Mark Raskino

This week,  the director of Terminator, Aliens and most recenty Avatar was asked about the Gartner Hype Cycle.

See what he said  in our Hype Cycle book blog post.

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Early last month I had a minor personal experience of the sociological reaction to economic austerity that I hope will not become the norm in Western Europe, but I fear might. In the aftermath of the London riots the news media first started to provoke politicians and commentators into a simplistic knee-jerk reaction by asking should we ban Facebook and Twitter? Quickly the question switched focus to Blackberry messenger. Then within the course of a few days the same media starting suggesting such a ban would be unhelpful – because the police can use the same tools to monitor, predict, contain and prosecute. So the debate quickly became cast as a “them and us”  – the police on one side and hooded looters on the other. A classic showdown, nicely polarised to create strong headlines. But the reality is of course a lot more complex than that. For example it isn’t simply a bipartisan issue – there are at least three parties involved. Most of the news stories rather neglected to talk about the mass of ordinary citizens who are neither rioters nor police. On the evening of September 8^th, I settled in and turned on the news. The chief of police for London made an earnest appeal to the TV cameras asking that all parents in London should know the whereabouts of their children that evening, and preferably keep them in at home. I was rather bemused… surely he didn’t mean all of London? Not all 7.5million people and 1500 square kilometres of it. I quickly convinced myself that he meant the few small districts that had seen disturbances on previous nights. But something in me decided to be ultra cautious. So I set the laptop in front of the TV, fired up Tweetdeck and created a search column for #ealing. Half an hour later the tweets started scrolling. “the police seem to be cordoning off streets”, “some kids have broken a window”, “it’s all kicking off in Ealing tonight”.   I phoned my older teen son. He was at a restaurant.  Confessing immediately to being the rather paranoid and over protective Father – I asked him to come directly home, after he had finished his meal. A few minutes later I saw a more serious tweet – a bank had been attacked just a block from the restaurant. Police did not seem to be in control. There were more rioters than officers. Not surprisingly, I got in the car and went to pick my son up immediately. Well, at least he was safe – even if it did seem to be a bit of and over reaction. It wasn’t. 45 minutes later, the same street he had been eating in was trashed ( video here ). The rest of that evening was spent watching, incredulously,  local area resident’s tweets. We tracked the movements and the actions of the rioters  – acat and mouse game with police – at micro-local level, street by street. I was very grateful for the information and very prepared for anything else that needed to be done. It was just one, wierd and unusual English city summer night. Probably a once or twice a lifetime experience. It ended as soon as it flared up. But for a very short time there was real risk – cars were torched, people attacked, one innocent bystander killed.  I will never be more grateful for the existence of Twitter. Without it I might not have known what was going on in time to inform my son, and he could have had a very bad experience .  Anyone who thinks social media should be banned in a riot – must think hard about the mass of citizens for whom it will be a crucial defensive information lifeline. Finally – I feel I must tip my hat to the originally Portuguese / South Africa restaurant chain Nandos, that behaved with  a most British sense of ‘keep calm and carry on’. How’s this for customer service?…  Instructed to close by the Police minutes before the rioters arrived, they quickly issued free meal vouchers to all the departing customers (even those who had already finished eating).  On the vouchers, in the standard box for stating “reason for gift” – the manager quietly and unflappably wrote “riots”. And what does it tell us about today’s generation that they felt the need to post this picture of the admittedly rather street-cred voucher on Facebook…. before leaving the restaurant?