Over the weekend and early this week, violent riots have sprung up over London supporting the cause of “we want a new pair of trainers and to smash windows and to burn houses”.

As people’s property and businesses burn and we see images of rioters strutting around sporadically throwing things at the police like confused adolescent school children having a sulk, the media keeps bringing up a piece of information that I feel is always on the brink of turning into something ugly.  They keep mentioning that these riots have been organised by using Blackberries and Twitter or Facebook.

It hasn’t happened yet, but I can’t help feeling that they’re trying to turn technology into a scapegoat for these riots.

What has actually caused this uprising is hard to tell.  Suggestions that it was in protest of the shooting of Mark Duggan as part of Operation Trident, an initiative targeting ‘black-on-black’ gun crime, is an absurd notion as that was protested peacefully in Tottenham before the violence erupted.  When you see a furniture store in flames in Croydon, it’s hard to reconcile that with a shooting in Tottenham.

There doesn’t even seem to be any political motivation.  This isn’t some wider protest about the state of the country.  There’s no one particular event that could have got people this riled up and although the news has been full of woe and downturn of late, its nothing that would get people fired up to smash and grab.

The rioters and looters have been described as gangs of kids communicating over the internet.  There is very soon going to be a need for society to blame something, and the internet might bear the brunt of this one because it’s easier to blame than the responsible parents of the ‘kids’ or heaven forbid the ‘kids’ themselves, and I’m putting kids in commas because it seems the news includes people up to about the age of 30 in that category judging by the footage they were showing.

Blaming technology that facilitates communication is going to hopefully be an argument that runs out of steam quickly.  After all, riots have happened before the internet and communication is possible without it.  It’s definitely true that people are more clued into what’s going on than they used to be and there is no debate that people can be easily led astray if they think that there are enough other people up to no good that they can get away with it too.

There were comments on the news last night that using a water cannon to put out the fires quicker would have helped as less people would have been drawn to particular trouble spots as the billowing smoke can act as a beacon for disorderly behaviour.  This makes perfect sense, and so with that, we have to accept that the riots were definitely facilitated by technology and the rapid speed of modern communication, but it would be a mistake to think that it wouldn’t have happened without it.  Riots and civil disorder piggy-bagging on what sounds like a legitimate cause for protest is nothing new.  Wanton destruction and looting is never about a political cause.  It’s always about criminality.

If you’re devastated by this display of the worst kind of human behaviour, then take solace in the fact that the same communication platforms that helped kick start the riots is also helping to try and repair the damage.  I heard on the radio this morning that voluntary clean up crews are being co-ordinated over Twitter to try and get the detritus left behind cleared away and that communities are rallying behind the idea to stop the rioting.  It may be hard to believe sometimes, but I have faith that there is a lot more good than bad in humanity and the gutter rats and scum that have been burning down peoples homes and businesses are in the minority and are a mere blip.  In fact, I take the gutter rat comment back. That’s giving rats a bad name.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about what’s to blame over the next few days.  The black community is disgustingly already being fingered for the blame with half-toad half-politician Nick Griffin starting to weasel his way through comments along the lines that the BNP were right all along.  There’ll be comments that David Cameron is to blame because he didn’t instantly cancel his holiday to fly back to London.  Somehow.  They will try to blame the parents, the schools and society for letting these poor disaffected children (again, children seeming to include all ages in this case) down.  They will try to blame technology.  The Evening Standard almost decided to run with a strap line about how rioters were inspired by video games, but thankfully someone in the editorial staff has at least two brain cells to rub together.

People are to blame, and by that I mean the people rioting.  They know it’s wrong, they know they’re hurting honest innocent people and they’re doing it anyway.

There is a lot about the nature of rioting I do not understand and I am happy to be proved a great ignoramus over this, but people’s lives and livelihoods are being put in serious danger by selfish, aggressive and violent ‘kids’ who do not know how lucky they are to live in this day and age.  They take for granted the levels of prosperity that even the poorest families have in this country compared with people across the globe.  They take for granted the liberties they are allowed, and the rights they have and the extent to which those rights are protected.

I only hope that when this clears over, the injury and death toll will be low.