Sense-making and Media Commentary
I usually appreciate Media Watch. Usually. On this occasion though, I can’t help but feel that the story is a beat-up that fails to acknowledge one of the basic social functions of media. Holmes’ point seems to be that anyone who was not in the UK at the time of the riots and who had not actually spoken to any of the rioters did not have a legitimate right to comment. I beg to differ on this one. First a disclaimer: I put my own thoughts to keyboard here last week.
Yes, much of the commentary was speculation. At this point, it had to be. An official inquiry is probably going to take six to twelve months and will return findings only within its own narrow terms of reference. A decent academic study is likely to take at least two to three years to get to publication, assuming that the researchers can get access to the people involved to interview them in the first place.
However, people need to make sense of what is happening around them as it happens, so of course there is going to be ‘best guess’ commentary at the time. Furthermore, because the media brings the world to our lounge rooms, some of that commentary will be from places other than the location of the riots and many of the people needing to make sense of the events will not be directly involved. This is the social side of global media; it helps people to make sense of events—even ones in distant places—and that meaning is constructed in the way we talk about those events.
If the media seriously wanted to help people understand the causes of the riots, it would follow through with full reporting of the findings of any inquiry and give attention to academic publications on the matter. While the findings of inquiries are often publicised months later, if the initial events were big enough, this is rarely the case with academic work that takes a much broader account of underlying factors.
My point is, though, that while inquiries and academic studies are invaluable for understanding what happened and why, they do not obviate the need for people to be able to make sense of events as they happen. Some of that may be misguided, ideologically informed, or even plain stupid (and there’s been plenty of that too), but it is part of the way that we create meaning in our mediated, global world, and as such it is necessary.
Your Comments
Matt writes:
I did have a good laugh at their piece on the Pulver family coverage though. (Reporting from the Pulver driveway four days after the event): “Madeline has bravely returned to school and is determined to get back to a normal life”.
But yeah I questioned that thing about the London Riots too. Someone on Q and A echoed the “we don’t know what happened so we should all shut up” thing too. Having said that, someone needed to call Devine on the ridiculous article suggesting gay marriage as the cause of the London Riots. But there are many other more thoughtful and in-touch writers out there. The general feeling as I’ve received it has been from a poverty / social exclusion angle. (This includes my conservative voting work colleague, who having been in London recently claimed to have seen “gangs of young people just sitting about on street corners with nothing to do” and immediately concluded that the riots were due to “these underprivileged kids who think it’s cool to drop out of the system and then get angry with the austerity measures”). So as far as I can tell, it’s reasonable to print in a news article that the riots are to do with poverty and the economic situation.
Posted: 16 08 2011 - 11:29 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
Even totally whacky people are entitled to a say, Matt, but as you say, someone should probably call them on it. I think lots of people have called Miranda, at least on Twitter. You would have little chance of convincing her devotees that there are other more systemic explanations anyway. They too, need to make sense of what is happening at the time and they bring their own preconceived ideas and ideologies to do that. We all do. Sometimes we retrospectively revise our understanding in light of new information and previously unconsidered arguments, but not always.
Personally, I think the poverty/social exclusion explanations are a significant part, but only part. There’s bound to be a whole complex of reasons extending well beyond those advanced so far that contribute to a society getting to that state. There’s a real need for some serious and theoretically grounded research, but that takes time and rarely makes the mainstream media.
What really gets my goat is not people like Miranda who at least try to find an explanation, however misguided I might think she is, but people like Cameron who seem to make no attempt to understand but simply revert to a moral blame discourse that closes down all possibility of examining underlying causes and contributing factors and thereby significantly diminishes the possibilities of doing anything constructive to address them. In my more cynical moments, I don’t think they want to address causes because it interferes with their own self-interest, but most people really aren’t that self-centred and greedy.
Posted: 16 08 2011 - 12:06 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
You know, having said that there is a need for more research, there has actually already been a lot of good research done over the past decade or so on young people, civic and political engagement, consumerism, media, and sense of place. Much of that has come from the UK. When you read, it the riots seem a lot less surprising. What also becomes quite clear in much of this research is that it is not just young people who are becoming disaffected and feeling that they are losing their stake in society. So it is likely that a good deal of the commentary that is floating around is not really all that speculative. The existence of this prior research does not negate the need to look specifically at this particular event and its causes though.
Posted: 16 08 2011 - 12:25 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
In an interesting interview, Zygmunt Bauman puts the riots down to the combination of rising consumerism and rising inequality: “City riots in Britain are best understood as a revolt of frustrated consumers.” Not a case of trying to change society, but for one night, at least, feeling like you can join the ranks of consumers from which you have been excluded.
It’s the other side of his description of community as a search for security in an insecure world.
Posted: 16 08 2011 - 12:27 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
There’s quite a large body of work, Bauman’s amongst it, that argues that citizenship and identity in the current configuration of capitalism is based on the ability to consume. I think this work certainly helps to explain why a major expression of the riots was the looting of status consumer goods and, as the interviewer points out, the burning of shops not universities. But I still think it is only a part explanation, even if a big one, which is why I think that Stratton’s piece, which talks about a perceived breakdown in the social contract between the citizen and the state is relevant. As has frequently been pointed out, not everyone who grows up in poverty loots and riots. It is possible for people to still feel some stake in their communities and society even if excluded from a consumerist identity. It seems to me that the break has to happen at a more fundamental level than that.
Posted: 16 08 2011 - 12:49 | Permanent link to this comment