[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.

First up is Opening Closed Regimes, by Philip N. Howard and others, a report from the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington. "What was the role of social media during the Arab Spring?" it … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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

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

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

I think of the second as the Christmas Fallacy:

… Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading

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 … Continue reading