Facebook mayhem and riot! "How Facebook 'night of mayhem' lived up to its Park Lane billing", "A party arranged on social network site Facebook turned violent" - that's how the British Independent describes a London party last week. A rave took over the top of a building, and got a bit out of hand.
Note that nobody was killed. Any wounded? "London Ambulance treated two people for injuries." Arrests? "There were no arrests yesterday..." What kind of violence actually went on? "[A] small number of partygoers started hurling bottles and bricks", which apparently caused precious little damage.
Let's see how the article's rhetoric coolly and professionally treats the party's reality. Beyond fifteen pages of photos, and being carried in the paper's Crime section:
It was billed as a night of mayhem and it certainly delivered. Riot police yesterday evening fought running battles with party-goers after an illegal rave in a multi-million mansion attracted thousands of teenage gatecrashers like hedonistic moths to a flame.
"hedonistic moths to a flame" - lovely stuff, there. Yet "mayhem," "delivered"? I'm a bit disappointed, to be honest. Perhaps being an American blogger gives me higher standards for mayhem. This doesn't even rise to the level of a tiff. (Educated readers may now refer to Bill Hicks' British crime routine)
What was the Facebook angle, again?
The party was advertised widely on Facebook as a “night of mayhem” to celebrate squatters taking over a six-storey Georgian mansion on Park Lane. The squatters are thought to be part of an anti-capitalist collective who believed that the unoccupied mansion was owned by HSBC.
Ah, it was advertised on Facebook. So the role of the world's leading social networking site was limited to... having a fan page?
Surely there's more.
But events rapidly spiralled out of control when thousands of teenagers heard about the planned revelry through social networking sites, passed the invite to their friends and then descended en masse.
Now it's clear. Those teens used Facebook to communicate about the event. The thing lived up to its billing after all. There you have it: fan page plus messages yields mayhem! Good thing we have established, sober, mainstream media to keep the masses from getting the wrong idea about things.
It's fascinating how so many juicy, classic newspaper story items get submerged by this vision of Zuckerberg mobs. There's the political angle of ideological squatting organized by a left-wing group. There's the classic rave panic story (no mention of drugs?). There's the odd Courtney Love digression. But Facebook rises above all of these, organizing the story into a cyberpunk-themed crime narrative. Maybe the Brits will take Facebook into haunted media before we Yanks do.
(via Ed Webb)
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