Bill Wasik explores how technology has changed rioting:
In the pre-cell-phone era—as Cliff Stott observed in Marseilles—overall numbers didn’t matter one bit if you could not keep physically connected. In Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s first-person account of soccer hooliganism, he describes the remarkable discipline that even these drunken, anarchic yobs had to maintain to carry out violence against opposing fans: “Everyone is jogging in formation, tightly compressed, silent.” Step out of the phalanx to grab a pint or take a piss and you might never find your fellows again; in the meantime, the opposing mob might find you alone. Today, by contrast, a crowd’s power is amplified by the fact that its members can never really get separated. A crowd that’s always connected can never really be dispersed. It’s always still out there.
The Dish 