What do Jeremy Paxman and Clay Shirky have in common? A sharp line in city psychology, and one that’s got me thinking about social media as an evolution of urban ideology. Bear with me, now.

Having spotted Shirky’s comment in yesterday’s Observer that ‘the internet brings to everywhere some of the conundrums of dense city living’, I went on to watch the first episode of Paxman’s series on the Victorians, which focused on the explosion of industry and the birth of the modern urban experience. Paxman’s narrative about the 19thC’s newly crowded and chaotic metropolises, which initially aroused fear and disdain, but went on to inspire a proud creative renaissance, has distinct parallels with society’s love-hate relationship with social media.

Our virtual scapes have their brimming sewers (RedTube), suburbs (Delia’s message boards) and public museums (Wikipedia, Flickr) too. Just as the Victorians invented the omnibus, opening up unprecedented levels of mobility for city dwellers where rich rubbed shoulders with poor, social media has opened up global, public platforms that connect us like never before. Our commentators similarly swing between criticising the anarchy and depravity of the space, and celebrating its democratic cultural richness.

And the psychology driving our new cyber-urban behaviour has uncanny resonances too. Paxman points out that, for the Victorian urban poor, emancipation did not mean the socialism of their revolting counterparts across the Channel, but the right to share the comforts of the middle class. And this kind of conservative aspiration is more of an online trigger – see this Sunday Times piece on PS3’s keep-up-with-the-Jones’ social network Home – than our crusading 2.0 iconoclasts would like to believe.

It isn’t just a cute conceit. The industrial revolution invented both our modern concept of the distant, mass-produced ‘brand’ and the mass marketing that was needed to make that brand desirable. It's no surprise that social media has inspired a similar explosion in brand interest and influence. By studying Victorian brands that flourished in their new environment – such as Duvelleroy, the London fan makers who created the highly successful and conversational ‘Language of the Fan’, which still generates content today, online and on TV – we might just find that our ancestors knew a thing or two about the urban psychology of word of mouth.