We didn’t start the fire (but we love how we look in its light)

Half a week has passed since downtown Vancouver was set aflame by riots following an ice-hockey match. Taking their disappointment to the streets, fans of the Vancouver Canucks burned cars, smashed and looted stores and fought police in response to their teams Stanley Cup final loss. It was a shocking meltdown in one of the world’s most livable cities.

Between 2005-2007 I called Vancouver home and it was sad to see streets I knew well filled with chaos and violence; mad crowds of drunken idiots destroying a beautiful city.

What has struck me most about the riots was the role played by social-media. As the city burned people tweeted, facebooked and tumblred. Photos of the chaos are striking: cars erupt, glass shatters and a thousand cell phones and cameras are raised capturing it all – a voluntary panopticon. It was as much a virtual riot as a real one, and the lines between observers and participants was blurred (see image below).

Much can be said about all this. In a real sense we are constantly split these days. Our experience of events is always divided. We are in the moment, but also tweeting the moment. We are present, but behind a cell phone camera. Our attention is always divided, we shape our real-life experiences for online consumption. So much so that real-life and online life cease to be useful categories. There is no longer a distinction. We experience life as people who facebook life. So we participate in a riot because we want to tweet the riot; we pose in front of burning cars because that will be a cool facebook profile shot. We didn’t start the fires, but we want our photos with them. We may think we are only observing a riot, but we have become part of it, getting in the way of police trying to restore order, contributing to the chaos we are tweeting about.

The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology:

We take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity — all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and the world. We create machines in our own image and they, in turn, recreate us in theirs.

Our technologies of social media teach us to package private experience for public consumption. What we eat, think, feel and do are all now news for our “friends” and “followers”. And so, what we eat, think, feel and do are now shaped by this expectation – we do them with an audience in mind.  In the process the line between private and public becomes blurred. We share more and more of our private lives online and forget that online communities are public forums. Everything now needs to be broadcasted. As Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, puts it: “I would expect that next year people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and the next year they will be sharing twice as much as they did before.”

All this explains the many people boasting on facebook about their role in the riots, and the many people now being prosecuted for their role in the riots because of their boasting on facebook. Something has gone wrong in a person’s view of the world when it seems like a good idea to boast about hitting a cop on a “public” social networking site. Or take those who jump on police cars or tip them over in full view of a thousand cameras. We no longer see the cameras. We no longer see facebook or twitter as public forums. They are an extension of ourselves, because we have put so much of ourselves online. Our public self is our private self. We are our status updates. This is why I think those rioters doing their online boasting simply did not consider the consequences. They were keeping things to themselves; their selves just happen to be located online.

I am not saying facebook, twitter and tumblr are all bad. They can be brilliant tools for bringing life and connecting people together. In the days since the riot, social-media has been used for good ends, organising volunteers to clean up the city; identifying looters and vandals. But Web 2.0 is shaping us. We are no longer who we used to be. And for me, the Vancouver riot was a startling reminder of this – we may all be connected nowadays, but we aren’t always present in the everyday moments of our lives. We are distracted, somewhat distant. Half there, half online. So many normal people in downtown Vancouver that Wednesday night watched a city burn, posed for photos, updated their status and never quite connected with the tragic reality unfolding around them.