Simon Schama’s vast history of the French Revolution, Citizens, is not the kind of tome from which you would expect to glean much insight for a media column. Yet, back in late 18th century Paris, the mob was a genuine part of the political process and, while there are no guillotines or regicides today, it is not outrageous to suggest that, with the help of the internet, the mob is back.

The digital mob is everywhere: forming opinions, putting pressure on companies, and prefiguring trends. How did the Celebrity Big Brother affair lift off? A petition set up on Digital Spy helped to boost the number of complaints to Ofcom to a colossal 44,500. Want to guess who will win the final of Britain’s Got Talent? The mob will tell you; last week, ahead of the result, Paul Potts had the most clip watches on YouTube (2.4 million roughly). Of course, the singer won.

Sometimes the mob can build a business from scratch, although predictably not in Britain. Facebook, the American social networking site noteworthy for its growing domination of US colleges, has been taken up by the British middle classes with incredible speed. And it doesn’t even have the music that MySpace offers. Already 135,000 people have signed up to a group dedicated to helping to find Madeleine McCann.

The mob also divides up into small groups and Facebook contains all sorts of instant groupings. If you want you can join a group that is campaigning against the impact of Adjustment A (whatever that is) on Lambeth council’s services, which must be fun for some.

The interesting question, though, is how to harness the mob, or at least survive it. Facebook owes part of its success to its viral methodology; it is extremely easy to invite friends to join a group, and so come to a shared view (far easier than turning up for meetings, which can take up far too many weekday evenings). So this is the key. Anybody else hoping to take advantage of the new energy needs to understand the power of sharing and networking.

Take, for example, ITV. As the digital mob moves to endorse Paul Potts, how much money does the commercial broadcaster make from the 4.3 million views of his most popular video on YouTube? Of course, some viewers were encouraged to watch the television programme, but however many came to ITV.com, YouTube is still snatching a big slice of the audience. That is why discussions between BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to create a single web portal make sense by way of a fightback. What the broadcasters must ensure is that it is easy to share and embed their content, including a small amount of advertising before or after a clip, and thus maintain financial control.

The mob, mobilised, demands satisfaction, and quickly – as Channel 4 found this year. Part of Channel 4’s problem then was not realising how big the race row would become; its rapid action in ejecting Emily Parr from the Big Brother house this month shows that the broadcaster had learnt a valuable lesson – swift, decisive action is needed to end controversies quickly (even then, about 800 people rang up the broadcaster to say it had been unfair: there are mobs for every point of view, of course).

The mob can change news agendas, and it should be allowed to; the BBC realised only gradually how big an issue rubbish collection was to people by the sheer volume of listener responses it got to radio items on the subject. Once considered too parish pump, the subject is now, correctly, seen as mainstream – an exercise not in dumbing down but in reflecting what the audience says.

What is required in this new era is quick intervention, a point that Ofcom has to appreciate as it grinds its way slowly through the reviews of various phone-in scandals. By acting slowly, Ofcom, or any media regulator, risks being seen as out of touch. What large, unwieldy media organisations have to realise is that times have moved on since 1789. In 2007 the idea of top down media, or indeed top down anything, is as dead as the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube’s founders, were in Paris this week to launch YouTube International, but for all they have achieved in less than two and a half years, their appearance was disappointing.

They were evasive on copyright – “it affects only a tiny proportion of our content” Chad said – and on censorship, where the mantra “we comply with local laws” is OK in the US, but hardly compelling in China or any other authoritarian regime.

Nor, interestingly, did YouTube – now owned by Google – feel the need to share any statistics with its audience; so those attending were left not much the wiser, save for the fact that YouTube plans to conquer the world.

However, we knew that already; it would be nice to get a firmer sense of YouTube’s ethics and principles. YouTube is already too important.

So, it turns out the Pearson, home of the Financial Times, and General Electric, owner of financial TV channel CNBC, was toying with a joint bid for Dow Jones, to compete with News Corporation, parent company of The Times. Maybe Pearson recognised it has a scale issue in financial information after all. Now it looks hard to see if anybody can stop News Corp getting Dow Jones, although if Pearson and GE had tried harder, at least that might have pushed up the price. Yet, if the Pearson/GE combine isn’t going to work, that does not mean the two should give up. After all, a combination of CNBC promoting the FT in the US, and vice versa in Europe could be interesting. CNBC subscription revenues would support the cyclical ad-driven FT; while some of Pearson’s other businesses, such as the little understood IDC, bring growth to the party.

Explore Industry Sectors

• Banking & Finance

• Construction & Property

• Consumer Goods

• Engineering

• Health

• Industrials

• Leisure

• Media

• Natural Resources

• Retailing

• Support Services

• Technology

• Telecoms

• Transport

• Utilities

Times Recommends

• Pressure to scrap 2p fuel tax as oil hits $135
• Credit crunch halves lending at Nationwide
• UBS presses the button on a $16bn rights issue