The riots in Haren will give rise to stricter security measures but this won’t prevent another incident from happening, writes Henri Beunders.

The Facebook party that got out of hand in Haren will probably not repeat itself. The consequences – fast track justice, stricter measures for all public events – will, as is usual in these cases, be with us for much longer. These measures are often disproportionate and don’t prevent new incidents.

In spite of the predictability of the story, which developed over days in all the media, the riots in Haren still came as a surprise. It’s not likely that they have opened the door to more of the same, as some commentators would have us believe. Every new medium introduced in the last century has led to similar, but unrepeated, surprises of this kind.

Mars 

A well-known example is the panic that broke out in 1938 after the radio broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’ which featured an invasion from Mars. Result: thousands of people fled their homes. In 1962, Open het dorp (Open the village), a televised charity event hosted by the popular presenter Mies Bouwman, caused a donating fury of unprecedented proportions.

From around 1995, the internet has spawned several surprise events, none of which have repeated themselves. The Blair Witch project (1999), which pretended to be a video registration of a real abduction and murder, was a box office hit and even when it became known the whole thing was a student hoax cinemas kept selling tickets.

YouTube

When Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan were given a laptop computer to stay in touch with home – Camp Holland had a satellite just overhead – and to play computer games to relieve the boredom, officials in The Hague noted with some alarm that many soldiers used social network sites like Hyves and waarbenjij.nu to talk about ‘those backward Afghans’.

In 2007, Esmée Denters put some of her songs on the brand new website YouTube. They were viewed a hundred million times. Her comet-like rise to fame resulted in a duet with Justin Timberlake.

In November of the same year, high school student Kevin’s MSN sent out a message calling for action against the number of mandatory school hours during which students were not taught. The message got caught up in the digital snowball and sparked a national walk-out of students the next day. 

In 2008 a viral campaign – mailing-on amusing footage – to support president Obama became a big hit. Former Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen used the same tool to some effect in the Netherlands.

One-offs

All these events were one-offs. It’s unlikely another ‘Facebook party’ like the one in Haren will happen again, at least not because of Facebook.

The consequences of these events are far more serious. Often the powers that be will call for stronger measures, as happened when riots broke out in Hook of Holland which resulted in the death of one person while many were injured. The measures invariably include more controls, more passes and a greater restriction of civil liberties.

Rules 

Haren may look like Hook of Holland to a certain extent– free party, lots of booze, a few hooligans, many hangers-on – but all these explosions of violence show more differences than similarities, and they are rare. 1,750 events take place every year in Rotterdam. Hardly anything untoward ever happens during Lowlands and Pinkpop. But the political consequences of the Hook of Holland riot mean that organisers now have to reckon with a number of possible scenarios and comply to a host of rules and regulations which may make the party ‘safer’ but won’t guarantee it will be incident free. If nothing else, leaning on possible scenarios makes for complacency.

The role of the ‘old media’ and the authorities will now be part of an investigation, and rightly so. Most of the examples I have mentioned showed so-called medial cross-overs: without the mass media nothing much happens. An action which is restricted to the internet – a condolence site for Antonie Kamerling, the actor who committed suicide, a petition aimed at reducing bar opening times – is ‘slactivism’, or slack activism. It doesn’t achieve very much. Every action or movement needs a physical manifestation – a demonstration or a meeting – and the power of television, radio and the papers to turn it into a national hype.

Imagination

Could the mayor of Haren have developed some sort of warning system to predict what was about to happen? The internet and Facebook were monitored incessantly but the authorities failed to come up with anything other than the conventional answers: closing off streets, replacing regular police with riot police, etc. It looks as if controls on drugs and booze at the station and the roads going into Haren did not take place. Why wasn’t there a band performing in the field next to the station, with a big screen on which the unfortunate birthday girl could have said her piece?

A proper response to a largely unpredictable communication process like this requires more than a knowledge of the internet. Hooligans and criminals have long ago abandoned the internet for communication purposes in the knowledge that the police keep a constant watch on public sites. Good, pro-active measures are not just a matter of crisis scenarios but of creativity, imagination and common sense.

Henri Beunders is professor of History, Media and Culture at ErasmusUniversity, Rotterdam