The one-day event, Insight 2.0: The Future of Social Media Analysis, promises to offer knowledge sharing, discussion and networking around the increasingly important topic of social media analysis.

In my mind, what gives this event an additional edge is the confluence of industry and professional speakers with academics working in the field of social media analysis. It’s really reasonably priced too!

I’ll be speaking during the day – probably about one thing that’s become clear to me working within a social media consultancy: data driven insights are playing an increasingly central role in shaping communications and business strategy.

See these handy articles giving a more thorough summary of the situation: Steve Lohr’s The Age of Big Data in the NYT and Christan Olsen’s HuffPo piece on big data driven communications planning.

More importantly, as the volume, complexity and tools available for analysis become increasingly professional (remember when all we had to hand was Google blogsearch, Boardreader and Summize?) the research strategies, methodologies and technology selections adopted in commercial agencies is becoming increasingly academic in approach.

The timing for this event, then, is extremely prescient!

I should disclose that I know the organiser, Lawrence Ampofo, but I’ve not been involved in the creation of this event – apart from approaching a few personal contacts to invite them to participate.

Hope to see you there!

One short essay in particular, Harmony Through Complexity, started me thinking again about non-hierarchical and self-organising systems and how today’s ‘networked enterprises’ – to use McKinsey’s terminology – should embrace Ward’s clear and forward-thinking work to become better at managing the organisational complexity necessary to survive in the contemporary networked reality.

Originally published in 1978, Harmony Through Complexity is well ahead its time, drawing as it does on anthropological studies of tribal societies, linking this with the (then) still emerging field of cybernetics and distilling this complexity into a clear argument for the benefits of leaderless organisation.

Ward’s fundamental argument is that tribal societies, organised around informal and largely leaderless practices are far from simple or primitive as sociological or scientific “experts” in the civilised West believed. They are, rather, held together by vastly complex social arrangements that rely on customs, cooperation and collaboration to evolve and survive.

Such “socially-calibrated” practices are not, Ward suggests, representative of “society’s simplicity and lack of organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organisations.”

In fact, Ward argues, civil society institutions from Government through to NGOs and businesses can – and should – learn a lot from these social, self-organising arrangements.

Putting these anthropological insights into an organisational framework Ward fascinatingly makes the connection between these complex, tribal organisational forms and cybernetic management theory – still a relatively new idea in 1978 – which offers a novel way of approaching the management of “complex, self-organising systems”.

Without delving too deep into cybernetics or systems theory (See Joanna Beltowska and Amy Rae great presentation below for a handy overview of systems thinking) Ward draws on the work of British cybernetician William Ross Ashby to highlight the ‘Principle of Requisite Variety’.

This organisational theory demands that the variety of practices within a controlling system must be at least as varied as the system it controls. Or to put it another way, while we have traditionally attempted to ‘simplify’ organisational structures by creating discrete, siloed departments managed hierarchically, the reality is that effective organisational co-ordination and management can only come from an approach that is as social and complex as the organisation itself.

The full problem organisations face is brought to life by another British cybernetics pioneer and mathematician, John D. McEwan, who observed:

“First we have the model current among management theorists in industry. This is the model of a rigid pyramidical hier­archy, with lines of ‘communication and command’ running from the top to the bottom. There is fIxed delineation of responsibility, each element has a specified role, and the procedures to be followed at any level are determined within fairly narrow limits, and may only be changed by decisions of elements higher in the hierarchy. The role of the top group of the hierarchy is sometimes supposed to be comparable to the ‘brain’ of the system.

The other model is from the cybernetics of evolving self-organising systems. Here we have a system of large variety, sufficient to cope with a complex, unpredictable environment. Its characteristics are changing structure, modifying itself under continual feedback from the environ­ment, exhibiting ‘redundancy of potential command’, and involving complex interlocking control structures. Learning and decision-making are distributed throughout the system, denser perhaps in some areas than in others.”

So far, so good. But what can we learn from this? The top-down model is widely adopted and ingrained in current industrial and social practice. It’s the dominant model for government, schools, businesses, NGOs and most other institutions conceived and established in the industrial era. It’s how we used to operating so why should we change?

One reason we need to think about helping organisations to embrace complexity and become more social is that failing to do so impacts signficantly on their viability and sustainability.

Research by the Deloitte consultant and ‘edge’ guru, John Hagel, shows that the efficacy and performance of US firms has fallen significantly with return-on-assets down 75% from 1965. Not only that, but the current life-expectancy of businesses in Standard & Poor’s 500 has fallen from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years today.

Significantly Hagel traces the cause of these downward trends to the mid-20th century when companies began to consolidate their structure and operations, rather than seek continual institutional innovation and adapt to the growing complexity of the social environment.

The significance of this institutional innovation is highlighted by Dave Grey from XPlane who, drawing on the work of Shell’s Head of Strategic Planning, Arie de Geus, argues that sustainable and successful organisations all feature three common traits:

• Ecosystems: Long-lived companies were decentralized. They tolerated “eccentric activities at the margins.” They were very active in partnerships and joint ventures. The boundaries of the company were less clearly delineated, and local groups had more autonomy over their decisions, than you would expect in the typical global corporation.

• Strong identity: Although the organization was loosely controlled, long-lived companies were connected by a strong, shared culture. Everyone in the company understood the company’s values. These companies tended to promote from within in order to keep that culture strong.

• Active listening: Long-lived companies had their eyes and ears focused on the world around them and were constantly seeking opportunities. Because of their decentralized nature and strong shared culture, it was easier for them to spot opportunities in the changing world and act, proactively and decisively, to capitalize on them.

It’s interesting to see how a lot of this thinking is being converted to action in the more cerebral social agencies out there.

For example, you can quite nicely boil down de Geus’  active listening to ongoing research conducted across an organisation’s internal culture and its external social landscape; followed by a strategy stage where research insights identify organisational identity in shared-values or define the social capital that binds internal and external networks together; next this strategic vision is is used to shape an organisational‘ecosystem that enables networked communication – both internally and externally. Finally, all agencies should be creating evaluation frameworks for their clients to ensure they are continually measuring and improving the performance of their strategies in a complex organisational environment.

I’ve been meaning to sort out getting this paper up for a while but never really found the time to edit/tweak/revise it so just figured I’d post it anyway!

Assemblages of Resistance: new media, old technology and the Egyptian Uprising

It’s very image-led so I heartily recommend consulting the slide notes or this blog post while you review.

In summary, we were interested in the notion of assemblages that draw together material objects/forces as well as communicative components in a fluid network. Our argument addressed the conference’s question of whether the emergence of distinct, proprietary platforms (e.g. Facebook; apps; etc) are undermining the web’s political potential.

We believed that assemblages provide a conceptual framework for accounting for radical ways to circumvent and route around attempts to lock down the web as a networked space. Perhaps more radically, we asserted that the web isn’t just an immaterial networked space but that it’s also imbued with physical effects – from technological infrastructure, hardware to human capacity and material resources.

Articulating this hypothesis we used some good empirical data and insights that Dan had gathered from the Egyptian #jan25 uprising and internet shutdown. We tried to highlight how multiple components – people, technology (crucially, both ‘new media’ such as twitter as well as old media such as ham radio, faxes, etc) and material objects (rocks; lamposts; space; etc) – were assembled to act as a radical, revolutionary assemblage – or more accurately, a network of assemblages.

Importantly, such assemblages contain within them – and exude – a radical potential. This radical potential is firstly that assemblages resist attempts to curtail them (e.g. the Internet shut-down didn’t stop the revolution, merely prompted different arrangements of components within the assemblage(s)) and secondly, that as the effects of fluid (re)assembling of multiple material and immaterial components are based on their capacity to become something when combined with other elements in the assemblage the outcome can never be known beforehand, thus making attempts to predict and put a stop to the revolution near impossible. Still with me?

Finally, we seek to learn from the Egyptian Uprising case study and articulate a way of using assemblages not only as a conceptual framework, but as a pedagogical one too. We do this by turning to the pedagogy of Paulo Freire who argued for a praxis-based learning rooted in experimentalism – the sought we identified being assembled in Tahrir Square. Dan brings this point to life using other examples he has been involved in, such as Social Innovation Camp and The Good Gym, and demonstrates how such approaches not only offer a radical resistance to authoritarian ways of thinking and doing, but also provide a productive route out of the totalising and seemingly inescapable spaces and practices – both in Egypt and the UK.

At least, that’s how I remember the paper coming together. It might have been nothing like that. Why not take a look at the Slideshare above and find out! You can find the original abstract here to make sure I’m fibbing

I’m trying to apply some of the insights offered by the likes of Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj Zizek to the contemporary situation we find ourselves in in early twenty-first century Britain, and how/whether we can find a way out of the current throes of capitalism.

Then an interesting thing happened, a handful of really prescient stories and ideas converged on me. Here’s a summary…

I was stirred to recap on the post-political by the excellent blog post by Dan McQuillan who examines the seventeenth-century English radical Antinomians in light of the contemporary Anonymous and – to an extent – #Occupy movements.

Fascinatingly both groups seem to reject any attempt at formal, strategic opposition to dominant structures and forces. Instead, such groups adopt a tactic of detachment in which they go about their aims without giving credence to authority’s  anticipated or expected responses. far from entering into power structures, both the Antinomians and Anonymous envision and produce another world. And this in turn is their strategy. It’s a de-strategy.

Highlighting this tactically productive approach, Dan’s post draws a lineage from the heresy of the medieval proto-antinomians, the Free Brethren of the Free Spirit, through to the radical seventeenth-century Antinomians and on to contemporary hackers. A timely reminder that struggles against authority and oppression are nothing new and that revisiting previous excursions into sites of radical action may bring new ideas and new ways of acting.

Then, just as I’m getting into the post-politics at a more contemporary level I come across the excellent chapter, On Fairy Dust and Rupture, in the even more excellent book, Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why its Kicking Off Everywhere.

Penned by the The Free Association the chapter seeks to account for the intrinsic faith people have in capitalism as viable system – a faith that, on the face of it, could be considered a ‘magic’ quality – and how this internalised logic can be tackled and shown for what it is: a sorcery created and maintained by a range of forces operating explicitly and implicitly; at a structural level and at an individual level.

For the authors, the fairy dust refers (via The Troggs!) to an unknown quality that can transform something mundane or everyday into something that exceeds the sum of its parts. “Fairy dust,” they argue “invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an experiment.” [p.29].

The authors go on to map out ways this fairy dust can be sprinkled on actions and events and how these one-off ‘ruptures’ can be built upon to spread greater and deeper social and economic change. The spark of nature’s fire that could trigger new antinomian movements, so to speak.

And finally, coming hot on the heels of reading this a friend shared Adam Curtis’ latest blog post on the Soviet stagnation of the 1970s/80s and the responses undertaken by a disaffected youth.

Curtis’ prescience and the dimensions through which he explores seemingly mainstream topics generally unnerves me, and this post is no exception. In it, Curtis plots similar themes tot he ones I’ve been tracing – but from a different angle: the post-political Soviet end of history as The Plan began to fail.

Curtis’ piece is amazingly timely as it looks at how soviet art and cultural movements of post-political Russia sought to reject soviet communism and, realising if offered an equally – if more subtle – totalitarian system, liberal democracy.

Curtis presents a critical appraisal of the economic and social (i.e. human) failures of the soviet system in ways that cannot fail to generate resonance with the reality of our Western society today.

This is especially powerful as Curtis succeeds where others (save for the radical left) have failed. Offering a genuine critique of Britain in the here and now is difficult as The Free Association’s ‘sorcery’ of capitalism maintains its hold creating either a denial or an awe of the system.

Yet Curtis’ analogy is hugely powerful as it shows how the great Soviet Plan entered into increasingly illogical and absurd spasms as it attempted to predict and manage the complex demands of the population.

It would be easy to laugh at the examples given by the scientists and economists as they explain their predicament were it no for the increasingly absurd lengths we see capitalism going to in its attempt to shore up the yawning gap between the economic, material reality and the glossy, consumer driven fiction all around us.

Curtis concludes with the somewhat bleak transition of Soviet Russia to a pseudo-Liberal Democratic Russia where the radicals of the post-political 1970s have either committed suicide (quite a few seemed to go that way, interestingly) or embraced the far-right or liberal democracy or, in the case of Vladislav Surkov, both.

That is is why Dan’s post and The Free Association are so important. They point us towards practical tactics and ideas for conjuring a way to another world.

Back to the post-political and searching for ways out.

We’re all talking about networks nowadays. Like the internet unleashed a realisation that our lives are, in fact, a lot more interconnected and complex than we used to imagine.

But what exactly do we mean when talk about networks? And how can we make better use of them in planning and managing the complexity around us?

I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking around the subject for my PhD of late (it’s going well, thanks!) and thought Id share some of my meandering thoughts.

If you’ve read my blog previously – or seen me present – will know that I’ve mentioned  Manuel Castells a few times before.

Castells gave us the term ‘Network Society’ in his series of seminal studies of the ways in which the network form has become the basic unit of organisation in our post-industrialist world:

“Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operations and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture.” 

In later work Castells also looked at how power – as communication power – is shaped by networks.

But despite Castells’ legacy, the more I read and thought about and experienced networks I couldn’t help find Castells’ work – although compelling – unsatisfying.

For example, trying to get my head around how networks produce qualitative differences characterised as complexity  I found that Castells’ logical or structural analyses that address quantitative differences, for example, the increased connectivity of network making more things happen and faster couldn’t adequately account for the full range of networked phenomena we experience on a day-to-day basis.

Thinking about this I decided that the problem might lie with Castells interpretation of networks from the perspective of technological evolution, that is: as telecommunications networks.

While this enables us to view different elements of our world as being networked, it locks us into thinking of networks as point-to-point systems of communication or organisation. Castells applies this analysis to social groups, businesses, political campaigns, etc.

But what about if we consider that rather than the Network Society arising thanks to newly empowering technology – whether the telegraph or the smartphone – networks, in fact, constitute our existence at a much deeper level as well as manifesting how we live or experience our lives.

This perspective comes to the fore perhaps most vividly in the work of Gilles Deleuze (and also his work with Felix Guattari) who gives us a different interpretation of network: as a rhizome.

Firstly, (and without getting too deep into Deleuze’s philosophy!) we need to unpick the idea of the rhizome which is actually a sort of metaphor (or ‘image of thought’ in Deleuze’s lexicon) to account for Deleuze’s broader philosophy of difference or multiplicities.

Rhizomes, then, are a type of networks constituted as “a series of productive connections with no centre or foundation” (Colebrook 2002, 156).

What this means is we have a way of interpreting networks as a potential form for endlessly connecting things in the world in a way that produces complexity.

Another theorist that has adopted rhizomatic networks, Bruno Latour, complains that Castell’s dominance in network thinking has led to a situation whereby the concept of the network unproblematically accounts for the transformation of things (information mainly) without “deformation”. On the contrary, the rhizomatic network that Deleuze and Latour discuss bring about “transformations” that problematise the point-to-point linearity of telecommunication networks.

So Deleuzian networks are systems of emergence with unknowable outcomes – or at least engender a complexity which makes knowing or predicting outcomes difficult. As such, they connect people and things to one another in ways that ensure an always open and endless flow of possibilities.

In short, I reckon you could summarise the difference by saying:

• Castellian networks connect and organise
• Deleuzian networks produce and disorganise

As vague and abstract as this might sound I believe it gets us closer to a better understanding of the potential for networks to account for the world around us – both as we exist within it as well as how it organises our lives.

I’ll hopefully follow this post up with a more applied look at rhizomatic networks and their relation to assemblages, something Anthony Mayfield and Dan McQuillan have already started to explore.

[Image courtesy of Sevensixfive on Flickr ]

After months of silence they’ve published a new – and much lengthier – response to the current politics. I’ve not got around to reading it all yet, but I anticipate great things.

Enjoy.

With news reporting that despite healthy profits and rising executive salaries, the supermarkets pay ‘poverty wages’ to their employees…

Maybe Zizek’s right: “the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege”.

Is there a solution?

Someone from Brazil – still unsure who – had sent me a gift package from the fabulous sustainable and eco-friendly skin and bodycare people, Natura.

Aside from some lovely natural cosmetics the package also included this insert with an inspiring inscription which I wanted to share:

It’s also a very presceint inscription as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing about networks – including the organic variety – of late. I’ll take this gift as a sign to share my thinking.

But I thought it was worth posting a couple of links to blog posts I've published over on the We Are Social blog, predominently about a new area of practice in which we've been doing a fair bit of thinking and doing.

Firstly, there's a piece about social customer service – what it is; how organisations can integrate it into their marketing and communictions activity – and hopefully how they can get it right!

Secondly, there's a post reflecting on the transition more and more clients are starting to make once they've launched and embedded social media marketing programs. More often we're seeing clients going from being a 'social brand' to becoming a 'social business'.

Enjoy – and hopefully I'll be back around these parts soon

By the time I'd got around to tidying up what I'd written it'd been superceded by a wealth of good analysis – some focused on media, some not.

Having written something I felt it worthwhile adding my own initial reactions to the debate, particularly from a media perspective given the political role the media has within liberal democracies.

I end the post with some next step ideas about what this all means for democracy. Something I'll hopefully return to a later date.

As mentioned above, recommended wider reading would include: Zygmunt Bauman's article on the consumerist context for the riots; Critical Legal Thinking and Schnews' account of the broader neoliberal capitalist project as cause of the riots and the London Review of Book's historical perspective.

I wanted to capture some of my thoughts around the limitations (and failings) of the media during the worst of the rioting, which may be useful for my ongoing research.

The guiding theme for all the points I jotted down was how the liberal media has possibly reached its limits for effective and adequate reporting in the 21st century.

This is partly due to the emergence of networked media powered by the internet and increasingly networked mobile technology; however, it is also down the wider structural limitations of liberal democracy within which the media plays a central role (see Louw, for a good overview of how the emergence of liberal democracy has gone hand-in-hand with the media).

Networks/Technology
During the worst of the riots social media gave access to multiple sources of information enabling anyone with internet access to gather information and build their own real-time stream of news.

Fascinatingly, the BBC was urging people not to use social media (Twitter in particular) to interpret events.

They told us: Twitter was full of misinformation, conflicting accounts and unverifiable information. Stay tuned to the BBC for verified and authoritative coverage.

Importantly, this random, disparate and admittedly sometimes misleading information flow of Twitter was the reality of the situation.

Gathering real-time streams of information and content from social channels and augmenting it with mainstream media coverage or official sources allows individuals to build their own personal news feed using multiple, heterogenous sources.

The flaw in the BBC's argument is that live streams of social information are much more reflective of the reality of the situation and allow individuals to create a flexible, open-ended picture of what's happening.

The role of the BBC (and other traditional new providers) is to crystallise information into "news" whereas following events through social channels recognises the fact that "news" is never created as a fixed reality, rather it allows us to infer a complex and ever-changing picture of events.

It can be suggested that this problem arises from the industrial model of news production where the gathering of information has to result in a completed, finalised and sellable product.

The BBC's idea of Twitter being misleading and unreliable is also a flawed argument based on the fact that it fails to recognise any other mode of editorialising except their own, professional news-production.

For example there are a number of filtering, accrediting and editorialising information using peer networks as Yochai Benkler has examined – see chapters 6 & 7 in The Wealth of Networks for an exploration of the different models of peer-to-peer information gathering and filtration.

As an example, I relied mainly on my own Twitter and Facebook network for gathering information about events, turning only to the #riot and #londonriot hashtags to verify what the BBC and mainstream media was reporting.

And as James Cridland has pointed out in a great blog post, when it came to gathering useful or verifiable data on the riots, traditional media – including the BBC – was reporting inaccurate information on events.
 
So, the BBC's attempts to warn people against using social media was telling: if anything, it reveals the real power of social media.

That the nation's public service broadcaster needs to try to convince people it has better information than the people on the ground suggests the game may soon be up for traditional, top-down, authoritative media.

(an ironic foot-note to all this, most forward-thinking mainstream media are actually seeking to build on real-time, social reporting as articulated by by the emerginging concept of "ambient journalism" according to Alfred Hermida.)

Reinforcing the argument that social media is over-taking traditional editorialising was the quality of the BBC and Sky's rolling news coverage.

Throughout the night, as I skipped from the BBC News channel to Sky News all I saw were news anchors repeating a variation of the same information drawn predominently from official sources; largely inane commentary from the paid-up commentariat or politicians and police sources who simply maintained an entrenched position that arguably created the socio-economic situation that gave broth to the riots in the first place.

The real voices of people involved or pragmatic analysis by individuals perhaps better qualified to talk about what was happening – people on the streets, sociologists, political economomists and the rioters/looters themselves – went unreported.

In fact, the news coverage on Sky went further than not offering real voices by actively seeking out and then mis-preresenting real voices.

Reporting on being told by one looter that they were looting because they paid taxes and got nothing in return, the correspondent reported this saying: "But I wouldn't say that's a political response. This is all just opportunistic."

If these points are political and cultural reasons why mainstream media has become inadequate in reporting news then there are also arguably institutional reasons as well.

For example, once the sun went down or rioting become too intense, dangerous or moved to perceived unsafe locations, such as housing estates, both BBC and Sky resorted to reusing aerial footage of burning buildings or footage recorded earlier.

No doubt this is to protect the health and safety of reporters, but it further reveals the limits of the media's ability to tell the full story.

Just as the textual/spoken reporting was limited to a repetitive set of 'known' or 'verified' information so too was visual reporting limited to unhelpful long-range or out-dated scenes.

There was arguably some 'citizen reporting' via Sky and the BBC – but this itself brought about an interesting blurring of boundaries between social and institutional reporting.

With many of their own correspondents living within areas subject to rioting and looting, Sky and BBC brought their reporters into live broadcasts on the phone.

Similarly, many were reporting events in real-time via Twitter. These off-duty reporters were reporting on local events from a personal persepective: remember almost all of these individuals have a "tweeting in a personal capacity" disclaimer on the accounts, plus by reporting through Twitter their coverage isn't limited to Sky subscribers or license fee payers.

Their actions were arguably blurring the role between being a professional reporter and a personal or citizen reporter. 

Limits of liberal democracy
The limits of the media can be extended, I'd argue, to an analysis of the increased decline in liberal democracy and its hold over people's lives and society as a whole.

Firstly, which is the demographic consuming least traditional media? Young people of course. And what was the core demographic of rioters? Young people – although, of course, with exception.

Young people as a whole crude homogenous lump don't consume mainstream media. On the one hand this is causing advertisers and media companies sleepless nights, but on the other it also means that the media's role in performing its rational, liberal public information or watch-dog role is being undermined.

Added to this situation is the established – and growing – disenfranchisement of young people by other structural elements of liberal democracy, such as government policy, political parties and the police.

For example, see my post on the March 26th demo and how so many of the young people I saw were serious about fighting back against police brutality meted out at the last year's student demos and a government which has made only too clear how public policy is dictated by the market by u-turning on student fees.

As a result, you have a liberal democratic mechanism of managing public opinion which is no longer effective among the emergent population (not to mention further exacerbated by the ongoing economic effects on quality of life and perceived life chances).

Then there is the content of the media and the role it plays in liberal democracy.

At a normative level the media is meant to help us rationally debate and discuss events in the public sphere and form reasoned, democratic responses upon which our political institutions will act.

However, the trend over the past decades has been an increasing sensationalism and populism among the broader, mainstream media.

The public – and in particular those who consider themselves liberals – who pay particular attention to the media to stay abreast of topical issues – are failing to recognise or discover the nuances and complexities of what is happening.

The public appears almost unanimous in adopting the sensational language used by politicians and media commentators and most importantly the predominently white, middle-class news readers who themselves are guilty of reinforcing this media "restyling" by adopting media stereotypes, e.g. referring to looters as animalistic, feral, etc.

There's no space in this type of traditional media coverage for critical debate. Suggestions that the government's strategy of destroying communities by cutting its funding and increasing levels of unemployment is parallel to destroying a community through the physical violence of trashing shops go unheard.

Arguably, the strategy is the same; the tactics differ. The government has the upper hand and can destroy communities through policy-decisions and structural means; young people adopt much cruder approach

And this allows us to glimpse a subtle and potentially crucial failing of the traditional media in what we might term 'end-stage liberal democracies'.

The government and the wider political institutions in a liberal democracy (of which the media is one) are used to controlling the media and shaping coverage.

Young people realise this. Many refused to become part of the media spectacle by attacking journalists or refusing to be interviewed – which further inflames the media's democratically privileged position and response.

Of course, social media's operational relation to this is not unproblematic. While social media can (but doesn't always) cut through the manipulation of media coverage by dominant interests, it can also incriminate people committing criminal acts.

As if to reinforce how important the traditional media's role is in supporting or facilitating liberal democracy – and social media's potential to disrupt and challenge established ways of working – as I write this endnote David Cameron is stood in the House announcing plans to censor social media during public disorder, effectively legislating for an enforced reliance and dominance of traditional media when liberal democracy is faced with 'legitimation crises'.

As none of the proposed knee-jerk respoens are likely to identify or attempt to fix the underlying causes of the #ukriots I expect we'll see more legitimation crises.