Author: Tom Slee

[Time saver announcement: The most interesting thing in here is probably the conflict of interest in a recent Twitter-Arab Spring paper, which starts here.]

Earlier today I thought I was doomed to fail; that part 3 of this prematurely-announced trilogy was just not going to get written. I tried a few things, threw them away. Tried a few more, scrunched them up into balls of electrons, and dragged them to the little waste bin up there in the corner of the screen. Life was looking grim (although not as grim as the awesomely atmospheric trailer for the Andrea Arnold version of Wuthering Heights, shot in wonderful Swaledale, and coming soon to a theatre near me, I hope).

But then two research papers about Twitter and the Arab Spring appeared within days of each other. Could these be raw material for a little grumbling about Internet-centrism, I thought? Well knock me sideways, it turns out they could.

But Opening Closed Regimes is better than the other paper, The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions  (pdf) by Gilad Lotan and others including (to my dismay) danah boyd, whose writings I usually really learn from – like Six Provocations for Big Data, for example.

This paper also takes Twitter feed data – nothing else at all: nada, zilch, zero – slices, dices, etc etc as before, and then says "we discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe".

The paper is published in the International Journal of Communication, which you'll be glad to know "adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world". So I was a little surprised when I looked up lead author Gilad Lotan, who lists his organizational affiliation as Social Flow.

[Update: the authors now provide an appendix to the paper explaining the relationship between the company, the lead author, and the work. I accept that explanation. I leave the post here, but please read it in that light.]

Why? Because it turns out that Social Flow is a private company that "has developed the industry's first and only social media optimization technology that uses real-time data – including the Twitter and bitly firehoses – to help publishers, retailers, and brands earn maximum potential engagement on Twitter." That's right, it's basically SEO for Twitter. It develops algorithms that "dynamically publishes the best message at the best time to ensure its clients get the maximum amount of engagement from their Followers." Yup, these people are going to pollute your Twitter feed, and make money from it. Small wonder that the paper paints such a positive picture of Twitter's influence.

Social Flow is a venture capital funded company based in New York. According to CrunchBase, they recently received $7M in Series A funding from a variety of venture capitalists including "Softbank, with Softbank NY, RRE Ventures, Betaworks, High Line Venture Partners, AOL Ventures, SV Angel and some individual angels investing." Plus, they have a lovey-dovey relationsihp with Twitter itself. TechCrunch comments that:

Neither side would comments on the terms of the relationship — but it's clearly beneficial to both.

"This is exactly what we want to see out of the ecosystem," Twitter Platform lead Ryan Sarver adds. "These guys are building a real business,"

Thanks Ryan.

And just in case you wondered: their investor Betaworks has also invested in Tweetdeck and Summize: other companies that have actually been bought by Twitter.

There is no mention of this blatant conflict of interest, which took me all of 30 minutes to look up, in the paper. The "International Journal of Communication" should be ashamed for publishing it.

After that, it's hardly worth even reading the paper. But I did. It suffers from some of the usual Internet-centric fallacies.

Here's the VERY FIRST SENTENCE (capital letters in tribute to Tiger Beatdown's third birthday): "The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to one of networked digital media has altered both information flows and the nature of news worked." Apparently positioning Internet sources as a competitor to broadcast media is so obviously true that it doesn't need support. Except that it's far from obvious that there is such a shift, even in North America, with audiences consuming just as much television as they ever have, with social media being an increasingly important complement to TV. And of course in North Africa the spread of television is much more recent – the growth of Al Jazeera even more so – so that there has almost certainly been no such shift at all.

The conceptual background of the paper is rife with such assumptions of the way the digital and "mass media" world differ. Studies investigate "how news emerges from networked actors who span different professional and organization identities and contexts" – note the organic, bottom up word "emerges" – in contrast to the world of mainstream media, in which "journalists tend to produce news designed for their publishers and editors", and enact "rituals of objectivity" to distance themselves from audiences. It's a caricature of the Internet compared to a cartoon of non-digital media.

And so it goes. The study itself is quite narrow, analysing information flows around Twitter, and makes cautious conclusions about the meaning of those information flows. But it acquires interest only from the suggestions, throughout, that this is part of a bigger picture of bottom-up newsmaking through social media. Their findings, for example, "confirm the notion that Twitter supports distributed conversation among participants and that journalism, in this era of social media, has become a conversation".

Now I don't mind a critical look at mainstream media – there's no shortage of things to criticize after all, and I suspect this is why well-intentioned people with anti-establishment agendas fall into the Internet-centricity trap. But even if "mass media" was nothing but a Debord-ian "society as spectacle" dystopia, that doesn't make the venture-capital-driven world of social networks an alternative: social media companies  are as mainstream, capitalist, and establishment as you can get. And they are no friends of liberation movements.

So, going back to the MIT Technology Review articles that I discussed last time, there are three contributions from people who are clearly on the left politically, and who seem to follow a broadly anti-establishment agenda, and whose writings I respect. But, if I can psycho-analyze from a distance, their writings show that they would dearly love Internet technology to be a natural ally of those who seek a more egalitarian, less hierarchical world. Unfortunately, wishes don't always come true.

So three cheers for Evgeny. Now back to the MIT Technology Review, and in particularJohn Pollock's Streetbook, an extended set of interviews with two secretive Tunisian digital activists who go under the pseudonyms "Foetus" and "Waterman". The article describes how "their organization, Takriz, performed a remarkable and largely unknown role" in the uprisings.

F—b— is such an important technology of mass coordination among young people that it was shut down in Egypt and other North African countries as the uprisings erupted in January 2011. F—b— was a technology that allowed many-to-many communication of political ideas, even under the censorious eye of repressive states; it provided a space where urban youth could gather to display their collective strength and build a clear identity separate from the state; it had fostered trans-national networks across the whole of North Africa; it lent itself to leaderless mass organization; and it produced some of the key organizing groups of the Tahrir Square protests. F—b— is, of course, Football.

The Ultras are groups of hard-core soccer fans who carry out dramatic displays of their fanaticism (fireworks, huge choreographed artworks, inventive songs) and who compete amongst each other to out-invent and out-display the fans of opposing teams. And, yes, fight with police from time to time. John Dorsey {blog} has followed Ultra culture closely. Here he is from Egypt in January 2011: {link}

With Egypt entering its second day of unprecedented anti-government protests, soccer fans constitute a well-organized and feared pillar of the marshalling grassroots coalition determined to ensure that President Hosni Mubarak suffers the same fate as Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was toppled earlier this month by mass demonstrations.

Alaa Abd El Fattah, a prominent Egyptian blogger {Wikipedia article}, was widely quoted as saying "The ultras–the football fan associations–have played a more significant role than any political group on the ground at this moment." {link}

Here is Debbie Randle of BBC's "Newsbeat" {link}.

When Newsbeat spoke to some of the ultras, they told us large numbers of them fought on the front line at the protests.

They said they passed on their knowledge to other demonstrators and protected people and their homes.

Abdullah, who's a member of the Zamalek White Knight Ultras, told Newsbeat they also helped to organise the protests.

He said: "We had many meetings to discuss the revolution before it started. We discussed that we must play an important part for Egypt, we must support Egypt."

The official line from the Ultras is that they didn't take part as a group but Newsbeat has been assured this isn't the case.

An ultra from a rival group, thought to have around 15,000 members, said they also played a role.

They worked alongside the White Knights, usually sworn enemies, to protest for their country.

A member of Egypt's NDP was reported on January 26 2011 as acknowledging the importance of the Ultras: "what we saw on the streets yesterday are not just Muslim Brotherhood members or sympathisers but Egyptians at large; those are the Egyptians that you would see supporting the football national team– and their show of frustration was genuine and it had to be accommodated." {link}

And Sports Illustrated, on January 31 {link}:

Over the decades that have marked the tenure of Egypt's "President for Life" Hosni Mubarak, there has been one consistent nexus for anger, organization, and practical experience in the ancient art of street fighting: the country's soccer clubs. Over the past week, the most organized, militant fan clubs, also known as the "ultras," have put those years of experience to ample use.

Why soccer? Let's return to James Dorsey as quoted in Sports Illustrated: "The involvement of organized soccer fans in Egypt's anti-government protests constitutes every Arab government's worst nightmare. Soccer, alongside Islam, offers a rare platform in the Middle East, a region populated by authoritarian regimes that control all public spaces, for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration." Does this seem familiar?

So it looks like the Ultras, which some describe as a social movement, played a self-conscious role in the Egyptian uprising, using the uncensored public space of the football terraces to organize themselves in impressive ways. See (via @techsoc's Twitter feed) this remarkable protest last week over the continued imprisonment of Ultra members following recent protests. The words above the pictures of the imprisoned apparently read "Free Fans (Ultras)".

The Ultras do use digital technologies to organize themselves, but the primary means is clearly physical. See these videos for a few examples: the Stretford End has nothing on these characters.

As we read Streetbook, however, we get a different impression of the Ultras. The narrative that the article conveys is one in which the digital activists of Takriz played the key role while the Ultras themselves are secondary.

Streetbook highlights Takriz's myriad connections, but presents its "main audience" as "alienated street youth: the lifeblood, often spilled, of the rebellion in North Africa". Though the article has many fascinating things to say about the contacts between Takriz and the street groups, it does not support the presentation of Takriz as the primary actor in these contacts, and there is a recurrent classism in the description of how the groups relate.

So Pollock describes how the Taks (members of Takriz), including his interviewees "Foetus" and "Waterman", had the inspiration of "turning the spirit (of soccer fans) to political ends", and developing a web forum for Ultras from different teams. Then "when the revolution began, the Ultras would come out to play a very different game. They were transformed into a quick-reaction force of bloody-minded rioters." The narrative is that the digital activists shaped the events, transforming soccer hooligans into a "bloody-minded" political fighting force. But is that what happened? Did initiatives such as the web forum or the Takriz efforts to direct the Ultras have any impact? There is no evidence for this in the article. And there is no voice here from the Ultras themselves. Do they not have anything to say beyond the wielding of sticks? It is remarkable that in all the coverage of the Ultras listed above, there is only one piece that mentions a name. Is digital presence required to have a voice in the debate about what happened in North Africa in 2011? It's not surprising that the importance of digital tools is exaggerated.

In the same spirit Streetbook describes how, when the Tunisian regime fell, Egyptian digital activist Hassan Mostafa "reached out to some of the hardened criminals, 'murderers and drug dealers', he had met while imprisoned for his Khaled Said protest: their skills would prove useful in stealing police riot helmets and guns. Through them, Mostafa recruited an army of toughs from the poorest areas." In Tunisia, Takriz leaders "use street culture, slang, and obscenities to fire up street youth". Again, the narrative has the digital activists as the brains, and the "toughs from the poorest areas" with no digital connections are reduced to a tool to be "fired up", with no agency of their own.

The over-emphasis on digital tools is everywhere in Streetbook. Most obvious is the claim that after visiting (overland, the old way) a group in Serbia, an activist returned with "a book about peaceful tactics and a computer game called A Force More Powerful, which lets people play with scenarios for regime change. Taking advantage of the game's Creative Commons license, April 6 members wrote an Egyptian version." It's not like in previous times activists haven't shared resources and built on each others' work because they didn't have the right clauses in their license agreements. The hacker group Anonymous gets a mention for targeting Tunisian government websites with DDOS "attacks", but was Anonymous's action a significant step in the escalation of protest? I doubt it. A Parisian-based activist "wrote a script, using semantic search techniques based on keywords… to measure how much time it took for posts to result in responses like comments". There is nothing wrong with such work, but it is clearly secondary – at best – to the main events, but in the Internet-centric "digital revolution" narrative, it gets a speaking part.

Yet throughout the interview, there are nuggets that reveal an alternative plot between the lines. Despite the focus on YouTube as a mechanism for sharing videos, Foetus describes how the video that "made the second half of the [Tunisian] revolution" was taken when the regime had shut down the Internet, so "according to a Tak who asked to remain anonymous, Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border" before forwarding it to Al Jazeera. What I see here is that, while YouTube has made it easier and safer to make videos available (at least so long as Google lets it be done anonymously), when an important video was available, the Internet was not essential to the process of distribution. On December 30 in Tunisia, "Lawyers gathered around the country to protest the government and were attacked and beaten", and a week later they all went on strike, followed by the teachers. Lawyers and teachers have their own pre-existing networks, of course, and probably used them to organize – at least there is no mention of a lawyers' Facebook page. So while Pollock diligently tracks each use of FourSquare, each request for help over Facebook, each use of emails with attachments, and each fake Twitter account, he skips quickly over the role of leaflets and flyers, meetings in mosques, university campus organizing, television, and balcony-to-balcony messaging.

Those who are convinced of the progressive potential of digital technologies sometimes accuse sceptics of exaggeration. No one, of course, thinks that Facebook caused the Arab Spring uprisings. But the Internet-centric narrative is not so much wrong in any one particular, as inherently distorted in the overall weight it gives to digital tools. It lends itself to narratives in which technological tools play a central role, in which the direction of influence is "from social networks to manifestation in the real world", as Streetbook quotes Samir Garbaya. The nuggets embedded in Streetbook tend to show that, more often than not, digital technologies are one option among several when it comes to the tasks activists face, and that information transmission is commonly not the bottleneck. There is no doubt that Facebook played a significant role in the Egyptian uprising, and that some key videos uploaded to YouTube helped to raise awareness of persecution, but alternatives have existed and do exist, and it is a mistake to pass quickly over these alternatives.

Next post – which I hope I'll get done in a day or two – is something more constructive. If Internet-centrism is a problem, how do we debate the role of digital technologies in politics? Henry Farrell has an extensive survey of the topic and some fine insights here, and I'll just try to add a few postscripts of my own.

I've never met Evgeny Morozov, but I have to say I love the guy because over the last three years he's succeeded in doing something that desperately needed to be done: he's provided a strong counterweight to an overhyped narrative of digital revolution. And then, since The Net Delusion came out at the beginning of the year, he's had to put up with a lot of unjustified condescension and caricature from some who suffer from the very "Internet-centrism" that is the target of his book.

Take the MIT Technology Review, which just ran a set of writings about the Arab Spring uprisings. The contributors characterize the debate over social media's importance as "wildly overdrawn" (Aaron Bady); "highly polarized" (John Pollock), a "false debate" (Zeynep Tufekci), a "false dichotomy" (Jillian C. York). And some put Morozov, together with Malcolm Gladwell, at one pole of that debate, with "the cyber-utopians" at the other. Now Gladwell is a high-profile name who dipped his oar into the waters of digital scepticism in a single article, and he can deal with what he gets from that. But Morozov, judging from his age, is looking to build an academic career on his work and he's at a vulnerable stage, so being the focus of so much attention is both a blessing and a curse.

In Streetbook, his contribution to the MIT Review articles, John Pollock summarizes The Net Delusion by writing that "[it] decries the 'naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication'". Now if you are going to accuse Morozov of being one pole in an overly polarized and, by implication, simplistic debate, you should at least get his position right, and this portrayal is simply unfair. The quotation comes from page xiii of the book's introduction, and is Morozov's portrayal of "cyber-utopians". Using this quotation makes it seem that Morozov sees his opponents in exagerrated and simplistic terms. But the bigger target of the book is what Morozov labels "Internet-centrism", a setof assumptions that has policy-makers "answer[ing] every question about democratic change by first reframing it in terms of the Internet rather than the context in which that change is to occur." {p. xvi}

Morozov is not a digital dystopian; hell, he owns both a Kindle and an iPad; he writes "The premise of this book (The Net Delusion) is thus very simple: To salvage the Internet's promise to aid the fight against authoritarianism, those in the West who still care about the future of democracy will need to ditch both cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism" {p xvii}. His position is well within the confines of mainstream political science — in particular, he accepts the "project of promoting democracy" as generally a well-intentioned effort from the US, which is a far-from radical stance — so it's remarkable that he has become such a polarizing figure. The Net Delusion is a strong book, but a limitation is that it fails to challenge that project and the intentions behind it sufficiently.

Over the course of the year, The Net Delusion has become a victim of its own success. Critiques argue that it is time to move beyond "duelling anecdotes" to a more sophisticated level of analysis, and both Patrick Meier and Mary Joyce (as well as the more predictable Adam Thierer) accuse Morozov of dealing too much in story, not enough in larger-scale data analysis or theoretical work. The accusations miss the point: there was no duel of any significant kind until Morozov stood up against the tide of "Twitter Revolution" euphoria that erupted along with the Iranian protests in 2009. He introduced a counterweight into a public debate environment that uncritically accepted the thesis that the Internet is intrinsically on the side of dissidents under authoritarian regimes; that the affordances it offers benefit the powerless against the powerful. Having rebalanced the debate, he is now met with a somewhat patronizing declaration that we are past all that, and it is time to move on to more sophisticated and nuanced discourse. Joyce is right when she says that he can be binary in his thinking, and that the book lacks theory, but these accusations are beside the point. It was a book written quickly, in response to the needs of the time, and it met those needs. Arguing that a more subtle, thorough book would be better is to miss the political situation in which it was written, and which it effectively challenged. Morozov deserves a better response from social scientists than he has received.

Despite the claims of moving beyond the Morozov/Shirky binary debate, some of the MIT Review articles suffer from the very Internet-centrism that Morozov criticizes, in particularly the Streetbook centrepiece. But that's a topic for Part 2.

The first is what I call the Long Tail Fallacy. It goes like this:

1. Look on the shelves of a big chain bookstore or music store. It's mainly mainstream stuff. Boo.
2. Look at the variety at Amazon or iTunes. Hooray!
3. Isn't it great how the Internet has liberated us from the tyranny of physical shelves and geography?

Did you see the switch? Here it is again. Watch closely.

1. Look at what was on mainstream network TV decades ago. Not much. Boo.
2. Look at all that variety on YouTube. Hooray!
3. Isn't it great how the Internet has liberated us from the tyranny of mainstream media?

See how I did that? Or again, this time from Digitally Enabled Social Change by Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport (p91).

1. Look at offline rallies as reported by the New York Times. Only big and complex protest events. Boo.
2. Look on the Internet. Online petitions, campaigns to save TV shows, all kinds of actions. Hooray!
3. Isn't it great how the Internet has unleashed a torrent of activism among the population?

I think of the second as the Christmas Fallacy:

1. Publishing used to be expensive.
2. Now it's cheap.
3. We have an abundance of publishing!

Seems reasonable enough? What about this:

1. Christmas comes but once a year.
2. I wish it could be Christmas every day.
3. We'd have an abundance of Christmas!

We wouldn't, of course. We'd have no Christmas at all.

In the New York Times today, there's a piece about a conference paper by Navid Hassanpour, "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak's Natural Experiment" {link}. I took a look: here's some immediate reactions.

The theoretical part of the paper is yet another cascade model of protest, a kind of Granovetter++, which comes down to this:

• Individuals are nodes in a network, and face a decision of protesting or not. Each has a personal threshold for action (in terms of the activity of their neighbours) and some small portion have a zero threshold, acting as seeds for the dynamics.
• Individuals update their threshold based on the level of activity among their neighbours; the more their neighbours are protesting, the more likely they are to join in.

The dynamics of the model is the spread of action through the network, a cascade caused by each actor becoming first more prone to action as those around them take up action, and then joining in themselves.

A "media disruption" reshapes the network – different media lend themselves to different network structures – and the dynamics of this reshaped network will be different, leading to different regions of activity and inactivity.

For many networks, one equilibrium is for almost everyone to be inactive, as each actor has a high threshold for action absorbed from their inactive neighbours. A set of dense connections can freeze regions of a network in states of inactivity: each individual may come in contact with active individuals, but the numerous connections to inactive individuals keeps them mute.

Individuals in a less dense network have a greater possibility of becoming active in response to a population of activists because they are less restrained by the inactive people around them, and this is the basic mechanism for the "media disruption exacerbates unrest" thesis.

So it's a bit like an Ising model of magnetism with ferromagnetic coupling: ions can be spin Up or Down, and their orientation depends on the orientation of their neighbours. One difference: ions don't come with different tendencies to choose Spin Up. It's a simple model – it doesn't try to model the availability of information itself, or have anything to say about political preferences or economic situation beyond the threshold for action. But it does bring in the relationship between network structure and outcome.

There is an empirical part to the paper as well. There is a survey of past revolutions and their relationship to media penetration, which does not convince one way or another (it seems to me there is a conflation of social media and mass media that extends throughout the paper). More interestingly, Hassanpour looks at the progress of the Egyptian uprising and contends that when the government shut down the Internet and phone networks on January 28 it produced, instead of the single gathering at Tahrir Square that had been in progress for several days, eight separate protests in different parts of Cairo. He quotes Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch: "It's clear that the very extensive police force in Egypt is no longer able to control these crowds. There are too many protests in too many places." In the absence of a broadly unifying social media that focused attention on the single winner-take-all protest at Tahrir, people were driven out onto the street to see what was happening and generated local protests instead.

Hassanpour suggests three effects of the disruption of the Internet and of the more widely used cell phone networks:

• it upset apolitical citizens, turning them against the government;
• it forced more face-to-face contact;
• it decentralized the rebellion.

The facts on the ground are open to many interpretations, of which Hassanpour's is one. He doesn't convince me  (I don't have the expertise to judge his empirical evidence) but it's a possibility, and I found it a valuable read.

Despite the title, the main interest is not whether social media increases or decreases the net level of activity, but that it reshapes it. There is overlap with Kieran Healy's just-posted work-in-progress, The Performativity of Networks, {link} where he argues that network algorithms, when implemented in social media products, "reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe" (social networks in this case). Facebook is a performance of a theory of friendship.

Digital technologies have been given credit for an almost endless list of roles in uprisings in authoritarian states. Digital technologies help activist circles to better communicate (blogs, IRC chat, and encrypted communications of various levels of security). They build a broader and deeper public sphere by being a space for open discussion (Facebook and Twitter). They give voice to citizens to speak to the outside world and witness the actions of their government (YouTube videos, Twitter, and blogs). They are a stark contrast to mass media. But they also complement Al Jazeera, who can draw from citizen videos. And they complement offline collaboration and offline organizing as well. Hassanpour points out that digital organizing activities are mainly Internet based while SMS is a medium more suited for on-the-fly information (SMS). In short, there is little that can't be attributed to social media in one form or another.

Hassanpour at least makes a specific claim, that a disruption of digital technologies produced an immediate and tangible reshaping of political activity, and he has a mechanism for his claim. I'm sure others will interrogate the evidence. There have been many calls to go beyond "duelling anecdotes" in looking at the role of social media, and this paper is an attempt to do that. It's flawed, but if you ask me it's going in the right direction.

As I said in my So You Think You Can Dance confession, it's quite possible that the Internet will end up complementing mass media, rather than competing with it. It turns out this is a current topic.

At Rough Type, Nick Carr rounds up some recent evidence, including a Nielsen report showing that American TV viewing per person is at an all-time high:

A year ago, the Nielsen Company reported that Americans' TV viewing hit an all-time record high in the first quarter of 2010, with the average person spending 158 hours and 25 minutes a month in front of the idiot box.* That record didn't last long. Nielsen has released a new media-usage report, and it shows that in the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched TV for 158 hours and 47 minutes a month, up another 0.2 percent and, once again, a new all-time high.* Twenty years into the Web revolution, and we're boob-tubier than ever.

… and more, here.

Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, the Globe and Mail's John Doyle has been to Beverley Hills to listen to TV execs talk about their line-ups, and they are surprisingly cheery about the state of the biz. A decade ago, according to NBC's Robert Greenblatt,  “there was a sense that it’s a declining business, and let’s just sort of manage the decline and hope we can get the best out of it.” Now, things are looking up. Here's CBS chief of research David Poltrack, echoing some of what Nick Carr reports (emphasis is mine):

"As this century opened, the focus of the world was on the Internet, and the focus of the television industry was on the DVR. At that time, the business of prognostication was booming, and no one was too optimistic about the future of the broadcast networks. Yet here we stand 11 years later, and the business of network television is alive and well. That doesn’t mean that the entertainment market has not been transformed by the new technologies. It has. What the pundits got wrong was not the impact of the new technologies but the alleged vulnerability of the television networks. … As the broadcasters and the cable networks move more content online, the viewers’ online video diet has included more and more episodes of television programs.

“It would be no surprise to find, for the first time, a significant number of viewers reporting that they’re watching more television than last year. The fact is, the viewer’s perception of television viewing is program- or content-driven, not distribution-driven. Whether they are watching their favourite program on their computer, their tablet or their smartphone, they consider themselves to be watching television. So contrary to the expectations of the pundits, the explosion of new sources of video distribution has actually fortified the market for the broadcast networks’ content.”

A couple of years ago Cosma Shalizi said this about search: "If your search process succeeds in aggregating what large numbers of people think, it will mostly reproduce established, mainstream cultural hierarchies, by definition."  (link now rotten – no, fixed) The same goes for social media as a whole.

Along the same lines, it is perhaps not surprising to see that Wikipedia is, like other institutions, male dominated with less than 10% of edits made by women. The full paper, from the University of Wisconsin, is here.

For me, what comes out of these observations is not that the Internet is retrograde — despite my posts, I do try not to be an old fogy when it comes to technological changes –but that it is best viewed as a site of contention rather than as an actor in the continuing struggle over the future shape of society.

It's confession time.

I try to put on a countercultural, intellectual persona here, but the truth is that I'm a fan of reality TV – some of it, anyway. In particular, despite having two left feet and being completely the wrong demographic, I adore So You Think You Can Dance (the US version; the judges ruin the Canadian version — take it up in the comments if you want to fight that one). Season 8 finished yesterday, with the brilliant Melanie Moore winning over the equally brilliant Sasha Mallory, and I'll miss my weekly fix for the rest of the summer. Here's two minutes of why I love it.

There. Don't you feel better?

I know I'm getting sold a packaged bill of goods by a mega corp, but it works because even the best efforts of Gatorade and other sponsors, and the sometimes high cheese factor, cannot smother the heart of the show, which is that a lot of very talented young folks work really hard, put their heart and soul into what they do, and produce some great routines. Plus, Cat Deeley is adorable.

Anyway, one thing many people do after watching shows like this is see what others are saying on various forums and so on about the performances. And I do the same. It's not just me either – there is a trend for TV shows and the Internet to be jointly marketed (Jeff Probst tweets along with Survivor episodes as they broadcast) and as computers move out of the study (if you have one) and into the living room (hello iPad), it's only going to get bigger. A lot bigger.

Jenny Davis at Cyborgology tells us that the biggest twitter volumes ever recorded were at the end of the Women's World Cup final last month. Glee fans are apparently big at using social media while watching, according to ReadWriteWeb. Yahoo! claims! that! over!80% of! TV! watchers! use a mobile device while watching. The Beeb chimes in with the same kind of numbers. For the TV companies, a big benefit is that social media makes audiences watch the show when it's on, rather than timeshifting it to skip the ads and watch a more convenient time.

It's time to get to my point, which is that the standard story of how we have moved from the old world of mass media TV to the fragmented new worlds of the Internet is misleading. It's quite possible that the Internet will end up complementing mass media, rather than competing with it.

I'll post more about this mistake later, but I'll save you that for now and instead give you what's probably the best known routine for any SYTYCD fan, the Tim Burton-esque Ramalama. Enjoy.