UK Relatives - Skype

Today my cousins and i were finally able to arrange a time for skype.  They had lots of information on the UK riots and were able to clearly explain it to me.  In brief they explained to me how the main rioting started after the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot by police after being seen with a weapon.  Duggan was part of a mob.  Therefore when news hit that he had been killed people railed around over facebook and bbm to start riots,  What started out as anger from the murder turned into looting and breaking and entering of stores.  People started taking advantage of all these unarmed stores that they could easily steal anything from.  The police felt very stressed about the whole thing not only because the last time riots broke out in the fall they were heavily critized for their actions.  Also there was another group of people who decided to try and stop the rioters but were doing it violently, which greatly confused the police on who they should be arresting.  Then after the four days of terror another group on facebook was started to help clean up the mess left by rioters.  People who originally started the whole rioting through facebook and bbm are facing around 4 years of jail time.  Some are finding this pretty harsh punishment. There was about 3 or 4 people killed in the days of rioting.  This was a brief of what they shared with me.

Delicious and Evernote

My Delicious account is: melanie.johnstone
My Evernote account is: melanie23johnstone

News on UK relatives.

Recieved emails from both Ben and my cousin lindsay! Both cery interested in helping and sharing what they know on the riots. I am currently trying to set up skype with them. However with the time difference it is tricky. My cousin Lindsay teachs at a private school over there and has recently had a big discussion and debate with her students about the uk riots. Interested to see what comes out of this

Evernote & Delicious

I have created accounts on both Evernote and Delicious to help with my UK riots research.  Both accounts were easy to make and sign up for.  I use the Delicious to tag any websites that i feel can be useful to my understanding of the UK riots.

UK Riots & Facebook

As promised i checked out Facebook for the UK riots.  Not overly shocked but impressed by the amount of pages created and dedicated to the UK riots.  There are pages on rallying against to stop the riots, there are others to keep rioters updated, others for families to avoid targeted areas.  Some pages you can tell are done by dedicated people others are outdated and what not.  The pages have links to more websites and utube videos so that everyone can see what exactly is going on.  One thing from looking at a view pages is that there is a lot of anger and hatred going on between people.  Hatred towards police and government is the most popular.  Lots of comments and pages to read about the UK riots.  

UK Relatives

The next step i took in this process to learn more about the UK riots was send an email via facebook to my cousins who live there.  I asked for his opinion and if he had personally seen anything so far.  I think his opinion could be interesting due to the fact that he is in his late 20's and is a school teacher who is interested in politics. So i will keep everyone updated as to what he responds. Of course due to the time difference i don't expect to receive anything back for a day or two. 
I also have other contacts in the UK, and they are my boyfriend's grandparents.  He says he has heard them mention it and i have asked him to question them more to get their stand point on the whole thing.

UK Riots & Twitter

When I started surfing the net for the UK riots one thing became quite evident, that Twitter was and still is a major involvement in the UK riots.  First I searched through my twitter account for #riots, and there is tons of tweets with this tag.  As i was reading through the tweets within a minute or less more tweets are still being posted.  Just as i am writing this blog two more have been posted.  Twitter is obviously major tool used for these young individuals to quickly spread news and information regarding their riots. Then i narrowed in my search on twitter and put #ukriots which brought more results and specified mainly on the UK only. There is even a twitter page dedicated to Uk Riot Updates. Also while i was searching the web i came across a graph that showed the activity use of twitter during the time of the riots in Totterham.   It is amazing how the graph sparked at such a high when people starting connecting and spreading news through twitter.  My next step is going to be looking at other interacting medias like facebook and see if the UK riots made an impact on that also.