By now the majority of people in British Columbia have felt plenty embarrassed and ashamed by what transpired in Vancouver after the Canucks fell to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup final on Wednesday night. We sat glued to the live CTV News coverage, appalled at the behaviour of the crowd as wave after wave of pseudo-war zone imagery flooded into the studio and onto our screens at home. I for one felt sick to my stomach; the kinda nausea I experienced as a youngster when two kids arranged to meet at the tennis courts to fight after school.

I've heard many people throughout the past week attempting to assuage the situation with shallow assurances that the sole responsibility for the violence and destruction that took place on those beloved city streets, the sight of so much positive celebration only a year ago with the Winter Olympics, was the work of a handful of crooks, thugs, punks, anarchists, yahoos, idiots, morons, hoodlums and goons bent on creating chaos and havoc regardless of the sporting outcome that night. All I see are labels being used to separate those who did the destroying from those who did the recording. All of whom share the responsibility in my opinion. One guilty of physical destruction and one guilty of passive digital and social encouragement that fanned the flames of the situation by celebrating the type of narcissism that Facebook Walls and You Tube fan pages live for.

Social Worship for The Socially Inept

Many criticized the Vancouver Police for not acting swiftly enough or for a perceived lack of planning for the management of such a monumental public gathering. But they did have a plan. They knew from previous events and the experiences of other enforcement agencies from around the globe the most successful tactics for managing a large and unruly crowd. Yes there were missteps along the way but all in all, the mayhem of those moments was not caused by a lack of police attention - it was created by an overwhelming mass of attention given to those who deserve it least. The mess was started by numerous groups of angry young men, drunk, misguided and vying to be seen as something greater than who they are; desperate to gather an ounce of physical control over a world that doesn't give two shits about them. Take that sort of soul crushing perspective of oneself and multiply it by the hundreds of cameras, camcorders and handheld mobile devices pointed in their direction and you've got a one serious powder keg of pent-up negative energy just waiting to explode.

When it comes to social media however, there is no experiential plan or strategy for how things might develop; this is the Social Revolution in progress and as inspiring it can be when documenting civil unrest that leads to major political and social change, it can be equally as unforgiving and ugly when the power of it's viral spotlight is focused not on rebels with just cause but rather fools without one. This is what a powerful shared experience like the Vancouver Riot has to teach us; the scope and reach of mobile and social technology has surpassed the understanding and respect of the user.

I often say that there are no rules when it comes to social media, that it's just a fancy term used to describe the freedom of social expression that the Internet now affords the people of our culture. We can like, follow, share, take, create and be pretty much anything we want to be in the online digital sphere. It liberates some of us to be informed and inspired just as much as it permits others the voice with which to spout ignorance, intolerance and hatred. We can all be seen for who we are or choose to be seen as something entirely different. We can share peace and we can share unspeakable violence; the choice is only ever the equivalent of a mouse-click away. Some people refer to it as the wild, wild West. I think of it as social evolution in progress.

Think about this, if a group of angry young men start to monkey dance and thrash themselves into each other with chests puffed out after consuming too many intoxicants and there aren't several thousand people crowding around them, egging them on and snapping a hundred pictures on their iPhone's, does anybody care? Hopefully it would get broken up before anyone got seriously injured but otherwise these intellectually stagnant alpha males would just a) tire themselves out or b) get themselves arrested by the hundreds of police officers who were out in force there amongst the seething throngs. My point is that without an audience to be seen by and a stage upon which to perform their sad little angry monkey dance rituals of old, would things have continued to escalate unchecked for several hours as it did? I contest that it would have petered out fairly quickly. But alas, the cat is out of the bag and Pandora has left her box for good and so we must find the balance point between the potential our mobile/social technology affords us and the cultural repercussions caused by the ignorance of its legacy.

Many will argue that they were simply on hand to document the evidence and record the experience - many of my friends were amongst the onlookers including the one who shot the photo above. I'm not saying it's right or its wrong as there are no rules outlawing such behaviour nor am I in any position to judge. But I can look at the unfolding events and see the end result. I can hear Vancouver Police asking everyone to go home but still the number of gawkers and onlookers, as "disgusted and embarrassed" as many claimed to be, clearly seemed to outweigh the number of fools and tools jumping, fighting, burning, kicking and smashing their way across the downtown core. So many people were just standing around, complicit in waiting to see what was going to happen and because they were waiting for something to happen they were passive-aggressively encouraging something to happen. And so something did happen.

The Facebook Lynch Mob

In the hours and days following the riot, Facebook pages sprung up with people being encouraged to post their pictures and videos in order to "bring these criminals to justice" - and people are still coming out in droves. It's like a nouveau-Salem Witch Hunt or some sort of Digital-Social McCarthyism taking place out there - people posting face shots and action pics of people in various states of being, with countless accusations, threats and verbal assaults being wielded openly and freely for the world to see. Please understand, I can relate to the sense of frustration and anger that comes from seeing something you care about disrespected and people you love put in danger - I lived in Vancouver for ten years and I felt pangs of it myself sitting at home here in Victoria watching it unfold. But the type of reckless behaviour being exhibited and vented on Facebook, one of the most popular social networks on this planet, is nothing short of alarming.

There's also a new blog that has sprung up in the wake of these events called Public Shaming Eternus by a man who refers to himself as "Captain Vancouver" and the number of readers and scope of commentary has recently exploded. The idea is that, like the Digital Witch Hunts on Facebook, this young man is posting "photographic evidence" of individuals taken during the riots and laying judge and jury verdict upon them all. He has determined himself the true protector of Vancouver's civic pride and thus feels quite rationally justified in his quest to fan the flames of hatred faster and further by including the names and locations of the people in these posted photos, condemning them to "eternal Internet fame" through shame.

There is little understanding of the long-tail of the digital footprint. In fact it's not a long-tail at all, but rather infinite. Once you post something, anything, to the Internet, it's there forever. In his angry haste, "Captain Vancouver" posts a photo of two young adults, a boy and a girl. He accuses them of crimes against the state and publicly ridicules them both. But no sooner has he done that than it somehow comes to his attention that he got it wrong. The young man in the photo was only observing. Oops. My bad. Can't take that back. Not only can he not take it back, h still doesn't bother to delete it from the original post but rather deems a simple strike-through of the text to be a sufficient apology/retraction. Do you sense the danger in any of this? (This is taken directly from his blog)

If you're not familiar with 1984, I suggest you spend some time getting to know it. There are dangerous social consequences that we cannot yet imagine when we shamelessly take justice into our own hands. Scarier still, is the ferocity with which seemingly rational and intelligent individuals will bare their teeth upon another in an open digital forum - and this is not some  online platform of yesteryear where angryman2011 and lonelygirl666 are having it out amidst the comfort of anonymity- this is fucking FACEBOOK. Our grandparents are on Facebook and so is our little cousin. I'm the hugest proponent of transparency but I cannot believe that people do not seriously consider the eternal nature of their online activity before posting these things. Surely the world is not full of this many assholes.

And so while there aren't any rules governing how to navigate the infinite possibilities of the emerging digital frontier there are indeed codes of conduct for human beings living together in a limited physical space. It's not even nearing the next distant galaxy of being perfection but we've been juggling that bag of rotten tomatoes for centuries and it's somehow managed to keep us from blowing ourselves up. My point is that we've had eons of time to test drive, ditch and re-imagine the boundaries of our relationships with one another in this stranger filled world but with this digital social landscape we've but a nanosecond to familiarize ourselves with the consequences.

We're still so tightly bound to our evolutionary roots, to those mammalian and reptilian ancestral links that can still somehow manage to wipe the entire scope of our rational, reasonable and intellectual thinking brains into extinction - especially when we find ourselves in a large herd (you can substitute mob or crowd if you prefer). We grew from the sludge of a heartless violent world and, much to the chagrin of many others like myself who seek intellectual, spiritual and emotional evolution, those ancient synapses are still firing to this day. And so, often in spite of what would appear to be glimpses of better judgement, we continue to threaten violent recourse in response to violent actions. And what good has ever come of that?

The photos and videos of the masses will live forever in this realm, as will the hateful violent words of the swarming social vigilantes unless we can find means with which to calm ourselves amidst the rising storms.

Dancing On The Razor's Edge

Perhaps it's due in part to my own personal experience with violence (my younger brother Paul was murdered in a late-night altercation 13 years ago), but I simply cannot condone nor abide by the increasingly violent reactionary shape of our culture. We're too complacent to stand up to action when the moment behooves us to do or say something to protect something or someone else. We're too quick to race to the comfort of our own homes with our opinions rather than to confront the true nature of our own frustrations and disappointments. We're too afraid of being judged and ostracized by everybody else and so we're too quick to judge, ridicule, shame, threaten and hate someone else instead.

It's too easy to get caught up in those moments but those are the moments that count the most. Those are the moments where we have the opportunity to grow, learn and become better human beings. Those are the moments where our social selves demonstrate that we're always a work in still have a long way to go.