The Fish Tank Complex of Social Modelling on Space and Time in Understanding Collective Dynamics

Tommaso Venturini (King's College London, Digital Humanities Department / Sciences Po Paris, médialab) Forthcoming to appear as a chapter of "Frontiers of Social Science: A Philosophical Reflection" Michiru Nagatsu and Attilia Ruzzene (eds.), Bloomsbury Publishing

A change of speed

In the BBC documentary The Blue Planet, the British naturalist David Attenborough narrates marine life commenting on the 'time-lapsed' images of a tropical reef. The images are beautiful and surprising. Played at accelerated speed, the sequences reveal corals for what they actually are: not minerals or plants, but animals who grow, crawl, hunt and fight to survive. In sibling documentary, The Frozen Planet, Attenborough again uses the same acceleration technique to show a crowd of starfish swarming over a seal corpse. In both cases, the effect is startling: the change of tempo shatters the relation between the action and its scenery. While the expected actors disappeared (as the fishes of the reef) or froze to death (as the seal), the theater wings suddenly come alive and take the center of the stage.

A similar effect, I hold, can be experienced in social phenomena by abandoning the spatial metaphors we traditionally use to understand them. Considering our collective existence, we often picture ourselves as coming from different cultural milieus, crossing social spheres, entering or leaving institutions, following norms and conventions. In all these expressions, individual movements are portrayed as occurring in the background of stable collective structures. Social sciences themselves have much encouraged such topological thinking, separating individuals from aggregates and placing the firsts inside the seconds. I refer here to the classic micro/macro distinction, which not only distinguish actors from structures, but also picture them as nested levels, with actors moving through structures as trains travelling through railways.

To be sure, most social theories admit relations between the two levels: agents are bound by structures, but also feed back into them; systems emerge from actions, but also inform them. Yet, relation does not question separation and our social imagination remains trapped in a sort of 'fish tank complex' -a conceptual framing where actors moves against a static background, like fishes in a plastic aquarium.

Such separation, of course, has its use. In collective life, not everything changes at the same time and it is often convenient to take some things as settled, in order to highlight faster transformations. Still, conceiving such distinction temporally instead of spatially has a key advantage -it remains open to graduation and change of speed. Social entities cannot lie between micro and macro (except in the few theory admiting the existence of a meso-scale) and are not supposed to jump from one level to the other: they are either actors or structures. Social change, on the contrary, can slow down or speed up and what seemed stable and structuring can suddenly transmute as corals bleaching at the speed of global warming and ocean acidification.

In this chapter, I discuss the limitations of the spatial framing of collective dynamics both in modelling and in social theory; propose an alternative approach based on the technique of versioning; and, finally, provide a concrete example extracted from a project on French parliamentary activities.

The topological framing of collective modelling

A good way to appreciate the inherent spatiality of our sociological imagination is to consider the ways in which collective dynamics are implemented in computer models. Modelling is instructive because the formalization of computer code forces scholars to be explicit about their theoretical premises and conceptual metaphors, thus allowing to observe them more distinctly. The examples of such formalizations are not in shortage. In the last decade, a variety of models derived from biology, chemistry and physics have been applied to social dynamics in the hope to harness their complexity through the precision of formal languages [START_REF] Gilbert | Artificial Societies: the computer simulation of social life[END_REF][START_REF] Castellano | Statistical physics of social dynamics[END_REF][START_REF] Vespignani | Modelling dynamical processes in complex socio-technical systems[END_REF][START_REF] Naldi | Mathematical modeling of collective behavior in socio-economic and life sciences[END_REF]; and most articles in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulations).

These efforts have produced many interesting results, but (so far) no major breakthrough. This modest yield, I believe, depends to a large extent on the constraints that a topological framing has imposed on collective modelling. Though the alleged aim of most models is to reproduce (and sometimes to predict) the dynamics of collective phenomena, close inspection reveals that temporal features are rarely salient in models. Most often, change is limited to local aspects of a globally static architecture.

A discussion of the three most common modelling approaches will elucidate this point. For the sake of space, this review will be highly schematic and neglect exceptions and complexities. While interesting experiments which exceed the three approaches below exist (I will discuss one at the end this chapter), they remain in the minority.

(1) Variation. The first way of handling change is derived from mathematical analysis. In such approach, elements are fixed from the beginning and their relations are defined by a predetermined set of equations, which are recursively computed until a stable equilibrium (or a repeating trend) is reached. Nothing new can be created in the model and its components cannot acquire novel properties or alter their associations. Most models of equilibria in economic (e.g. [START_REF] Nash | Non-cooperative Games[END_REF][START_REF] Tobin | A General Equilibrium Approach To Monetary Theory[END_REF] and ecological (e.g. the 'Lotka-Volterra equations' as in [START_REF] Hofbauer | The Theory of Evolution and Dynamical Systems: Mathematical Aspects of Selection[END_REF] systems fall within this tradition. As the model consists in the parallel computation of equations, the only type of changes admitted is the increase or decrease of quantities. Though these models can be extremely sophisticated, the nature of change is generally determined from the beginning and the only surprises can come from the interaction among the equations, which can sometime lead to different equilibria.

(2) Circulation. The second modelling approach focuses on the flow of entities through a grid of connections (generally a network). Such systems admit the existence of mobile components, which move according to the system topology, the state of its connections and the position of other components. Epidemics [START_REF] Keeling | Networks and epidemic models[END_REF] and routing [START_REF] Cordeau | A Survey of Optimization Models for Train Routing and Scheduling[END_REF] problems are generally modelled through this approach. Though these models allow some degree of dynamism, both the configuration of the network and the nature of the movable items are essentially static. The vectors of the circulating entities can change, but the shape of the grid and the rules of movement coordination are fixed from the beginning.

(3) Interaction. A more sophisticated approach is implemented in agent-based models [START_REF] Epstein | Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling[END_REF]. In such models, change does not derive from general equations or from the overall configuration of the system, but from a multitude of local exchanges among myriad calculating agents. As the mobiles of the previous approach, the agents of these models move through the system, but in addition they also encounter and interact with other agents. Faithful to the emergent nature of collective transformations, the evolution of these models cannot be analytically computed. The dynamism of these systems derives, however, from a restricted and constant set of interaction rules. The pride of these models is indeed to generate the maximum of global variability from the minimum of local instructions. Classic examples of such models are the analysis of urban segregation of Thomas [START_REF] Schelling | Dynamic Models of Segregation[END_REF] or the evolution of cooperation by Robert [START_REF] Axelrod | The Evolution of Cooperation[END_REF]. Connecting movement and interaction recursively, agent-based models capture some elements collective change. Transformation, however, does not concern the nature of the elements or the architecture of the system, which are never affected by the interactions they contain. Despite their differences, all above approaches share the same spatial framing of temporal phenomena and constrain collective dynamics in a topological arrangement where interaction occurs locally, while resulting patterns are consistently global. In simpler words: too much attention is given to the distinction between "local exchanges and global patterns", not enough to the interaction between "things that change quickly and things that change slowly".

The shortcomings of the micro/macro divide

The spatial framing encountered in collective modelling is largely inspired by the classic framing of social theory, where it is customary to assume a fundamental partition between a 'micro-level' of local and ephemeral exchanges and a 'macro-level' of farreaching and long-standing aggregates. Expressed in terms of levels, this distinction stages the study of collective life through a topological metaphor in which "macrobehaviours" are always an aggregation of "micromotives" [START_REF] Schelling | Micromotives and Macrobehavior[END_REF]. Far from being limited to human phenomena, this framing has been applied to all sort of collective behaviours, from social animals [START_REF] Moussaid | Collective information processing and pattern formation in swarms, flocks, and crowds[END_REF]) to biological organisms (Dawkins, 1982); from mental processes [START_REF] Minsky | The Society of Mind[END_REF] to artificial entities living in silico [START_REF] Epstein | Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems)[END_REF].

Though it is reasonable (and analytically convenient) to assume that, in collective existence, not everything changes at the same time and that some elements can be taken as fixed to focus on those that transform more quickly, the micro/macro framing comes with two major limitations.

Conceptually, the micro/macro divide ends up framing most research questions as the search for the pathway leading from one level to the other. Should the inquiry begin from the micro or the macro? Are macro mere aggregates or a sui generis phenomena (Durkheim, 1987)? How do global properties emerge from local interactions [START_REF] Boudon | The logic of social action : an introduction to sociological analysis[END_REF]? Is it possible to reconcile the two levels by an encompassing theory [START_REF] Bourdieu | Outline of a Theory of Practice[END_REF][START_REF] Giddens | The Constitution of Society[END_REF][START_REF] Archer | Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach[END_REF]? By presupposing the existence of two levels, the micro/macro framing takes as solved the very question that it should open to investigation: how are stability and evolution obtained by slowing down or speeding up the stream of collective change? How are institutions established by the repetition of interactions, and innovations produced by the propagation of variations? How does time matter in shaping social structures (Abbot, 2001).

Empirically, by constraining change to local circuits and stability to global structures, the micro/macro framing privileges phenomena that fit its assumptions and confines modelling to phenomena where change is clearly circumscribed. These phenomena include, for instance, variations of values in markets with preset rules (e.g. [START_REF] Neumann | A Model of General Economic Equilibrium[END_REF]; spread of diseases (e.g. [START_REF] Daley | Epidemic Modelling: An Introduction[END_REF] or species (e.g. [START_REF] Bak | Punctuated Equilibrium and Criticality in a Simple Model of Evolution[END_REF] in a stable habitat; flowing and queuing in a fixed network (e.g. [START_REF] Gawron | An Iterative Algorithm to Determine the Dynamic User Equilibrium in a Traffic Simulation Model[END_REF]; circulation of memes through media (e.g. [START_REF] Leskovec | Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle[END_REF] and many other dynamics of such kind [START_REF] Macy | From Factors to Factors: Computational Sociology and Agent-Based Modeling[END_REF]. Even worse, wary of situations blurring the micro/macro border, modelling efforts often abstract from actual processes and focus on artificial simulations where actors and structures can be separated by construction [START_REF] Venturini | Fill in the Gap: A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences[END_REF]. A particularly unfortunate choice in a time when the spread of digital media is increasing the availability of data on social phenomena [START_REF] Lazer | Computational social science[END_REF][START_REF] Rogers | Digital Methods[END_REF].

These conceptual and empirical limitations illustrate what I have call the 'fish tank complex of collective modelling' -an analytical setting where social actors perform against a fixed background, like fishes swimming through an artificially static aquarium (as opposed to actual sea reefs which evolves with the colonies that they host). This 'fish tank complex' holds social modelling (and sometimes social sciences) from addressing the situations of structural change where old institutions dissolve and new arrangements crystallize; the moments in which a new species transforms an ecological environment [START_REF] Levins | Evolution in Changing Environments: Some Theoretical Explorations[END_REF][START_REF] Gordon | The fusion of behavioral ecology and ecology[END_REF]; an innovation 'creatively destroy' an industrial market (Schumpeter, 1976); a compromise is proposed to defuse with a social crisis [START_REF] Callon | Acting in an uncertain world : an essay on technical democracy[END_REF].

The topological divide described above is so deep-seated in our social imagination that it is difficult to find alternatives that would be natively temporal. Even approaches that refuse the micro/macro distinction tend to define themselves in relation to it. As an example, I will mention actor-network theory (or ANT) -not only because this approach is extreme in its denial of any binary divide, but also because it is the ground in which the reflections of this chapter have germinated.

Developed in the French tradition of Sciences and Technologies Studies, ANT proposes a unconventional approach, whose originality comes largely from a stubborn rejection of all distinction between agents and structures. In the article founding such approach (at the time called "sociology of translation"), Michael Callon and Bruno Latour (1981) explicitly avow the priority of temporal dynamics over spatial arrangements:

We cannot distinguish between macro-actors (institutions, organizations, social classes, parties, states) and micro-actors (individuals, groups, families) on the basis of their dimensions, since they are all, we might say, the 'same size', or rather since size is what is primarily at stake in their struggles (p. 279).

While the approach developed by Callon, Latour and others, (cfr. [START_REF] Latour | Reassembling the Social An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory[END_REF][START_REF] Law | After ANT : Complexity , Naming and Topology[END_REF] gained a growing success, it has never succeeded to cut loose from the spatial framing against which it was introduced (which explain, in passing, why the label 'actornetwork theory' stuck over the name 'sociology of translation' proposed by its inventors). ANT's contribution remained, as a consequence, primarily negative: it encourages researchers not to take for granted the division between interactions and structures and follow instead the heterogeneous and ad hoc distinctions constructed and de-constructed by social actors. But what ANT does not provide is much positive advice on how to describe social phenomena. In a dialogue intended to explain ANT to young researchers, Bruno [START_REF] Latour | On using ANT for studying information systems: a (somewhat) Socratic dialogue[END_REF] repeats it at least three times:

ANT is first of all a negative argument (p. 62)… it's about how to study things, or rather how not to study them. Or, rather, how to let the actors have some room to express themselves … ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it (p. 63).

Versions

To find a natively temporal description of collective dynamics, I therefore searched beyond the limits of social sciences and found an interesting (and unexpected) inspiration in the field of software development. I refer here to the technique of 'version or revision control'. Versioning -the ensemble of conceptual and technical instruments developed to compare different editions of the same documents and to track their evolution over time -is one of the most important and yet most overlooked information techniques of modern collective life.

Versioning has been around since early modernity. According to Elisabeth [START_REF] Eisenstein | The Printing Press as an Agent of Change[END_REF] the idea of 'versions' emerged with mechanical printing, when the possibility of reproduced exact copies made western societies sensitive to the variances between handcopies of the same manuscript. Filing cabinets, carbon papers and Xerox machines traced for decades the evolution of legal, administrative and commercial documents, but it is with the advent of digital technologies that versioning entered its golden age. The association of versioning and digitization goes both ways. On the one hand, digitization facilitates the tracking of an increasing variety of inscriptions (see the brilliant work of Ben Fry on Darwin's Origin of Species -http://fathom.info/traces). On the other hand, version control constitutes one of the pillars of digital computation. In digital environments it is so easy to duplicate and modify a documents that keeping track of changes becomes vital. This is especially true for software, a peculiar a type of document whose extreme formalization implies that even a single-character transformation can be of great consequences. It is therefore not surprising that the first advanced systems for revision control were introduced by and for software developers. The first of such systems was the SCCS (Source Code Control System) developed by Marc Rochkind (1975) at Bell's Laboratories is in the early '70. Some ten years later, Walter [START_REF] Tichy | Design, implementation, and evaluation of a revision control system[END_REF][START_REF] Tichy | RCS-a system for version control[END_REF] introduce the RCS (Revision Control System) and the idea of storing modifications as 'deltas' from a 'master version' (thereby saving significant storage space).

From the onset, digital versioning has been a social technology, aiming to support collaboration among code writers. At first, editing conflicts were avoided by a simple system of locks, preventing developers from modifying a file if someone else was already working on it. In the late '80s, however, a more sophisticated approach was introduced by the CVS (Concurrent Version System) developed by Dick Grune and Brian [START_REF] Berliner | CVS II: Parallelizing software development[END_REF]. CVS implemented a server-client system with a 'central repository' containing the 'root version' of documents, and personal workspaces where developers could create 'local branches' of them. This allowed developers to work simultaneously, but required them to 'commit' their changes by merging them to the master version stored on the server. Various technical problems connected to CVS (particularly connected to file naming and hierarchy), however, discouraged developers from using branching functionalities and locking was still largely used.

To address such problems various open-source and commercial systems were introduced (ClearCase, Perforce, Subversion to name a few), but the step forward came in 2005 with the release of Mercurial (by Matt Mackall) and Git (by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux). Despite their differences, both systems make branching and merging easier by scaling down the unit of change from documents to commits and 'changeset'. A few years later, in 2008, Github was launched offering free online storage for Git-versioned projects and, more importantly, enhancing revision control with social-networking functionalities. The success of Github was fast and massive, reaching 1 million repositories by 2010 and 10 million by 2013.

Despite its enormous importance in our collective life, version control has so far received little attention from academic research and has generally been discounted as ancillary to software development. I found most of the information discussed above in the introduction of technical books or in developers' blog posts. The details in which I described the history and the technical features of revision control may therefore seem amiss in a book on social sciences. I believe, however, that the idea of versioning is directly relevant to the study of social life for at least two reasons.

The first reason why sociologists should be concerned about versioning is that this technique has long left the domain of software development and has started to impact a variety of other collective actions. The most famous example in this sense is Wikipedia. Everyone knows how in less than a decade Wikipedia has radically revolutionized the encyclopedic genre and grown to be one of the most influential sources of information about almost anything. There is little doubt that Wikipedia's success is due to the collaborative nature of the online encyclopedia which is in turn made possible by the revision control integrated in its technical infrastructure [START_REF] Niederer | Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system[END_REF][START_REF] Niederer | Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system[END_REF][START_REF] Venturini | Opera Aperta: Wikipedia e l'oralità secondaria[END_REF]). Yet little has been written about the importance of such function and how it has shaped the interaction in Wikipedia (and this despite the fact that scholars have extensively drawn on Wikipedia versioning data for research -for example Kittur, Aniket & Kraut. 2008;Viégas, Wattenberg & Kushal, 2004;[START_REF] Borra | Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles[END_REF]. This absence is noted in the 'Talk page' of the 'Version Control' Wikipedia's article: Integrated revision control is a key feature of wiki software packages such as MediaWiki, TWiki, etc. Comparison of wiki software lists revision control for several wiki packages. It's hard to imagine a wiki functioning very well without revision control; for example, the ability to revert a page to a previous revision is critical for defending a public wiki against vandalism and spam, to allow legitimate users to correct their mistakes, and to allow groups of editors to track each other's edits. I certainly think this warrants a mention in Version control, but on Wikipedia I must cite our sources. It's not enough for something to be true or even obviously true; it must have been written about in some reliable source. I.e., I would need to find some reputable news article or scholarly paper which discusses the role of revision control in wiki software, so I could cite it here. I also need to avoid self-references. --Teratornis 22:11, 4 July 2007 (Wikipedia "Talk:Version_control", en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Version_control, accessed on 10/03/16 Wikipedia is the clearest example, but the effects of the generalization of revision control are worth studying. What happens to team work when everyone can easily know who modify which part of a document and when? What happens to co-authoring when the proposed modifications can be easily reviewed and accepted or discarded? What happens to personal communication when I can save drafts of our emails or SMS? And, more generally, what happens to society when 'Undo' (Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z) becomes a widespread function of our life?

The second and subtler reason why social scientists should be interested in versioning techniques is that they address the same conceptual problems that challenge the understanding of collective life. How do aggregates maintain their identity when all their components change over time? No line of code can be preserved from the first to last version of a program exactly as all members of an institution can change during its existence. How can we handle modifications overlapping at different scales and in different moments? The edits made on a lower level of code, for example in the way functions are invoked, can trickle up to each of the function exactly as a constitutional amendment can trickle up to a variety of regional laws. How is structural coherence sustained when thousands of modifications are negotiated independently? Large pieces of software can be developed by hundreds of coders contributing simultaneously to different portions of the codebase in a similar way to which international treaties are negotiated on multiple diplomatic tables. Version control has answers to these questions and they all rely on a temporal rather than on spatial framing.

The example of the Law Factory

To illustrate how the concepts and (equally important) the techniques of versioning can be imported in the social sciences, I will relate the example of a research project I observed and facilitated at Sciences Po Paris.

The project "The Law Factory -Do Parliament Members lay down the Law?" was born from a collaboration between a French NGO (regardscitoyens.org), the médialab (medialab.sciences-po.fr) and the Centre d'Études Européennes of Sciences Po. The question set on the table by Olivier Rozenberg (our expert on political sciences) was to assess how much French laws are actually transformed by parliamentary debates. This is a classic question for political scientists who have long discussed the relative weight of the legislative branch in the balance of the separation of power. In particular, we wanted to know whether laws were substantially amended by the Sénat and the Assemblée or whether the parliamentary debate had a more symbolic function. As the subtitle of the project reads "Do Parliament Members lay down the Law?".

As they concern the process by which norms are created, such a question could hardly be fit in a binary framing opposing institutions and individuals. Lawmaking is supposed to be the very moment in which the members of a society decide (through their elected representatives) the rules of the collective game -the moment in which the structures are as flexible as the game of alliances and oppositions shaping them. The impossibility to cut parliamentary processes into a micro and a macro level was not only a theoretical problem. In practice, it also meant that both qualitative methods (customarily used to describe micro-interactions) and quantitative ones (generally used to aggregate macropatterns) were unfit for this project. Yes, we could have dissected the the parliamentary journey of a few bills to observe in-depth their transformation, but how to know if results could be generalized? And yes, we could have devised some statistical measures of parliamentary transformation and compute them for all French laws, but how to know whether those metrics were not too simplistic (and could differentiate substantial from cosmetic modifications)?

Eventually, our NGO friends (all coming from a software development background) came up with a more original solution. They observed that if "code is law" (according to the famous aphorism by Lawrence [START_REF] Lessig | Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace[END_REF], then law can also be treated as code. Following this intuition, they extracted from the official websites of the Sénat and the Assemblée all available information on the amendments submitted on the 300 laws discussed between 2008 and 2014 by the French Parliament. After an extensive cleaning, this information was coded in through Git versioning format (as explained above generally used to track the revisions to software), formalizing amendments as 'commits' to laws 'master version'.

The potent formalization offered by Git allowed to create an extremely flexible visual online interface allowing, scholars, journalists and engaged citizens to explore the lawmaking process of the French Parliament (lafabriquedelaloi.fr). The exploration starts from a vast overview comparing how long different laws were discussed in different branches of the parliament and how many words were changed through these discussions (see fig. 1a). It then allows users to drill down progressively disaggregating the data and identifying how precisely each article of each law was modified at each passage (see fig. 1b); considering all amendments proposed by different political groups (see fig. 1c); and reading the transcription of each word spoken by each parliament member on each specific article at each stage of the discussion (see fig. 2d). The originality of such a platform is that it allows to move from one-figure metrics to debate minutes (and back), dissolving topological separation and promoting instead the observation of temporal dynamics. The different layers of the interface are designed and implemented in order to encourage a seamless navigation from one to the other, allowing users to identify stable trends and turning points. And the heart of this remarkable feat, it is worth remembering, are versioning techniques (see fig. 2). To overcome such topological framing, I proposed therefore a description of collective dynamics based on the notion of 'versioning'. Instead of opposing local and global levels, this approach draws our attention to the speeding up and slowing down of social processes. It gives us conceptual and (more importantly) technical tool to observe how old arrangements are liquefied and new ones crystallized.

Our focus on change, however, might be questioned. Such focus, it could be argued, may disguise the general stability in the distribution of social resources (power and wealth in particular). Yes, the collective fabric can be constantly weaved by the interactions of a multiplicity of agents acting at a variety of speeds and distances, but what is the advantage of such an intricate description if, in the end, the same asymmetries are reproduced over and over again? Little good will come of the claim that everything can change in theory, if nothing really does in practice. At best, it will make sociological investigations uselessly complicated. At worst, it will mislead individuals that their actions are not constrained by a social system whose forces exceed them.

I cannot but disagree. The image of a structural apparatus, on overarching social systems existing on a different level and imposing its norms on individual actors may encourage some to rebellion, but it also inflates the power of inertia and belittles the forces of change. Let's go back to the example of collective modelling I discussed above. Most formal models imported in the study of social phenomena are borrowed from natural phenomena where global properties emerge from the blind interactions of local entities. It can be atoms generating material properties; molecules provoking chemical reactions; cells composing organs and organisms. All these cases have in common that the micro-entities have no clue of what is happening at the macro level, they act (or rather 'react') on the exclusive basis of the information on their immediate proximity. One of the most common and most telling metaphor is that of social insects: like ants moving sand grains through their nest -and thereby constructing it without the slightest idea of it global architecture -human beings would create their social structures without really understanding them.

But human interactions are slightly more sophisticated than ants' (and ants' interactions, it seems, are more sophisticated than most entomological models, cfr. [START_REF] Gordon | From division of labor to the collective behavior of social insects[END_REF]. Humans have developed all sorts of informational and technical devices to extend the reach of their knowledge and of their action (which explains, by the way, why actor-network theory was developed in the tradition of Science and Technology Studies). Social organization is not the global effect of myriad local actions. It's a complex fabric whose threads extend at variable lengths; a story with a millions themes, starring on a page or lasting through chapters and books; an ecosystem of species surviving through evolution; a software architecture of a million branching and merging versions.

Contesting the spatial framing of social theory, I do not mean to overstate the important of chance. A temporal understanding of social phenomena focuses on stability as much as on transformation. It does, however, draw attention to the fact that stability (exactly as change) is a consequence of collective action. The 'constraints' that according to Emile Durkheim constitute the very essence of social facts (1966) are not stable because they are sited in some higher layer of collective life, some macro-context shielded from microinteractions. They are stable because the actions that uphold them last longer or are persistently repeated.

"Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same" says Tancredi Falconieri, in The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1958) of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. With this enigmatic line, the heir of Salina's princedom justifies his choice to join the cause of the Italian Unification even though this threatens the status of the Sicilian aristocracy to which he belongs. With ruthless political intelligence, the young Prince understands that his vantage is best preserved by aligning with the forces of change rather than resisting them. Power and privileges, he acknowledges, are not structures sustained by an inherent logic, but arrangements that endure only when they are constantly updated. And the opposite, of course, is also true. Challenging traditional bias and asymmetries begins with understanding their history and dynamics "directing our attention not to the social but towards the processes by which an actor creates lasting asymmetries" (Callon & Latour, 1981 p. 285, 286).

Figure

  Figure Error! No sequence specified. Four interfaces of the lafabriquedelaloi.fr platform

Figure

  Figure Error! No sequence specified. An example of visualization of law versioning


Katharina Rein

Tommaso Venturini

Ploughing digital landscapes: How Facebook influences the evolution of live video streaming

Keywords: Facebook, live video streaming, media ecologies, media system, social media platforms, walled gardens

In this article, we discuss Facebook's strategy to influence the development of a new communication format known as live video streaming. We take this case study as an example of the ways in which Web platforms operate to harness media innovations and their social uses. The case of Facebook Live illustrates exemplary how, far from developing spontaneously, media landscapes are actively shaped by the technological and financial initiatives of their more influential players. In this article, we describe how Facebook's technical infrastructure and partnership scheme influence the editorial organisation as well as the storytelling of live video streaming.

Introduction

It is common when discussing the development of media to employ notions such as 'information ecosystem' or 'media ecology'. According to Scopus, the former expression is contained within the title, keywords or abstract of about 150 scientific publications, the latter in almost 300. The second expression has also come to define a distinctive, albeit heterogeneous, approach to the study of media. One excellent review of the different branches of this approach can be found in [START_REF] Strate | A media ecology review[END_REF].

These expressions, and the theories that come with them, have the advantage of drawing our attention to the complex networks of interactions that connect human and technological actors within the media system: the 'massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' characteristic of human communication [START_REF] Fuller | Media Ecologies[END_REF]. They also encourage us to reflect upon the way in which media constitutes a sort of secondary environment and how the 'balance' of such environments influences the quality of collective life [START_REF] Postman | The humanism of media ecology[END_REF]. Finally, they have the merit of refusing linear and deterministic media histories and replacing them with a richer evolutionary approach, according to which 'the evolution of media cannot be understood outside the relationships that the media "species" establish within an ecology' [START_REF] Scolari | Media ecology: exploring the metaphor to expand the theory[END_REF][START_REF] Scolari | Media evolution: emergence, dominance, survival and extinction in the media ecology[END_REF](Scolari, : 1434)).

Using a biological metaphor to highlight the complexity and interrelation of the media system [START_REF] Logan | The biological foundation of media ecology[END_REF], however, comes with a distinctive drawback. Often against the intention of media ecologists, these metaphors end up naturalising communication technologies and presenting their development as an organic evolution emerging spontaneously from the interactions of a multitude of actors. Such ecological framing is particularly common when describing digital media, since the rapid and often unexpected transformations seem to defeat all centralised planning and offer the best example of undirected evolution.

But the decentralised nature of digital media should not blind us to the fact that their development is in no way natural or artless. Surely, the media system comprises a large number of actors, but some of them are more powerful than others and their strategies affect heavily the directions in which the system transforms. The world of digital media systems resembles less a pristine ecosystem evolving freely under the invisible hand of society or the market, rather more a cultivated landscape in which natural tendencies interact with the initiatives of a large but not indefinite number of influential 'gardeners' or 'farmers'. Among these powerful actors are, of course, the so-called social media platforms.

Concepts such as media industries [START_REF] Havens | Understanding Media Industries[END_REF][START_REF] Hesmondhalgh | The Cultural Industries[END_REF] and communication power [START_REF] Castells | Communication Power[END_REF] are not new, nor is the observation that large media conglomerates can play a crucial role in influencing the public sphere. Firsfarit observed in broadcasting media that such influence has become more and more evident in digital media with the rise of the so-called 'platform economy' [START_REF] Kenney | The rise of the platform economy[END_REF] or the 'platform capitalism' [START_REF] Langley | Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation[END_REF][START_REF] Srnicek | Platform Capitalism[END_REF]. Colonising growing shares of Internet communications, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have progressively disciplined the initial spontaneity of online exchanges [START_REF] Taylor | The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age[END_REF][START_REF] Wu | The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires[END_REF].

Far from being neutral mediators, such platforms bring with them a distinctive 'media logic' [START_REF] Van Dijck | Understanding social media logic[END_REF], which promote certain economic and social arrangements over others [START_REF] Gillespie | The politics of platforms[END_REF]. Adopting a critical stance, observers have studied how platform infrastructures encourage users to produce and share contents [START_REF] Boyd | It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens[END_REF][START_REF] Jenkins | Spreadable Media (Postmillennial Pop)[END_REF], but also keep these contents within well organised 'walled garden' where they can be captured and monetised [START_REF] Fuchs | Social Media: A Critical Introduction[END_REF]Mandiberg, 2012;[START_REF] Van Dijck | The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media[END_REF].

In this article, we will provide an illustration of these 'gardening' (or rather ploughing) initiatives by discussing the strategy deployed by Facebook to harness the development of a new communications technology known as 'video live-streaming' or 'social streaming'. We chose this specific case study because it concerns one of the most promising innovations in the current media landscape (from a commercial viewpoint, at least) and because Facebook is pursuing a particularly aggressive strategy around it. Since the introduction of its Facebook Live feature, the platform has vigorously pushed the new service through its technical and commercial infrastructures, even going as far as to tweak its newsfeed algorithms to favour live video. What's more, the platform initiated an ambitious programme of partnerships with top-tier news producers, and for the first time in its history, offered direct financing in exchange for steady production of content for its Live feature.

After providing a quick overview of social live-streaming, we will present our methodology based on the analysis of press experts and of interviews with Facebook's media partners, as well as with companies involved in Facebook's Media Solutions programme. Drawing on such sources, we will describe how news publishers (both traditional and 'pure-players') are affected by Facebook's strategy to influence the emerging uses of social streaming. Although it may be early to assess the long-term success of such a strategy, it certainly does not fall short of technical and financial means. While its effects may be temporary, they are already very tangible.

Social video streaming, the state of the market

Live video streaming can be described as 'the ability to broadcast video to a remote audience in the instant that it is captured' [START_REF] Juhlin | Mobile broadcasting[END_REF]. While applications for real-time video transmission over the Internet are not new (desktop video conferencing has been around for years), live video as a social medium is a more recent phenomenon. The earliest social live-streaming platforms were introduced about 10 years ago -with ComVu Pocket Caster launching in 2005, followed by Bambuser and Ustream [START_REF] Juhlin | Mobile broadcasting[END_REF]. Platforms typically offer the possibility to capture video from mobile devices and share them with an online community, allowing 'people browse through live broadcasts, access archived clips, and follow and interact with individual users' [START_REF] Juhlin | Mobile broadcasting[END_REF]. Such interactions occur mainly through text-based chats coupled with live streams, where viewers can communicate with the streamer and with other viewers.

The combination of real-time video and chat promotes high levels of engagement and constitutes a key characteristic of social live-streaming. Drawing on [START_REF] Mcluhan | Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man[END_REF] theory of fidelity and participation, [START_REF] Hamilton | Streaming on Twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media[END_REF] hypothesise that the 'hot' and 'high fidelity' media component (the video) allows users to share a rich experience, while the 'cool', 'low-fidelity' media component (the chat) facilitates the interaction. Viewers connect through unexpected events and feel 'part of a unique group of people that saw something special as it happened' [START_REF] Hamilton | Streaming on Twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media[END_REF]. The chat intensifies this connection by encouraging streamers to adjust their broadcast to the interventions from the audience (Figure 1).

Despite its potential, social video streaming proved challenging for providers: although users enjoy watching live video streams, most of them do not become regular streamers. Ben Rubin, CEO of the livestreaming app Meerkat, thinks that both the unfamiliarity with live video and the 'high emotional cost of being entertaining in a live format' are the main obstacles (D 'Onfro, 2016b). Tech magazine Recode quotes Rubin in an e-mail to his investors: [START_REF] Bambuser | Bambuser Live Broadcast[END_REF].

According to [START_REF] Juhlin | Mobile broadcasting[END_REF], 'many users struggle with both the technology and the concept' and end up producing 'uneventful' videos that display low quality in terms of video production and camera use. Consequently, although some videos fall into categories such as 'video logs', 'tours' and 'social events, groups, and family', much of user-generated content consists of 'tests and demonstrations'. Left to its own spontaneous development, social live-streaming seemed unable to generate a sufficient base of active broadcasters, which contributed to the failure of many social live video services (including Meerkat), the business models of which were aimed at consumers. As publishing activity remained relatively low, numerous providers could not generate sufficient revenues from subscriptions and advertising to become profitable (Wagner, 2016a).

Providers that did manage to become economically sustainable either optimised their platforms to the needs of commercial clients and adopted 'freemium' models or encouraged the emergence of new niche markets [START_REF] Kharif | Meerkat, Periscope, been there, done that. Bloomberg[END_REF]. The examples of Ustream, Bambuser and Twitch illustrate this development.

Ustream offers a broad variety of services targeted at corporations, including professional video production services, data analysis and strategic consultancy [START_REF] Zimmerman | IBM acquires Ustream to propel cloud-based video services[END_REF]. Though the platform remained free for users, Ustream now charges monthly fees from more than 5300 companies including Sony and LinkedIn [START_REF] Kharif | Meerkat, Periscope, been there, done that. Bloomberg[END_REF]. In a recent press release, IBM announced that it had acquired the company and plans to integrate its services into a new cloud-video unit [START_REF] Zimmerman | IBM acquires Ustream to propel cloud-based video services[END_REF].

Bambuser, which commenced as a project dedicated to citizen journalism, found its business model in collaboration with media companies. Since its launch in 2008, Bambuser made a name for itself as a source for eye-witness videos of political events, such as the uprisings of the Arab Spring. In 2013, the news organisation Associated Press invested in the platform, explaining that through Bambuser, AP can source UGC video news live from the scene from eyewitnesses exclusively for its broadcast and online publisher customers. This not only ensures that the AP remains the foremost global provider of live video news, but also helps its customers overcome their own UGC challenges. [START_REF] Lunden | AP takes a stake in Bambuser, the real-time mobile video service that helps eyewitnesses tell their stories[END_REF] Twitch, on the other hand, became profitable by entering the niche of online gaming. While watching is free for all viewers, fans can buy monthly subscriptions to get more privileges, such as exclusive access to the chats of their favourite streamers. With this concept, Twitch built a base of 12,000 professional game broadcasters. Via its 'partnership program', these streamers get a share of the 'advertising, subscription, and merchandising revenue Twitch can generate from their channel' [START_REF] Gillette | How Twitch turned video game voyeurism into big business[END_REF]. Meanwhile, Twitch also profits from collaborations with video game and console producers.

It was not until 2015, however, that two new apps -Meerkat and Periscope -sparked a boom in the industry. The new market entrants were well received because they were constructed to integrate smoothly with Twitter, allowing users to stream to their followers, search Twitter's user base and promote their streams via Twitter's push notifications [START_REF] Morrison | Beyond Periscope and Meerkat: The state of live-streaming video[END_REF][START_REF] Wagner | Twitter launches live streaming app Periscope -its own version of Meerkat[END_REF]. In an interview with AdWeek, Brad Hunstable, CEO of Ustream, claimed the exponential growth of the mobile video market was another reason for the sudden success of the apps [START_REF] Morrison | Beyond Periscope and Meerkat: The state of live-streaming video[END_REF]Statista, 2016). Digital video is predicted to be one of the fastest growing revenue sources in the global media market, with the video advertising marketplace showing expected growth rates of 18.75% per annum in (Statista, 2015). The importance of video streaming in this regard is already evident. In 2014, Twitch was the fourth-largest peak-Internet traffic source in the United States, surpassing even Facebook [START_REF] Popper | One million broadcasters strong, Twitch surpasses Facebook in peak traffic[END_REF].

Given this potential, it is not surprising that companies such as Twitter, Google, Amazon and Facebook soon entered the social streaming market as powerful competitors. Meerkat, for example, suffered a blow when Twitter, which had bought its competitor Periscope, announced it would 'remove Meerkat's access to their social graph in favour of [...] Periscope' [START_REF] Bacheller | Meerkat vs Periscope: which live streaming app will win? Marketing Blog -TopRankÒ[END_REF]. Although Periscope remains an independent app, its live content is now fully integrated into the main Twitter app. Videos shared from Periscope to Twitter appear in users' Twitter feeds in the same way as Twitter's native video [START_REF] Wagner | Periscope Videostreams now appear -and Autoplay -inside the Twitter App[END_REF].

Meanwhile, in 2015, Google launched YouTube Gaming in direct competition to Twitch. Chromecast, a device and app that enables users to stream content from Netflix and other providers to TV screens, and a new premium subscription service called Youtube Red, which is currently available in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea, rumoured to roll-out in the United Kingdom in 2017 [START_REF] Ingram | The video wars continue: Amazon vs. YouTube, Facebook vs[END_REF][START_REF] Titcomb | Google plans UK launch of paid-for YouTube Red service[END_REF]. Youtube Red, an ad-free version of Youtube, competes with music and video streaming services alike: Not only does it offer exclusive new TV-style shows featuring Youtube stars such as PewDiePew, as well as a range of independent movies, it also gives subscribers access to Google Play Music, Google's music streaming service, and enables subscribers to download and consume content offline [START_REF] Titcomb | Google plans UK launch of paid-for YouTube Red service[END_REF]. More importantly, Google plans to update its YouTube app with a live-streaming feature [START_REF] Martin | YouTube answers its rivals Periscope and Facebook live with live streaming from its mobile app[END_REF]. The firm has been active in live video for a while, with its Google Hangouts On Air and livestreaming via the Creator Studio dashboard on YouTube, but the new app feature will make live video streaming more accessible, as explained by YouTube product manager Kurt Wilms: Because it's built right into the YouTube app, mobile live streaming will have all the features your regular videos have -you'll be able to search for them, find them through recommendations and playlists and protect them from unauthorized uses. (Wilms in [START_REF] Martin | YouTube answers its rivals Periscope and Facebook live with live streaming from its mobile app[END_REF] As for Amazon, beside buying Twitch in 2015 for US$970m [START_REF] Kharif | Meerkat, Periscope, been there, done that. Bloomberg[END_REF], the e-commerce giant introduced a Prime service for movie streaming and recently announced the launch of Amazon Direct Video, a platform similar to YouTube (Ingram, 2016b).

Finally, Facebook, whose users already consume around 100 million hours of video per day, is also investing heavily into live-streaming (D 'Onfro, 2015). In 2015, the social network started to offer video embedding, allowing 'Facebook videos to move around the web' (a service previously only provided by YouTube), and improved its video advertising services, allowing customisation and targeting by gender, age and location [START_REF] Rosenbaum | Facebook TV arrives, and broadcast, YouTube are in the Crosshairs[END_REF]. Recently, Facebook implemented 'Twitter-like' features such as verified accounts for celebrities, trending topics and hash-tags, to draw more professionally generated content [START_REF] Kafka | Facebook takes on Twitter by courting celebrities, building Twittery tools[END_REF]. However, with the increase in professional content, Facebook has experienced a '21% decline in "original sharing," or personal updates' [START_REF] Griffith | Have you been sharing less on Facebook[END_REF]. The new live-streaming feature, Facebook Live (Figure 2), could benefit both content forms as the network claims people watch live video three times longer and comment 10 times more often in comparison to on-demand videos (D 'Onfro, 2016a;Facebook, 2016a). [START_REF] Lavrusik | Facebook Live application for iPhone[END_REF].

First released for celebrities and verified pages in 2015, Facebook Live was fully launched in April 2016 [START_REF] Cohen | Facebook live: now available to everyone, several new features announced[END_REF]. From the beginning, the new service was actively supported by Facebook. In an effort to boost user-generated live video content production, Facebook ran an extensive ad campaign in the United States and the United Kingdom. TV and Facebook video ads depicted snippets of real user-generated live videos to raise awareness for the new feature, and educational out-of-home ads showed users how to use Live [START_REF] Nudd | Facebook launches a big ad campaign for Facebook live, with user videos at the core[END_REF]. The social network also put considerable effort into integrating social live-streaming into its technical infrastructure and promoting it through a change of its ranking algorithm (Constine, 2016a). Recognising the existing difficulty for publishers to build sustainable economic models for livestreaming, Facebook decided to subsidise the production of content. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook invested US$50m in live partnerships with 140 media companies (Perlberg and Seetharaman, 2016; Figure 3). While YouTube has been working with a shared ad revenue and subscription model for years, Facebook has yet to find a way for publishers to generate revenue from their content. Facebook is thus using the partnership programme to keep publishers interested in the feature until it finds a sustainable way to monetise their efforts. In addition, the partnerships allow Facebook to gather a significant amount of data to improve its feature and outperform rivals. Even though the exact terms of the deals are secret, the Wall Street Journal claims that 'contract values are based on publishers' popularity on Facebook and the number of broadcasts they are willing to stream' [START_REF] Perlberg | Facebook signs deals with media companies, celebrities for Facebook live[END_REF].

Methodology

To describe Facebook's efforts to influence the development of social live-streaming, this article draws on a series of conversations with companies involved in the production of video for Facebook Live. A corpus of interviews and declarations was extracted from publications specialised in technology, marketing and business, then complemented by 10 semi-structured interviews realised specifically for this study. Five of them were conducted with senior employees of organisations that 1. Are paid by Facebook to use its Live feature and considered frontrunners in the quality and quantity of the published streams, 2. Vary, from traditional news producers to digital pure players, focused on tech and entertainment, and 3. Do not operate traditional TV networks (as their experiences, resources and objectives differ from those of newer video publishers).

To prepare the investigation, two preliminary interviews were carried out with recognised experts in the field: Professor Oskar Juhlin from the University of Stockholm, and Kurt Wagner, senior editor at the technology magazine Recode. Finally, to shed light on trends in the market and expose potential bias in publishers' responses, two interviews were conducted with service providers of Facebook's 'Media Solutions' programme. Grabyo provides tools to distribute, manage and monetise video assets, facilitating the editing and simultaneous distribution of live streams to various social media platforms. Telescope developed 'Live Studio' -an audience engagement tool for Facebook Live that enables the display of viewer comments on-stream and allows publishers to conduct polls as on-screen graphics. All participants were interviewed via video chat and telephone with interviews typically lasting between 35 and 60 minutes (Table 1).

Co-producing news streams with Facebook

In the contemporary media landscape, publishers have to cope with fast technological innovations, changing consumption habits and an increasing variety of competitors. Social media, in particular, have assumed a growing importance as sources for news and entertainment, especially for young audiences. Worldwide, more than 25% of consumers aged 18-24 years claim their main news sources are social networks, with Facebook being the most cited platform [START_REF] Newman | Overview and key findings of the 2016 report[END_REF]. To survive in the crowded digital market, publishers need new partnerships, as the production of the new digital offerings requires skills and resources that traditional organisations cannot easily supply [START_REF] Lindskow | Exploring Digital News Publishing Business Models: A Production Network Approach[END_REF]. Suppliers in this coproduction process include companies such as Google and Facebook, which can offer a bundle of specialised products including 'editorial tools (e.g. social widgets), measurement tools (e.g. web analytical tools), and advertising services' [START_REF] Lindskow | Exploring Digital News Publishing Business Models: A Production Network Approach[END_REF].

Emily [START_REF] Bell | Facebook is eating the world[END_REF], Director at the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, described the future of digital news journalism as follows:

It seems most likely that the next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens, posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned in favour of hyper-distribution. The distinction between platforms and publishers will melt completely. Some of Bell's predictions have already been observed: the news media start-up NowThis has shut down its website and now purely operates on social media. A less extreme example of such 'social-only' content dissemination strategies is Buzzfeed's food channel, Tasty, which built up a fan base of 54.6 million followers on Facebook alone (Griffith, 2016b).

The developments described above offer news publishers the chance to enter markets previously dominated by traditional television. However, the power of the new media partnerships often lay with telecommunications providers, who serve as the new intermediaries in digital publishing [START_REF] Simon | The digital shift in the media and content industries -policy brief by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission[END_REF]. Publishers depend on their infrastructure and can hardly influence the conditions under which they operate. One common problem is that while platforms want to keep users within their 'walled gardens', publishers need to drive traffic to their websites to generate ad revenue. In the case of news video streaming, such asymmetry is particularly manifested as 'the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand' [START_REF] Kalogeropoulos | Reuters Institute report -the future of online news video[END_REF]. While most publishers increase the number of videos posted on Facebook, they struggle to persuade users to consume videos on their own platforms. Publishers are thus forced to invest in technology and staff to remain relevant, but are uncertain about their return-oninvestment, as social networks dictate how video content can be monetised.

As the publishers in our sample were paid media partners for Facebook Live, it is not surprising that, while some of them had experimented with live video on other platforms, they all declared it was the launch of Facebook Live that kick-started a more extensive engagement with social live-streaming. Even though the network's financial incentives and enormous audience size played important roles too, several publishers admitted that the choice to use Facebook's service was due to their dependence on the platform and its aggressive strategies to push the new feature:

When Facebook tells us something is gonna be the new thing we listen, because you know we want to keep that good relationship and generally they tend to dictate what becomes the new trend on their own platform. So, it became clear to us that we should start building a team and start trying it out. (NowThis personal correspondent, 2016, emphasis added)

Informants feared that by failing to adapt, their offers could be sanctioned by the platform's algorithm, as in Mashable and The Verge's statements:

If they favour their algorithm to promote Live, you move in that direction [...] It's very easy for them to convince you, because they just take their platform and say 'here's what we're gonna favour to get into the feed!' (Korsh, personal correspondence, 2016, emphasis added) Facebook has already given Live more prominence in the newsfeed ... We're going after that audience with what we think is right for that medium and native to that medium. (Havlak, 2016, personal correspondence) As shown in Table 2, Facebook Live is not the only social streaming service used by the interviewed organisations. Most publishers tend to rely on a variety of different platforms, both as strategy to decrease their dependency on a single provider and in accordance with previous choices (e.g. The Verge adopted YouTube's live feature several years ago, as they have a large following on the platform; for Mashable, Periscope was the natural choice because that organisation is among the top publishers on Twitter.). However, in contrast with Facebook Live, publishers adopted other platforms gradually, dedicating less resource to them and producing smaller output. Facebook's paid partnerships dictate, on the contrary, that publishers must produce a certain amount of live videos. For NowThis, the number varies between 90 and 100 monthly streams [START_REF] Scott | People like to know they're being heard': Facebook live at NowThis[END_REF], whereas The New York Times (NYT) produces about 120 live videos per month [START_REF] Spayd | Facebook live: too much, too soon[END_REF]. Such high numbers encourage publishers to build specialised Facebook Live teams and jump into a format for which they have little experience. This created understandable voices of concern, for example in Mashable's interview:

Unless you have a piece of content that you feel is really breakthrough, in a way you're not that interested in too many people seeing it, because it could have negative effects. It's so experimental that we're not pushing it out in a dramatic way. I'd like to get to that place ... They're paying many publishers, and so everybody is doing their experimenting or piloting for them at a pretty low cost. And you know, us included, you're seeing some mediocre activity. [...] The problem is, you have to hit a certain volume to get the money from them. [...] So it puts you on a treadmill that makes it really hard to make something more conceptual. You really need to devote resources if you're gonna (sic) be good at it. (Korsh, 2016, personal communication) These concerns reveal the unprecedented influence reached by Facebook on the production of online news. For the first time in its history, the social network left its role of a mere content transporter and decided to pay chosen news outlets to use its features. Such a strategy increases the dependency of publishers on Facebook and augments rivalry on both providers' and publishers' sides. As the publishers are obliged to produce higher amounts of videos for Facebook, they dedicate less resource to other platforms, which renders their diversification strategy relatively ineffective. Even publishers excluded from these 'special deals' are pressed to adopt Facebook Live to keep up with their paid competitors (who are the leaders of their respective news sector). In turn, this encourages providers such as Periscope and YouTube to find new ways to increase their value for publishers. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Periscope founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour said, I think that [for Facebook], it's an effective and aggressive way to play catch-up, for sure. [...] It's important to make sure we're incentivising creators. And you already see Twitter experimenting with this: we have a whole division called Niche that works with creators to help pair them with brands that want to sponsor content and help them make a living. (Beykpour in [START_REF] Hern | Periscope CEO: 'Facebook is shamelessly following us into live video. It's flattering[END_REF] In addition to strengthening its relationships with content providers while effectively forcing them to focus on competing services less, Facebook's strategy serves another important purpose. Funding publishers and releasing an open application programming interface (API), which allows both software and hardware developers to integrate existing technology and create new solutions for Facebook Live, also allows Facebook to collect vast amounts of data -data that can be used not only to improve its service but also to practicably crowd-source ideas for new business models around live video. One example is Facebook's competitor, Livestream. Despite the fact that they operate their own social live-streaming platform, they integrated and adapted their multi-angle camera Mevo to Facebook's platform after user feedback suggested that people wished to stream to the broader audience of the social media giant [START_REF] Ha | Facebook live opens to developers, starting with Livestream[END_REF]. Facebook now benefits from the product itself, the benefits it provides for Facebook Live users, and from the data around the use of said product by monitoring how publishers utilise it. Ultimately, that makes it very easy for the network to develop new, improved hardware similar to Mevo, without investing too many resources in a long trial-and-error development phase.

Adapting news storytelling to Facebook

The dependency on platforms such as Facebook is reinforced by the failure of earlier attempts to integrate live video into publishers' strategies. A few years ago, both The NYT and The Post invested in TV-style onsite live-streaming but had to change their strategies viewer numbers fell short of their expectations. In 2013, The NYT abandoned its TimesCast shows, which featured breaking news and glimpses into the newsroom [START_REF] Bunz | New York Times publishes a daily video from its newsroom[END_REF]. In 2015, The Post re-launched its unsuccessful PostTV under the moniker Washington Post Video, replacing the lengthy daily live shows with 'shorter-form original videos' [START_REF] Raudenbush | How the Washington post is pivoting its video strategy[END_REF]:

PostTV had a strategy of trying to be the ESPN of politics. They would do shows all day long. [...] I think that was a fundamental misreading of the audience and how people watch online. (Gelman, 2016, personal communication) The failures of PostTV and TimesCast are no exception. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Huffington Post and several other news publishers all tried to produce on-site live programming but ended up scaling down their initiatives [START_REF] Welsh | From 'WSJ Live' to 'WSJ Video': publishers step away from dreams of live TV-style broadcasting[END_REF]. Most of these initiatives tried to establish their independence by avoiding drawing on an external provider for live videos. The drawback of this strategy, however, was that it prevented publishers from benefitting from the network effects of social media platforms. Consequently, partnership with Facebook offers publishers such as The Post and The NYT an opportunity to re-enter the live domain with a new strategy and a larger audience. Despite said, poor results with live video, all publishers profited, having already expanded their strategic focus on video products a while back. Earlier experiences left publishers with fully equipped studios and skilled video teams to be reinvested in the new Facebook partnership. The Post, for example, steadily increased its investments in video since 2013, when Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, bought the company [START_REF] Ciobanu | WaPo new video strategy: more than 'television on the web[END_REF][START_REF] Kennedy | The Bezos effect: how Amazon's founder is reinventing the Washington Post -and what lessons it might hold for the beleaguered newspaper business[END_REF]. Embedded into different newsroom divisions, the Post's video team comprises 40 people, and the outlet operates three professional TV studios [START_REF] Raudenbush | How the Washington post is pivoting its video strategy[END_REF]. In an interview for Digital Content Next, Micah Gelman, The Post's Director of Editorial Video, explained as follows:

We want to change the perception of The Washington Post as a legacy newspaper with video, to a video-first enterprise, essentially re-imagining The Washington Post as a video destination, not only on Facebook Live, YouTube and other social media sites, but also over the top via Apple TV, Roku, and Fire TV. (Gelman in [START_REF] Ozer | The Washington post is focused on video. Here's why[END_REF] Mashable, whose focus on video has always been strong, recently made an even more drastic shift towards moving images, dismissing 30 (mostly editorial) staff members and announcing that it will 'pivot from hard-news coverage' and 'focus on producing lots more video about "digital culture"' [START_REF] Kulwin | Mashable fires news staff, replaces executives as part of pivot to video infotainment[END_REF]. In a public memo, Greg Gittrich, Mashable's new Chief Content Officer, explained the decision as follows:

We're expanding the real-time team and adding video and visual storytelling capabilities across all core areas of coverage. [...] Our young, social audience is increasingly getting information by watching video, whether that's on our site or on platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, OTT, Instagram or television. [START_REF] Gittrich | What's ahead: a memo from Mashable's chief content officer[END_REF] Other publishers in the sample reported similar strategic adjustments. All interviewees deemed the dissemination of videos across a variety of platforms and devices as vital, and all reported investments specifically targeted to Facebook Live, for example, acquiring products such as Mevo, the 'first camera to stream directly on Facebook Live' [START_REF] Haot | Mevo -the first camera for Facebook live[END_REF] and multi-angle set-ups connected with Facebook's API for higher-quality videos.

Interestingly, publishers stated they installed teams dedicated specifically to the production of social streams, rather than delegating live video to their regular video teams. The Post, for example, built a team of six, 'including the editor, producers, and hosts' (Ciobanu, 2016). The NYT runs a team of equal size, while both The Verge and NowThis currently employ teams of three. These relatively small teams can produce a large number of videos by sourcing additional talent from the rest of the newsroom. This was specifically important for The NYT, which uses its Facebook Live initiative as a tool to advance its ongoing transition towards digital. In a recent interview for the podcast series It's All Journalism, Louise Story, the Times' Facebook Live team lead explained as follows:

A lot of times when you see fancy things happening in the digital space, they're being done by people who know how to code, or with a lot of fancy equipment and a lot of skill. That's exciting too, but this can be done by anyone. You shoot this with your cell phone [...] I know a lot of reporters want a way they can get involved in innovation, experimentation, reaching out to our audiences more closely. This allows for that. (Story in O 'Connell, 2016) Though the size of these teams may seem small, one should take into consideration that most publishers run teams of equal or greater size for each specific social media platform [START_REF] Kalogeropoulos | Reuters Institute report -the future of online news video[END_REF]. The choice to set up a specialised team dedicated to producing content for Facebook Live is thus explained by the need to adapt content, not only to the format of video streaming but also to the peculiar style of Facebook's platform mechanisms and user behaviour.

As for the requirements related to video streaming, most publishers affirmed that, to foster engagement, content must be visually exciting and suitable for interaction, in line with Hamilton et al.'s (2014) findings about the 'hot' and 'cool' components of live-streaming. Contents must also have some 'freshness' to justify live transmission. The Verge, for example, mentioned using video streaming to present technological gadgets as soon as they are released, while The NYT stated,

The most viewed live videos that we've done have been around the Orlando shooting and the reporting that we were doing there. That's because ultimately while Facebook is a publishing platform, it still has that social element to it. So the success of every video depends on the social currency that that story has in a given moment. [...] We had a live video with somebody who had been shot in that shooting [...] and it was the first time that anybody really got to hear from somebody who'd experienced that breaking news event. (Haburchak, 2016, personal communication) Even though there was much general agreement on these criteria, some publishers seemed to interpret them more strictly than others. The Post, for example, pointed out that many live streams were 'uninteresting' because they gave a 'sense of emergency to things that didn't necessarily require it' (Gelman, 2016, personal correspondence). Specifically, the informant referred to so-called 'talking-heads' formats, in which reporters discuss news topics with the audience. By contrast, NowThis found this format particularly interesting because it allowed audiences to directly engage with reporters:

We had one of our producers the other day just doing a Q&A with the audience about Ramadan, just answering general audience questions. We got such good engagement, so many people watching. (NowThis, 2016, personal communication) Publishers have also experimented with airing pre-recorded footage. While Facebook does not advocate this practice, nothing prevents publishers from live-streaming their regular web shows to increase their reach and exploit the changes in Facebook's algorithm to favour live over on-demand videos [START_REF] Marshall | Facebook 'live' doesn't have to be live[END_REF].

Producing successful streaming content is particularly challenging because of the specific nature of storytelling on Facebook. Embedded in the newsfeed of Facebook or Twitter, videos compete with other content. Users checking their social media accounts do not generally look for specific videos, but discover them through the platform -often thanks to auto-play features. The consumption conditions privilege with shorter videos, lasting usually around 90 seconds, offering clear rewards for watching (Newman, 2016a). However, because of the way content discovery works on Facebook, streaming video cannot rely on such short formats. Unlike Twitter, Facebook is not constructed for real-time content, and prioritises articles and status updates based on parameters such as popularity and individual users' behaviour rather than displaying recent content first (Constine, 2016a). The social network has made three changes to help the discovery of live content: It has tweaked its algorithm, enabled users to subscribe to live notifications and launched a 'live map' of on-air streams. Still, most users will usually discover live videos after they have started. Hence, Facebook recommends streaming for at least 10 minutes, to give audiences time to build up (Facebook, 2016). Live video on Facebook is therefore subject to contradictory constraints, as Gareth Capon from Grabyo explained:

If you're social live streaming you need to capture the audience attention quickly, because they need to know what the content is and they need to know why they should bother to stop scrolling and watch -you have to be quite creative. It's like a heartbeat of interesting moments spread through the live event [...] because viewers could be jumping into that stream at any time. You want these heartbeats of interesting moments going through your content so you can drive spikes in activity. (Capon, 2016, personal communication) In contrast to linear television, where the climax is built up slowly, live streams must keep a level of tension throughout the entire video with various climaxes. While capturing the attention of viewers arriving on the streaming at any time, publishers must yet try to not give away too much of their story before the audience reaches its peak after about 10-15 minutes. A few participants mentioned a Buzzfeed production as an example for a live video that found the perfect balance between surprise, tension and reward. Buzzfeed conducted an experiment where they put rubber bands around a watermelon to see how many it would take to make the fruit burst. With more than 10.9 million views, the live video is among the most watched on Facebook [START_REF] Buzzfeed | Watch us explode this watermelon one rubber band at a time! Available at[END_REF]. Viewers knew what the climax of the video was going to be but could still watch in excited anticipation, making bets in the comment section about how many more bands it would take for the melon to explode.

The length inherent to Facebook Live video poses another problem. Streams are not removed after their completion and, according to the social network, two-thirds of their consumption happens in this ondemand form. This change of consumption setting is problematic, as what was engaging in a live format can become boring for completed videos. To address this issue, Facebook has launched a so-called 'engagement graph': using its new 'live reactions' feature, which enables viewers to send various emoji throughout the broadcast, the provider created 'a visualized timeline of when a Live video receives the most engagement' [START_REF] Constine | Facebook live lets you skip to the good part[END_REF]. This timeline allows latter viewers to skip to the parts of the video that caused the strongest reactions.

The way publishers re-purpose live content is also interesting. For one thing, it reflects the increasing shift of news publishers' strategies from 'purpose-building' (the tailoring of content to specific social media platforms) to 'only-building' (the creation of content that only exists on social media). With the exception of the The Post (which avoids 'orphan videos' not connected to other content), most publishers do not redistribute their Facebook Live videos on their websites or other social media. Unlike on-demand videos, live streams are generally not re-distributed simply because they achieve the best effects on social media. For The NYT, the practice of 'only-building' is first, as the publisher previously refrained from producing 'social-only' content not connected to other pieces of reporting:

A new move for the Times has been producing segments and stories only for Facebook Live. So, I actually just got back from a meeting with a reporter doing an interview for Facebook Live that wasn't gonna exist in any other format (sic). There wasn't a story being written about it, there wasn't gonna be a produced video going on nytimes.com [...] We've been doing more and more of that. (Haburchak, 2016, personal communication) However, there were two cases where publishers did experiment -by connecting social streams to other formats -that were most remarkable in our corpus of study. The Times streamed a 3-hour live video from its newsroom, following Editor Carolyn Ryan's coverage of the New York presidential primary (Insider Staff, 2016). The piece is an example of how video streaming may increase transparency on reporting processes, and it is interesting because after the live stream was over, a link to the finished article on nytimes.com was added to the original Facebook post. This illustrates a way in which social live video can be used to direct people back to the main publisher's website -a tactic that could potentially balance the increased dependency on providers such as Facebook. The Post's coverage of the eighth Democratic Primary Debate (2016) provides an even richer example of connecting live content across different channels.

The publisher co-hosted the event with Univision News (the most watched Spanish-language US television network) as part of an extensive partnership 'to offer deep, authoritative coverage of Hispanic voters during 2016 presidential campaign' (WashPost PR Blog, 2015). In addition to Univision, CNN and Fusion aired live broadcasts of the debate on television, while The Post streamed the event via its website and its Apple TV app. The publisher simultaneously used Facebook Live to reach audiences interested in further in-depth political analysis. In over 10 streams, The Post delivered 'live behind-the-scenes coverage, analysis from debate moderators in advance of and directly after the event, as well as real-time observations from Post reporters through the broadcast' [START_REF] Patel | Why live streaming is important for Facebook[END_REF]. In an interview with Digiday, Micah Gelman explained as follows:

It's a great opportunity to show what goes on behind the scenes. People are interested in that part of the political process, and Facebook Live allows us to really dive deep in a way that we couldn't in a traditional streaming opportunity. (Gelman in Patel, 2016)

Conclusion

The future and even the present of social life-streaming are far from written. At the time of this study, providers regularly announced new features and proposed solutions to some of the common issues encountered by publishers. After all data were collected, Facebook announced their first tests for 'mid-roll' ads in Live videos [START_REF] Sloane | Facebook is testing mid-roll video ads in Facebook live[END_REF]. Moreover, the network introduced 'waiting rooms and pre-scheduled broadcasts', which might decrease the problem publishers voiced with deferred storytelling. Publishers can now 'pre-schedule the time they are going live, which will allow Facebook to send users a notification before the stream starts so they can be waiting when you go live' [START_REF] Tepper | Facebook live grows up with two-person broadcasts and waiting rooms for viewers[END_REF].

For the moment, however, none of these changes call the general findings of our research into question. By shifting news consumption off-site, publishers become more and more dependent on social media platforms, subject to their influence. Our case study illustrates how Facebook can shape profitability and storytelling of social live-streaming, both indirectly (by tweaking its feed algorithm) and directly (by sponsoring specific uses of its tools). Live-streaming may well be the current 'next big thing', but it did not evolve naturally from consumer demand or product developments. Instead, live-streaming has been carefully nurtured and cultivated by the direct manipulation of technology providers.

This does not mean that Facebook will be the only actor shaping the evolution of live-streaming, to be sure. While we underline the power of the corporate influence, we should also be attentive to not reifying 'The Social Network'. As insightfully observed by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze in their introduction to a special issue on 'Convergence Culture', digital media are now the theatre of contradictory trends:

These shifts in the communication infrastructure bring about contradictory pulls and tugs within our culture. On the one hand, this 'democratisation' of media use signals a broadening of opportunities for individuals and grassroots communities to tell stories and access stories others are telling, to present arguments and listen to arguments made elsewhere, to share information and learn more about the world from a multitude of other perspectives. On the other hand, the media companies seek to extend their reach by merging, co-opting, converging and synergizing their brands and intellectual properties across all of these channels. In some ways, this has concentrated the power of traditional gatekeepers and agenda setters and in other ways, it has disintegrated their tight control over our culture. (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008: 6) Our study of Facebook's campaign to steer the development of live video streaming, however, has revealed yet another way in which digital gardeners can affect digital communication. Beside influencing end users through the artful setting of their algorithms and interfaces [START_REF] Cardon | A quoi rêvent les algorithmes[END_REF], platforms can establish direct partnerships with leading content producers, with the hope that their example will establish a model for other users to follow. The implications of such findings are both reassuring and worrying. Reassuring because they suggest that for all their might, digital platforms cannot impose by themselves how communication technologies will be used and worrying because they reveal the growing financial and technological leverage of telecommunications providers.

In the case of live video streaming, Facebook's influence is particularly manifested. Through its partnership programmes, this social network has made it difficult for traditional publishers to implement their own strategies for diversification and power-balancing. While Facebook's partnerships give publishers the financial freedom to try out an innovative format, their contractual clause dictating the high quantities of live monthly videos make this market experiment risky in itself. In a Sunday column for The NYT entitled 'Too Much, Too Soon', Editor Liz Spayd reviewed the outlet's own efforts with social livestreaming and concluded as follows:

These videos represent a potentially transformational form of journalism because they let stories unfold organically, live, and with the audience able to change the experience ... But here's the problem. After watching countless hours of live video in the past few weeks, I have hit upon many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring, by I imagine most anyone's standards ... If you're not experimenting in the digital age, you won't survive. But this experiment veers significantly from The Times' past approach to new journalism forms. The newsroom has shown that innovation doesn't have to equate with poor quality ... This time, that's not the case. It's as if we passed over beta and went straight to bulk. [START_REF] Spayd | Facebook live: too much, too soon[END_REF]

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Screenshot of a Bambuser Live Broadcast (Bambuser, 2016).

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Facebook Live application for iPhone[START_REF] Lavrusik | Facebook Live application for iPhone[END_REF].

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Facebook Live media deals (Perlberg and Seetharaman, 2016).

Table 1 .

 1 Original interviews realised for this research.

		Organisation	Informant	Position	Date and duration
	Pre-interviews	Recode	Kurt Wagner	Senior editor	4 April 2016 -21 minutes
		Stockholm University Oskar Juhlin	Researcher	8 April 2016 -43 minutes
	Publishers	NowThis	Interviewee asked to be only	Senior video producer 8 June 2016 -34 minutes
			partially identified
		The New York Times Alan Haburchak	Senior video journalist 21 June 2016 -60 minutes

Table 2 .

 2 Platform choices for live video streaming.

		Facebook Live	Periscope	Youtube Live	On-site streaming
	The Washington Post	X	X	X	X
	The New York Times	X		X	X
	The Verge	X		X
	Mashable	X	X	X
	NowThis	X

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.