by ·Comments Off on Technology as a Scapegoat

Riot or free-for-all shopping spree? Hard to tell.

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.

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Mention the Misconduct!

From City AM this morning, I picked up this little nugget under their “Marketing Campaign of the Year”:

 “Celebrities do it all the time,” said Norwich Union when it changed its name to Aviva. It argued that the old name – which dated from 1797 – was due a change in a world where it operates in 27 countries, and that one name should be used across the group.

Of course, the name change from Norwich Union to Aviva was nothing to do with the £1.26 million fine levied against them by the FSA for being incompetent when it came to protecting client data and protecting against fraud that was so damaging to their reputation that they had to distance themselves from their own name.  Of course not.  What a crazy suggestion that would be.  It’s because the name was old.  And they work in countries that don’t know what a Norwich is.