The World vs SOPA/PIPA

Under the dry academic title of "Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate", Yochai Benkler (Harvard) and four Berkman Center fellows analyze the public debate and networked mobilization that arose to defeat SOPA and PIPA. The paper is 54 pages (PDF) and I haven't had time to read it in depth yet, but a first skim shows some interesting assertions.

Benkler and his co-authors used a set of tools to code content from various Web sites, news sources, and social media over a 17 month period. Their tools did the initial text and link analysis, which they then supplemented with human review and personal interviews. From this analysis they argue that - in effect - the long-claimed effects of decentralized and networked democracy worked. They track how small-scale media worked to shape and coalesce the story (narrative) that then entered the mass consciousness.

As David Post notes in his blog entry on the report titled "What the Hell Happened?" for people not intimately involved in the networked media discussion for the year or two before the bills went down, it felt like a sudden tidal wave. Literally in the space of a couple days the bill went from having massive support from the political elite to being a piece of toxic waste politicians couldn't disavow fast enough. It looked like a quick event from the mainstream media perspective, but what Benkler et al show is that the opposite is true. The conversation started and evolved and grew through broad participation (including thoughtful academics like Post). It was these highlights that the mainstream media seem to have picked up on, missing the broader and deeper picture.