Alexis Madrigal

I walk to work every day through the streets of Washington, DC reading the news on my phone and weaving past other pedestrians doing the same thing. Nearly all of us have touchscreen phones, which is great until the temperature drops below freezing and we have to choose between frostbite or Twitter. (You know which option I choose; I've tweeted 16,000 times.)

There is a technological solution to this conundrum and it is called conductive thread. Glove manufacturers can sew this material into the fingertips of gloves, thus allowing you to remain warm while continuing to scroll and pinch.

There are easier solutions -- cut-off gloves, say -- but I think if you're going to use your phone in freezing temperatures, you should go with the nerdiest possible product. These North Face ETIP gloves certainly fit that bill and at $40, they are a big enough gift that few people are going to purchase them for themselves.

With all the ups and down in the energy business, it is sometimes difficult to see the forest through the trees. Solar module costs -- the actual energy conversion hardware -- have been falling for the past several decades and the past couple of years have seen sharp declines.

But there are a lot of other components in the cost of a solar installation. What you see above is a chart of all the solar installations since 2006 tracked by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for which cost information is available. What we see are substantial cost drops in the total installed cost of solar. In the last six months of 2006, the average project paid $8.58 per watt. In the last six months of 2011, the average project paid $5.91. Not bad.

All the data is available here.

Photographer Robert Shimmin has revived a 150-year old photographic tradition known as "tintype" in which photos are printed directly on a lacquered sheet of iron. The image you see is technically a negative; the dark parts are the metal showing through, while the light parts are formed by the emulsion.

Tintype initially got popular because it was a one-step process -- the negative is the print -- and that allowed photographers to pump out the images quickly. They were popular in public settings like amusement parks, where mobile photographers could snap your image and hand it to you after a few minutes.

But if you want to get a feel for why tintype is would be interesting as an artform, I think Shimmin nails it. There's something about our proximity to this technology that makes it more interesting than film or digital photography.

"Even shooting a modern subject, it almost looks like it's from another time period that you can't quite pin down," Shimmin says. "So you're looking at something that's of today but not necessarily of today."

In other words, using the older technique unmoors the image from the progression of photographic technology. The tintypes Shimmin makes could have been produced any time in the last 150 years. While normally it is the newest technology that blows us away -- the Lytro, say -- using the oldest tech can be sublime, too. And when you're talking about tintype in an HD video posted to Vimeo and linked via Twitter, your images suddenly say that you're not just up with recent times, you're up with all times.

Remember those glorious, faux-wood paneled, hobbit-sized speakers that used to mark someone as a member of the audiophile 1%? Well, they've fallen out of favor, even among people who think of tweeters as speakers, not users of Twitter. And with all the other gadgets that people buy now, it's harder to justify an expensive hi-fi rig with all the fixings.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of us have condemned our ears to listening to our favorite music through tinny computer speakers or headphones. And even if you get the nicest pair of earbuds or Bose headphones, you lose the sense of space that comes with listening to music out in the open air.

So, here's our suggestion for either the hi-fi-turned-wi-fi music lover or the headphone freak looking to open her ears: the Jawbone Jambox. The sleek, Yves Behar-designed speaker puts out richer and atmospheric sound while maintaining the portability and low-profile of a gadget designed to work with any Bluetooth-enabled device.

A great sounding portable speaker is surprisingly awesome, particularly when paired with smartphones and iPads. You want some music while you wash dishes? Hit play, pluck the speaker from its normal perch, and set it down just out of splash range.

The main selling point of the Jambox, though, and the reason it made our gift guide is that the sound quality is really, really good. When I play a sonically complex piece of music, I want to sit down in front of this tiny speaker and just listen. The music envelopes you, and particularly with the new "3D sound" software update, reminds you that sound travels in the air, and the sense of it moving through space matters.

It was almost a year ago when the first truly great piece of literature arrived on Twitter. A parody of Rahm Emanuel's Chicago mayoral campaign made a magical leap from profane joke into... an epic in tweets. As it happened, the man behind @MayorEmanuel, Dan Sinker, then a journalism professor at Columbia College, revealed himself to the world through our humble Technology Channel.

Sinker was suddenly thrust into the limelight. Some of the attention was annoying: Mere hours after our story went up, there were TV news trucks on his family's front lawn. But some great things came out of it, like a book deal with Scribner that resulted in, "The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel." The book is a direct reproduction of the original Twitter stream with extra context and commentary thrown in. While the temporal and responsive aspects of the Twitter narrative become compressed in book form, it's actually easier to see the brilliance of Sinker's 140-character prose-poems when they're laid out flat. Here's what we said about it earlier this year.

The glory of @MayorEmanuel was that it exposed the dark humor that political operatives know and love, mixed with the drunken idealism that tends to drive the politicos. Politics is desperate and raw and exhausting, yet on TV it looks so polished and prim. It's a knock-down, drag-out war in which everyone has to fight in their Sunday best. @MayorEmanuel looked at that state of affairs and started cussing, not unlike what a lot of us do when we look at our politics. This take on politics would not be airbrushed, edited, or watered down. All the things public politics downplays, this feed would expand and celebrate. This feed would be festooned with anger and the drive for power and the f-word. It was the inverse of the real Emanuel campaign, or as the [Chicago] Tribune called it a "brilliantly imagined and unrestrained counter-script."

As a gift, this book is perfect for people who think that Twitter is only "celebrities talking about what they had for lunch." And it's also perfect for people from Chicago. And it's also perfect for heavy Twitter users who want to see the first time a brilliant writer elevated the form they know and love.

Think the 1994 Northridge quake was strong? How about Haiti's 2010 quake? This United States Geological Survey video by NOAA employee Nathan Becker puts the energy released by earthquakes over the last 50 years in startling perspective. While I know that the scale that we use to measure earthquakes is not linear, it is difficult to make my brain believe it until I see it laid out like this. Take a look for yourself, and give thanks that you weren't in Chile in 1960 when the strongest quake ever recorded struck.

Via Paul Kedrosky

Do you know what is indisputably awesome, even for those language-sticklers who claim you can only use awesome "in its original sense"? Great white sharks jumping out of the water to eat seals.

While you or I might have been content to just watch the Planet Earth episode about this phenomenon, biophysicists tried to describe the physics of a shark launching itself at a seal in a November 30 paper in the journal Marine Biology Research.

They dropped decoy seals into the water to elicit 121 Great White strikes over a period of years. Using the data of how high the sharks jumped, they were able to calculate how fast they were moving.

"For example, on 18 June 2002, broadside to our observation vessel, a 3.5-m white shark performed a breach with a height of [at least] 2.4 m, a water-escape trajectory of [plus or minus]45 degrees, and duration of 1.2 s," they write. That is to say, an 11.5-foot shark jumped 8 feet out of the water and caught air for more than a second. Doing the math, they estimate that the sharks get up to speeds of almost 10 meters a second (or greater than 21 miles per hour)!

Most shark attacks on the seals occurred where the bottom depth of the water was 26-30 meters. In those circumstances, the researchers calculated that the sharks would reach the seals in around 2, 2.5 seconds after they begin their strikes. That's not much time for a seal to get out of the way, which is one reason that shark attacks are successful from between 40 and 55 percent of the time, depending on the lighting conditions.

So, just a tip, if you're near Seal Island in South Africa, maybe you should stay in the boat.

Via @mocost

Welcome to one of the inner rings of The Establishment. We're near Dupont Circle, a short distance to the various centers of power in Washington, DC. The Capitol Building is not so far. The White House, too. The myriad National Associations dot the streets, and the K Street lobbyists and big law firms are a few blocks away.

Here we find The Brookings Institution, one of DC's oldest think tanks. When you think of people in suits coming up with policies that become laws, this is one of the places you're thinking about. 

Today's order of business was a panel about Anonymous, about hacktivism, about... the lulz. "Radical online activism is a new public-policy challenge, with groups such as Anonymous being described as everything from terrorist organizations to freedom fighters," the Institution billed it.

The speaker charged with explaining Anonymous' idiosyncrasies was Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who has been studying the group and its affiliates for months and months. An hour before she went on stage, she asked her Twitter followers, "The question for today: do I dare say 'Ultra-Coordinated Motherfuckeray' to the D.C. establishment in one hour?" (She didn't, sadly.)

This is the challenge Anonymous poses to the establishment. For those who think it is risky to wear a skinny tie, the group's argot and traditions are so alien that it's difficult to parse what the the group is. I have long imagined some DC lawyers gathered around 4chan.org with looks of horror and disgust on their faces. Even Coleman, who has spent massive amounts of time embedded among Anonymous and 4chan users, noted that the latter site was "teeming with pornography" and that many of its members communicate "in a language that seems to reduce English to a string of epithets." Which would, of course, be the point. Outsiders aren't supposed to understand.

So, when Coleman came to the microphone before the Brookings-blue logos of the stage, I was curious to see how her presentation of the social dynamics of Anonymous might be perceived. She described the group's birth on 4chan and the turn that some groups within the larger mass took to engage in activist politics in 2008, changes that came in the process of griefing the Church of Scientology in Project Chanology. Through that experience, various Anons developed the digital and physical moves that they'd later use on other organizations.

She covered several other notable Anonymous and AnonOps (separate group) exploits. What was fascinating about her talk was the way that it gave the impression that -- much as people would like to -- it is very difficult to separate out the different kinds of activities that define Anonymous' do-ocracy. Anonymous, a bit like Occupy Wall Street, is as much a platform for action as anything else, and individual efforts are largely separate from any other effort. This massive decentralization of power makes it difficult for Anonymous to stand for any one thing or even to ask that question of itself as an institution. It wouldn't make sense to say, "What are Anonymous' politics?" even if it seems clear that, in inchoate, intuitive form, there are some.

Coleman also highlighted the way Anons follow a strictly enforced "no fame" policy in which those members who seek celebrity are shunned. But inside the group, individuality is encouraged. The whole enterprise is "evasive, shifty, and nomadic," but not necessarily in a bad way.

That style is also a strategy. As Richard Forno, the graduate program director of University of Maryland, Baltimore County's cybersecurity program, explained, for those trying to defend their organizations an Anonymous attack, the very fact that no one controls the operation makes it difficult to strike back. Beyond any technical resilience the hackers build into an operation, the anonymity and decentralization create a social resilience. There's no one person to apprehend, no organization to strike, nothing to hit.

The last speaker was Paul Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig has a classic Washington resume: University of Chicago JD, lecturer at George Washington Law School, visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, various posts at the Department of Homeland Security, and a bow tie.

I have to admit that he did not strike me as likely to understand or feel much sympathy for Anonymous. But Rosenszweig did a fantastic job of framing the group's activities for the policy crowd. "I offer the comments with a great degree of uncertainty and trepidation," he began, and then used the nominal title of the panel, "Hacktivism, Vigilantism and Collective Action in a Digital Age," as a way of illuminating different aspects of Anonymous and how policymakers might respond to it. Far from the befuddled establishment lawyer that I expected, Rosenszweig's sensitivity to the multivalence of Anonymous impressed me. We can only hope that other people whispering into lawmakers' ears are as intellectually curious as he is.

"In some instances, [Anonymous' action] is hacktivism of a vicious sort or vigilantism of an even more vicious sort," Rosenszweig said. "And in some instances, it embodies collective action that has been a tradition and core part of what we in America think of as free speech and political activity."

These distinctions matter. If policymakers think of Anonymous as hacktivism, they may see it as a kind of insurgency that they would battle not solely with policing but also with a battle to win hearts-and-minds and rob the group of its moral standing. If they see the group as vigilantes, they might take a more crime-fighting approach. And if they see the group as embodying collective action, "that's a whole different kettle of fish."

"If it's a First Amendment sort of activity, the only thing that's legitimate is to police the margins and enforce the traditional First Amendment rules like preventing a heckler's veto, so one part of speech doesn't drown out another part," he said.

Rosenzweig tipped his hand a little as to how he sees the group, but with the utmost (and seemingly honest) humility.

"I tend to see predominant within Anonymous, the more adverse parts and more the criminality and the theft of private information," he concluded. "But I'm certainly willing to acknowledge that I might be wrong. And that kind of indeterminacy of the threat, if it is a threat at all, makes it very difficult, possibly impossible [to create] a coherent policy or a coherent legal approach."

All this to say that, given the yawning gulf between Anonymous and the DC establishment, I was shocked to discover that there are some among the elites that can be eminently reasonable about the kind of things that Anonymous does. Perhaps given the byzantine and bizarre ways that power flows in Washington, DC, it's easier to understand a strange group that has its own language and plays by its own rules.

Bots drown out anti-government speech in Russia, portending the rise of speech-canceling noise bots

The Internet's infrastructure makes stopping free speech slightly more difficult. People can post anonymously; people can post (or appear to post) from all over the globe; there are less central media hubs on which authority can be exerted. But it's not as if authoritarians are sitting by and letting speech resound. Instead, they're going to come up with ways to keep the messages of their opponents from getting out.

This week provided a great example of this. In Russia, charges of electoral fraud brought mass protests against the government. Some entity out there, directly aligned with the government or not, decided to drown out that dissent on Twitter. Here's Brian Krebs summing up the situation:

But according to several experts, it wasn't long before messages sent to that hashtag were drowned out by pro-Kremlin tweets that appear to have been sent by countless Twitter bots. Maxim Goncharov, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, observed that "if you currently check this hash tag on twitter you'll see a flood of 5-7 identical tweets from accounts that have been inactive for month and that only had 10-20 tweets before this day. To this point those hacked accounts have already posted 10-20 more tweets in just one hour."

"Whether the attack was supported officially or not is not relevant, but we can now see how social media has become the battlefield of a new war for freedom of speech," Goncharov wrote.

Trend to watch for 2012: speech-canceling noise bots.

Image: Vtldtlm/Shutterstock.

I have a feeling that I'll end up using this official embedding option alongside the more informal ways that I've developed to quote people from Twitter.

As my colleague Garance Franke-Ruta noted, a Rick Perry Iowa television ad went viral on YouTube yesterday, but not in the way that Perry intended. The video has been viewed almost 750,000 times and garnered 3,466 likes and 156,821 dislikes.

Traffic doesn't just flow to political campaign videos from nowhere. They get traffic the way any piece of content on the Internet does: links from popular sites and hits on social news platforms. While it's hard to know precisely which sites drive the most traffic to any given story, in this case, it looks like Reddit may have played a decisive role. From experience here at The Atlantic, we know that a single bit Reddit hit can drive six-figure traffic to a story. But we've never experienced something like what happened with this Perry video.

The way the site works, stories are submitted to individual subreddits like /video or /politics, these then accumulate points. At a certain algorithimically determined level, they go to the front page of that subreddit and then if they keep picking up momentum, they get splashed onto the front page of Reddit.com. That's when the traffic really starts to pour in.*

Yesterday, some time before 7:30pm**, two links to the Perry video went to the Reddit home page back to back, one from /atheism and the other from /video. Both were notably opposed to the video. The one submitted to /atheism read, "Rick Perry's new Commercial, and he's not ashamed to admit that he is a Christian," while the other was stronger in its critique, "Rick Perry's shockingly bigoted campaign video. Titled 'Strong'. Uh ...huh."

Again, it's hard to parse the specific numbers here, but an Atlantic article hit the Reddit front page a few hours after the Perry videos. Already, Reddit has referred 45,000 people to The Atlantic from that link. Extrapolating out the greater amount of time that the Perry links have had to generate traffic, that they hit at a higher traffic time, and that there were two of them, I think Reddit drove at least 150,000 people to the video. And that's not counting all the second-order effects of people who saw the video via Reddit and then shared it on Twitter or Facebook.

I go into this level of detail because Reddit has already emerged as a self-conscious community. Given the site's massive traffic-driving abilities, the site's users will play a bigger and bigger role in online politics (/RonPaul anyone?). And really, I don't think we know very much about the politics of Reddit or how its information amplification power will play into elections present and future.

A month into Google's experiment with the design of Gmail, we are safely past the reactionary phase of criticism. Now, we're on to the searing and increasing hatred phase. It feels like Steve Jobs' evil ghost doppelganger went through the interface and made everything just a little bit harder to use. The problems with the new Gmail are not about look and feel; they strike right at the core usability of the software. This is the biggest step back for email since I signed up for Gmail in 2004.

Let me explain why. I use Gmail all day, every day. I also chat with all of my colleagues here and elsewhere through Gchat all day, every day. Well, the new Gmail has made these two CORE functions nearly incompatible. That is to say, writing emails and chatting with people has become a huge hassle.

Here's the problem. See that big text box in which I type hundreds of emails per week? Well, it is obscured by chat windows that I use thousands of times per week. The two basic ways that I communicate are in direct conflict with each other.  

If this doesn't say it all about the ends to which we put technological means, I don't know what does.

The image is part of a series on Quickmeme going by the name "unimpressed astronaut," which is unfolding like a New Yorker caption contest for people who read Reddit.

There is a subtle difference between these two contest genres, though. Every New Yorker cartoon takes the universal New Yorker caption, "Christ, what an asshole." This image does not.

Via Garance Franke-Ruta

2011 was a big year for technology stories. It began with an explosion of protests across the Middle East and, alongside them, a debate about technology's role in their spread and power. The year has ended with a similar story -- the role of technology in the Occupy protests here in the United States. That's why, for 2011, mobile protests were the defining tech story. In between, the year saw growing competition among the top tech companies, the growth of the tablet market (dominated by the iPad), and the loss of one of the greatest tech leaders of our time, Steve Jobs. Here's our roundup of 2011's most important tech developments.

If newspapers go down, it's not just journalism we'll need but the digital bullhorns to get the word out

In my world, a new Clay Shirky essay about the future of news is an event. Shirky sets the terms of debates about the future of newspapers with casual realism and stylish prose. Supporters retweet endlessly, detractors retweet endlessly.

His latest is, nominally, a response to Dean Starkman's less-than-flattering profile of future-of-news thinkers, "Confidence Game." But it is a more substantial piece of thinking than that would imply. Shirky's piece is an elaboration of what news institutions really are and what they can and won't do.

Shirky can be hard to excerpt, but here's the key point:

Despite these challenges to newspapers, Starkman believes that we can and must "...find ways to preserve and transfer their most important attributes to a digital era, even as we push them to adapt to new financial, technological, and cultural realities." I don't believe we must do this, because I don't believe we can do this. That, I think, is the core difference between our views.

One reason for Shirky's skepticism is that when he looks at newspapers, he doesn't see an optimal newsgathering machine. "We need to support the people who cover hard news, but when you see a metro daily for a town of 100,000 that employs only six such reporters (just 10% of the masthead, much less total staff)," Shirky writes, "saving the entire edifice just to support that handful looks a lot harder than just finding new ways to support them directly."

Let's stipulate that real reporting is the civic reason to support newsgatherers of all kinds. But the rest of the edifice -- all the fluffy stuff and ad sales and all -- used to keep the amplification apparatus in good working order. The most fantastic thing about the institution of the newspaper, as we knew it, was that human beings built a culture that amplified things that made people in power uncomfortable, despite the risk that entailed. Their classified sales kept them fiscally sound and their distribution power was sufficient that they could inspire fear in politicians and business leaders.

To me, the real challenge for the future of news is *not* finding ways to support relatively tiny numbers of reporters to cover state legislatures and school board meetings. The problem seems to be in building an amplification apparatus that will reach a substantial percentage of the people in a given geography. There are some signs that this can be accomplished via a social news mechanism. Redditors, in particular, are getting good at pushing particular stories to popularity, like the video of a Texas judge hitting his daughter.

But social news efforts often draw on a national audience that's actually quite small in a given jurisdiction. That said, it's worth remembering that the newspapers were not the only source of amplification for local investigations. Rather, they often just gave stories the activation energy they needed to jump to local radio and television stations, which shamelessly plunder local papers.

So, if we were to imagine a future system that carried out the most important civic functions of a newspaper, we'd need to support a team of reporters -- and then a strategy for gaining the attention of interested locals *and* local broadcast media.

That's a tougher task than the one Shirky has laid out, but the amplification apparatus may be easier to scale than reporting or the old way of distributing newspapers. That is to say, once someone hits on a way of amplifying local investigative journalism, it may become less and less expensive as more cities join that civic immune system. And that would be very good news for hard news.

The Minneapolis museum makes a play to become a networked cultural powerhouse

The Walker Art Center launched a new website last week that should be a model for other institutions of all kinds. The site repositions the Walker, in the words of Artlog, "at the center of the global conversation about contemporary art," by incorporating ideas, words, and art from far outside the museum's walls.

The Walker is in Minneapolis, a wonderful city that is not near the physical centers of contemporary art production. Nonetheless, through smart curation and creative engagement, the museum has become an international symbol for how to make an arts venue work in a medium-sized city. From afar, it has always seemed like a place (much like MCA Denver) that was bursting at the seams of its geographical location. So perhaps it is no surprise that the Walker decided that it could succeed by becoming "a new creative platform" as director Olga Viso put it

In the physical world, cultural institutions thought their authority derived from their precious collections of irreproducible objects. On the Internet, every website is successful to the extent that people want to reproduce -- on their own screens -- whatever culture you happen to be making. So, it takes a considerable shift for museum directors and their patrons to somehow want their collections flung across the world, every single person making her own 'print' of a painting each time she opens a browser and surfs to a museum collection.

Museums have options. One, they can stay off the web, hoarding their treasures offline and doing what they've always done. Two, they can dabble on the web and try to use it as a marketing platform to maximize the value of their physical spaces. Three, they can take advantage of the Internet's reach and figure out a way to become valuable within the new paradigm. We've seen a lot of options one and two, but the Walker is a definitive step down the third way.

In a networked world, people and institutions become valuable by becoming important nodes. That means taking on some (but not all) of the attributes of a media company. Museums can continue to pull people inward, but they also have to push content outward. They have to learn to exist within different, overlapping ecosystems -- Tumblr, Twitter, the art blog networks, cultural institution sites -- and figure out how to receive ideas and content from those places, not just broadcast to them.

The Walker's director has called their concept "the idea hub." I tend to be suspicious of how hub-like an institution intends to be, especially if a marketing department is anywhere near the controls. But The Walker's new site is helmed by Paul Schmelzer, who has long run the excellent Eyeteeth blog. If anyone can figure out how to turn The Walker's website into an art mag frontend for the museum's collection, Schmelzer can.

What I love most about what the Walker is attempting to do is that they seem to have realized that they can do more than stave off a slow spiral into irrelevance. The Internet means that the Walker can become a global art powerhouse from the comfort of the upper Midwest.

Image: Walker Art Center.

Despite all the talk of Solyndra and Chinese solar companies dumping their products onto the US market, the development of projects in the US continues apace. Driven by falling costs for photovoltaics and California's Renewable Portfolio Standard, many utility-scale projects are in the works in the southwest United States. These seven mega projects were culled from Solar Energy Industries Association research on all the major projects completed, under construction, or under development in this country.

Looking over that list, there are two large questions outstanding.

1) Will concentrated solar power projects, which work like normal power plants but substitute solar heat for fossil fuels to generate steam, remain competitive with PV projects? CSP projects will be able to accommodate energy storage easier than PV, but PV costs are falling faster. Keep an eye on that going forward.

2) Will utility-scale projects out in the desert make sense, generally, going forward? Right now, all kinds of models are springing forth for getting solar onto the roofs of individual homes and businesses. While the cost to install the solar panels is lower out in the desert and the solar resource is better, the plants have to compete at wholesale prices. Solar panels on roofs are competing with the retail price of electricity, which is considerably higher.

What's certain is that all of these kinds of projects have powerful backers and so in the near-term, we're likely to see many different experiments trying to find what works best.

This morning, Herman Cain's campaign launched a new website called 'Women for Cain,' on which women can submit stories of their support for the embattled Republican presidential candidate. This is the leader image for the site.



If you've been around the Internet for a while, you can recognize a stock photo. And that is definitely a stock photo. Twitter user @delrayser even tracked it down on Shutterstock, which sells this kind of imagery for about $20 a pop. The photo is titled, "Four happy young women holding their thumbs up."

Just for fun, we cut it out and uploaded it to Google Image Search to see if any other websites had used the same stock photo. The most prominent usage came on AupairTracker.com, a site that still appears to be under development.

Mathew Ingram had a great post yesterday on "the rise of the new information gatekeepers" in which he looked at how technology companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple increasingly control access to news and culture.

This morning, Steve Lawson, a bassist from Birmingham in the UK sent out a string of tweets that I think highlight a key difference between the old information ecosystem and the new one. Everyone can use the new system's infrastructure, regardless of their 'official' capacity. Here's what Lawson had to say:

The info gatekeepers thing is interesting, but the parameters are WAY more porous than before. TV/Magazines weren't "gameable". The web is. Cable access channels aside (Wayne's World!), you can't 'use' broadcast TV for your own ends & ignore the broadcasters. Here, there's choice. ...so while twitter controls trending algorithms, promoted tweets etc, we can still build sub-networks on the same infrastructure. So I can use twitter/G+/FB to spread indie music, without the need of their 'support' as such. We can reshare it, and build our own network. Same for news, activism, art, culture...there's still a curated 'bought' mainstream. But the alternative is on the same platform. That's new.

And propaganda thrust into a community looks way more dodgy than propaganda in a paid ad on TV. We're more sensitive to it here. The big worry? the implications of ad-funding as THE model. If all our actions are made possible by that, we're complicit or parasitic... We either 'pay our way' by buying the shit that gets advertised, or we are happy to let someone else's untrammeled consumption pay for us.

What I think this analysis shows is that a simple recognition that there information gatekeeping remains does not mean that the new way of doing things is equivalent to the old way of doing things. The details of the system matter.

There's also something of a nerdy alternative media rallying cry in there: Ignore the broadcasters! Build the sub-network!