In October 1985, on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham where the death of Cynthia Jarrett sparked riots that culminated in the brutal murder of PC Keith Blakelock, a community leader stood on his chair at a packed open-air meeting.
The man bellowed into a megaphone to the 150 residents in front of him: "You tell them that it's a life for a life from now on. This is war."...
Twenty six years later, police officers are still listening – but the megaphones and open-air meetings have been largely replaced. This weekend's north London riots, the Daily Mail announced on Monday, were "fuelled by social media".
But is this necessarily the case? ...
However, the most powerful and up-to-the-minute rallying appears to have taken place on a more covert social network: BlackBerryMessenger (BBM).
Using BlackBerry handsets – the smartphone of choice for the majority (37%) of British teens, according to last week's Ofcom study – BBM allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts, who are connected by "BBM PINs". For many teens armed with a BlackBerry, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free, instant and more part of a much larger community than regular SMS.
And unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities (which is why, in large part, BBM is so favoured by Emirati teens to spread illicit gossip about officialdom).
[Read on at above link.]
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