It was really quite rich to see British Prime Minister David Cameron complaining about how social media helped to fuel the series of riots in that country.
Such things as text/instant messaging, Twitter and Facebook, he claimed, help to provide rioting thugs the information they needed to spread their violence through parts of London and other big British cities.
British authorities were said to be moving toward closer control of such social networks. At one point, they even sought ways to gain access to the computers that held information for BlackBerry’s proprietary Messenger service.
While that was going on, the same government decided modern technology wasn’t a threat after all — but that it was a potential tool.
So while decrying how bloody easy it was for criminals to use the Internet to further their mayhem, the government used all media — including the web — as a means of trying to identify and track down the scores of perpetrators who caused so much physical damage to British business and damage to the country’s reputation.
The truth is, whatever technology is available, bad guys will find a way to communicate and put into action their nefarious plans.
If you impose stricter controls on social media on mobile device, they’ll move onto phone calls. If the conversations are tapped, they may choose to use two-way radios and old-style walkie-talkies.
And so it goes.
No, instead of spending even an iota of energy here, British officials should concentrate solely on how so much violence could be spawned — and so quickly.
Once that’s solved, no one will give a hoot about the role of social media in the spread of mayhem because there will be no cause for the mayhem to exist in the first place.