An analysis of commentary on the UK’s August 2011 riots reveals shifts in the way the media and politicians now construe concepts of youth, race, criminality and deprivation. By comparing the response to these events with that which followed the riots of 1981, these changes can be clarified and illuminated. This analysis reveals that discussions of ‘social problems’ exploited by ‘infiltrators’ (1981) have been replaced by notions of ‘pure criminality’ and ‘mob rule’. The implications of these changes for contemporary protest, and some ways in which the riots and other forms of protest can be related, are drawn out.
Research into Internet communities and online behaviour constituted one of the earliest and most dynamic fields of interest in the new field of Internet studies. Studies focused a range of issues including understanding how social order was possible in mediated environments, the social and political dimensions of community, the impacts that online communities could have on their offline counterparts. At the same time, studies of Internet community provided Internet studies more generally with methodological innovations and new means of examining the new electronic worlds that had opened up. However, Internet community studies have been a victim of its own success to the extent that it has recently become fractured into a number of specialist arenas. As a consequence, the field has become both narrower and dominated by intractable problematics. However, recent research offers a new and revitalised agenda, focusing around the altering political status of community and new, and pressing questions have been opened up for the study of online community.
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