What came first, the Riot or the BlackBerry?

It was announced yesterday that the Liberal Democrats will not support David Cameron’s proposal to shut down social networking sites during times of unrest. The Liberal Democrats are currently part of the coalition government of the UK so their lack of support will make it difficult for Cameron and the Conservative party to pass any legislation or take decisive action should they choose to do so if last week's type of behaviour is repeated.

Deemed the ‘BlackBerry Riots’ in some of the British media, last week’s unrest has prompted significant political debate regarding the reasons behind the riots and how to prosecute those responsible.

For Generation Y this is ‘our riot’ in that it began and spread by Twitter, Facebook and on the BBM Messenger feature that operates on the BlackBerry Smartphone. All of my peers can identitfy, and most likely use, at least one of these forms of communication. We are all savvy to how easy these tools are to use and most of us are comfortable with the speed they allow information to spread. The speed at which rioters got involved, in real time, was not particularly shocking for Generation Y because we’re used to it. What we’re not used to is having these tools taken away from us.

There are currently powers which do exist in the UK, and indeed other countries, that allow the government to order the blocking of traffic and the shutting down of internet networks. This did occur during the unrest in Egypt earlier in the year and was particularly crippling for those trying to get their information out. Therein though lays the quandary about who is more negatively effected when a network is shut down- those trying to instigate the problem or those trying to escape from or report on the problem. It’s your classic ‘chicken-and-the-egg’ dilemma.

Arguably once a problem has become big enough to necessitate shutting down a network it will have gone beyond the internet- the unrest will have spread to the very visible streets. The question is then do you risk the safety of innocent individuals by disallowing them access to the tools that could help them escape harm's way by shutting down the networks they could be trying to use to get information out or do you let communication flow?