Social Media’s effect on the UK riots should surprise no one.

According to HitWise, Twitter accounted for 1 in every 170 UK Internet visits yesterday; by their estimates, there were over 3.4 million visits to the Twitter homepage from the UK population alone. This is the world that we live in now. WE are the media. We create the content, we share the content and we consume the content-CONSTANTLY.

I can’t pinpoint the exact date where we started to leverage the medium of social media for world wide causes, but I can cite some recent events such as the terrorist attacks in India and the uprisings and revolutions in Iran and Egypt respectively as moments where cultures took social media platforms to such scales as a way to augment, support, discuss, share and or fuel what was happening IRL.

It is the nature of the world that we live in today. we are one digital culture.  But look at what organizations and institutes now have to deal with…

Yes there are other digital platforms that are in play during all of this but it is Twitter which seems to be the primary conduit for real time conversations, and updates during the riots in London. The real-time aspect of sharing information through Twitter has made the platform ideal for updates on what has been happening. In fact because of the riots, it has been Twitter’s biggest ever spike in UK traffic online.  Beyond the role that social media has been playing in the UK riots, there’s a larger question that needs to be asked…Has the disruptive nature of social media now become the fuel for anarchy?