Let's imagine that there is a big public square in a city. You are watching this square as an observer -- a chronicler, a blogger.
Let's say that a year ago -- December 2010 -- bit by bit, steadily, you see that first dozens, then hundreds then thousands of people start to come into this square over a few months.
Let's say that you see after some months, there are even 40,000 people in the square (as many as were in Minsk in December 2010 before many were arrested and beaten). Let's say that you even saw this population in the square more than double to 90,000 before your eyes.
As you watched -- let's picture this on a time-lapse video -- you see that by December 2011, there are more than 100,000 people. Some 26,000 were added just in the last six months. Indeed, there was a jump in the number even from November to December. The numbers of the people in the square were growing -- now they were like the kind of crowds of 100,000 that the Western wire services seemed to require before they'd acknowledge a colour revolution was really underway -- 40,000 in Minsk, no; 100,000 in Kiev, yes.
So now there are 100,000 people -- in Moscow, you know, people got mad at Putin over the election fraud and manipulation of media, and first 36,000 pledged they'd come to Bolotnaya Square and then maybe they got 20,000, or maybe they got 40,000, it's not clear; and then, even though it was cold weather and the holidays were coming, they got 50,000 next time, or maybe even 100,000, and tens of thousands of Facebook or other social media pledges.
Would you conclude then for Russia that there is a connection between Facebook membership and presence on protests in a square?
Oh, you might. You can safely correlate it in Moscow, between 36,000 pledges or whatever, and 40,000 or 50,000 or more actually coming to Sakharov Avenue. Correlate, but not count on it as a trend; correlate it, but not necessarily prove that Facebook membership=marches. After all, tens of thousands were on Facebook a year ago, many were on Live Journal, but they never demonstrated. And let's not forget when there isn't a protest permit, only about 200 come, as they came for the arrested communist activist Sergei Udaltsov. You need Facebook; but you need a police willing to give you a parade permit, too. It's complicated.
Now let's look back at our first square. Where is it? It's only on Facebook. It's only virtual. It's the membership numbers given by Socialbakers, a commercial firm that works closely with Facebook management and analyzes membership trends by countries. It's most definitely the number they gave in December when you visited their site: 105,920 in December 2012, with 23,480 joining just in the last six months.
So are these numbers accurate? Sure they are. They may only be based on projection of trends of only a slice of membership that they have participating with widgets (i.e. Alexa) or some other methodology that may be a commercial secret, or is only some of the data they get from the company, or questionnaires, or who the hell knows. You tell me. It's not important. Socialbakers are respected. They give you the zeitgeist. They let you know most importantly the trends of countries compared to everybody else and their own growth over time. Like Alexa, they can be very inaccurate and be scorned by the gurus of the industry. But like Alexa, for the average person and the blogger, they are good enough for comparing web sites to each other in a given niche. They are not wrong.
Does 100,000 on the virtual square of Facebook from Uzbekistan mean that there could be marches of that size or half that size or a 10th of that size tomorrow? Of course not. Unlike a time of ferment in Egypt or Russia, people aren't using FB for that purpose. They are posting pictures of their cats or girlfriends and chatting about music videos. It's hard to get a window into who these people are in a closed society, but one way is to look at those portions of the 8,000 who "like" the US Embassy page when they come into view. You see they are either middle class and affluent or perhaps poor students from the provinces with a tech yen, but you realize they don't represent their country or any movement or anything, really. They're just there. Their being there doesn't mean they resist the government; maybe some like the government that gives them jobs where they can afford iphones and have the leisure time to chat on social networks.
So now, as this observer, suppose you take this fact on the charts of this surge in membership, and you report it in a blog post. The blog is here. You report what it said at the time: "usage grew by more than 23,480 in the last 6 months to a total number of 105,920". You report it accurately -- it's what the chart indeed says. Your report is accurate. You report it in context by saying -- great, but it's still only the Internet penetration of Chad -- one of the most poor and least literate African least-developed nations. Chad! So you're not proposing any Arab Spring here. You're referencing Chad. You are not exaggerating things; you're reporting a story accurately: surge, but like Chad.
Let's say that this blog post of yours in a news feed on Twitter then attracts the comment of an academic who has made her career analyzing social media in these very countries. She sniffs, "Sloppy statistics" and denies that it's significant and that she has the numbers from the first six months (not in the open view on Socialbakers) which reveal a slowdown in growth rate - as distinct from absolute numbers. That is, if it once doubled from 40,000 to 90,000, even though it is growing still, it is now only at 100,000 plus, which means its growth rate has gone from more than 50 percent suddenly only to 25 percent, let's say.
The observer could look in disbelief at this curious academic who has emerged with this point, even if technically correct, and note several messages she is conveying. These are:
o "Look at me! I'm an academic! I'm smarter than you are!"
o "I have access to numbers you don't precisely because I'm an academic."
o "You're incompetent because the academic approach is the only way to approach this field."
o "I'm going to call your work 'sloppy' because in fact, I'm mad that you questioned my thesis on another paper."
and so on.
But you could disregard all these strange personalities and insecurities and try to focus on the facts.
So the growth rate slowed. So what? Even if it cut in half or less. So what? It still shows a huge SURGE. The news story is about the SURGE and the continued growth. Surely she can't disagree that the main story is about the surge, not the slowing in growth rate.
What could cause that surge? Certainly not any better organizing of the opposition or worse conditions in society or anything of the sort -- they don't obtain. The lowering of providers' prices seem to be the main factor, but Facebook is still 10 cents a day, a big expense in this country without a few hundred dollars a month for many people in the affluent category with i-phones and $20 for most (average wage).
There's also the Gartner Hype Cycle to consider. I don't worship this artifact of Silicon Valley at all, and have often criticized it for being out of sync for what's really happening with a given platform. But like anything else out there -- like Socialbankers -- it's a useful rule of thumb to watch. Time and again, in following how technology penetrates society, the Gartner analysts find that it can experience a surge of use by early adapters, peaking then, and then even crash as they become inevitably disappointed with features or distracted by the next toy, and then it goes into the "trough of disillusionment" and the starts the steady climb to adoption by ordinary users not in the tech set. So the slowdown in growth may simply mean that after a few thousand people get this toy for 10 cents a day and chat on it and show pictures to each other, they get bored, they stop trying to get their friends on it, and they move on.
Of course, the climate of repression is a factor. But just like we can't really correlate FB membership and march participation -- although people do, and that's ok (just like they correlate Internet penetration and unrest and its successes or failures, say between Iran and Egypt -- so we cannot correlate Internet usage and repression scientifically, either. It's silly to think that only Internet penetration or Facebook membership affects the outcome of a social media, when there are a huge number of other factors, from the willingness of the police to fire on people to the willingness of old grandmothers to provide relay stations and safe houses.
In any event, what we have here is an academic who disagreed with what she felt was some kind of hyping, and then pulled credentials with a nasty personal attack on a blogger on Twitter to insist that everyone listen to her point that growth was slowing and it really wasn't "all that". Nothing surprising there -- academics can be insufferable bores and arrogant prats. So what? The point is valid for the long-term, but then...so was the point about Chad. Nothing incorrect was said at all, but the academic decided she needed to pwn the blogger.
So, it might all end there, but it doesn't. Imagine if that academic then tweets and retweets to all her friends and gets them all to retweet her slam on the blogger for their "sloppy statistics" and essentially takes up the cry that this person shouldn't be employed at the website where they blog. Imagine if they deliberately deploy the @ sign of that employer to get it into the view of thousands of people, and right on the front page of that site in the "social chat box". It's a technique they've all used before at Registan -- if you disagree with them, they start putting in that @ sign and denouncing you as someone who should not be employed by that news site.
Would you find that a bit creepy? I mean more than creepy? Would you wonder why these people needed to do that?
But let's say that these academics keep it up. They keep posting that @ sign. When the blogger says, "But I linked to an accurate chart," a second academic says, "But quantitative never is accurate" -- in academic form. She still refuses to admit what the main story is, and distracts with a truly academic point.
You're puzzled now because...you saw the 100,000 people.
You got back to Facebakers and see that even though their six-month chart still shows the jump between 40,000 and more and shows an end of 106,000 in December, now the figures are saying "82,000" [and this link will say something else 3 months from now] and now the figures are showing some 5,000 dropped out. So it may make a Gartner-like crash between December and January, or that could be due to New Year's holidays when people went to real family instead of sitting on Facebook or didn't work where they had free computer and Internet access. Or who the hell knows.
Now the growth rate isn't just slowing, as the academic self-importantly told us; maybe it's crashing. Or maybe the servers are down at Socialbakers or their monitors which are at Beeline or MTS or whatever. Who the hell knows! The SURGE in membership is still UNCONTESTABLE. The growth may change and crash and grow again -- who knows? The growth rate was not a predictor of what we see now -- 82,000, a lessoning of 20,000 plus. The growth rate didn't stay the same, even according to the academic's fuller statistics for a year; in fact it unexpectedly reversed. But it doesn't matter. There was a surge; that's what's important. In the ebb and flow of social media, it counts. It has an effect. Does it mean there's an Arab Spring tomorrow? No, but it means something.
Lots of other indicators have to be studied, and academics are good at that, and that's their job -- but not if they deny obvious truths that any naked eye can see -- a SURGE in growth -- and begin yammering about growth rate slowdowns as if that is the only message.
One of the little indictators for me is the membership growth on the page of the Popular Movement of Uzbekistan. I started watching it a year ago -- it was 300. Slowly it went to 500. Today it's at 1,872 -- that, despite all the crackdowns, despite the very assassination of one of their leaders, despite a "suicide girl" hoax designed also by Uzbek intelligence agents most likely to scare people off the Internt. People keep coming; academics with theses about the non-impact of social media cannot stop them.
Now the academic is saying about Socialbakers, "They are a for-profit company". Of course, being a capitalist company isn't evil, and making a profit off analysis isn't evil, either, so it's not clear what this academic's point is, really. To say that they may be lying for whatever clients pay them? Well, show us that then? It doesn't seem to be the case. Socialbakers doesn't have a lot of motivation to do anything in Uzbekistan for anyone, given that Internet penetration is...0.30 percent of the population.
So imagine that these academics, when you keep challenging them not only with their rote academicism but condemn their personal attacks, that they only ratchet it up further. Now one is shouting to your employer that you are awful, you shouldn't "threaten" them (!) and by implication that you should be fired! In other words, you can't criticize a) their theories or b) their personal attacks used in defense of their theories without having them threaten your employment. So the academic is using the @ sign as a weapon, like a vicious, tattle-taling child. When you point out that her tactics are outrageous -- they're the kind that secret police informers use on people -- she says you are "doing it to yourself" -- another secret police sort of psychological tactic. What is it with these people?!
What kind of person would do that? Why? To win an argument?
A person who is afraid? Of what?
