The news broke this morning that Yahoo, which had been discussed as a potential buyer for Hulu, the streaming video portal set up by the broadcast networks, decided to make another investment instead. For $1.1 billion, up from a valuation of $800 million in September 2011, Yahoo has purchased the microblogging and social networking site Tumblr.

One of the reasons Yahoo bought Tumblr is simple: it was available. Facebook bought photo-editing-and-sharing app Instagram last year, a move that made sense given Facebook’s focus on social distribution of information, particularly of images. The bulletin-board service Pinterest pulled in a $200 million round of funding in February, but it’s not clear that the company would be open to a sale, or even if it were, that Yahoo would have been interested in the business model, given the uncertain path from getting revenue out of Pinterest. Various estimates seem to be putting Twitter’s value between $9 and $10 billion, and the company seems more likely to opt for an initial public offering than to sell out to another social media or internet company. Facebook’s IPO is a year old. Of the large social media companies examined by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, that left Tumblr as the property available to Yahoo if it wanted to buy another popular service.

But even if there had been another appealing property on the block—and speculation continues to swirl about whether another company will buy Hulu—Tumblr would still have been appealing for two reasons, one a hard figure, one a perception. The first is that 13 percent of internet users aged 18-29 told Pew that they use Tumblr, a figure that suggests that an enormous number of Tumblr users could be coming online in coming years. The second is the perception that Tumblr is a female-driven service. That isn’t quite accurate. That same Pew study found that 6 percent of both male and female internet users report that they’re on Tumblr, though the sample Pew used is slightly weighted towards women, surveying 956 women out of 1,802 total respondents. But whatever the actual numbers, the perception is that Tumblr has a female-heavy user base (as well as a strong LGBTQ one).

So when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.

Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.

I’m always up for modernizing Nielsen ratings, but this new measurement the organization is rolling out isn’t exactly what I was looking for:

Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will measure the total audience for social TV activity, including participants and users who are exposed to the activity. According to Nielsen, this will provide the “precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, said in a statement. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

According to Nielsen, the Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. The tool is described as “giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity.”

I get that networks want to see what kind of buzz their shows are generating. But it’s a measure of real-time engagement, which is the same measurement that’s been rendered so much less useful by the rise of DVRs and high-quality, legal streaming sites. And as anyone who has been dismayed by the gap between, say, the volume of Twitter conversation about a cult sitcom like Community and the actual ratings for that show, I think it would ultimately be much more useful to the survival of beloved but low-rated programs to measure the real viewership of those programs more comprehensively. To incorporate more data, Nielsen would have to trust self-reporting from legal streaming services like Hulu, and would have to work out windows for those reports to be delivered and combined with DVR data. But it would be much more useful for networks, and for those of us who love shows where we fear enthusiasm for them isn’t being captured by the current ratings system, especially those like the CW with younger audiences who are watching more television streaming and on mobile devices, to be able to sell package ad deals across platforms, than to know what people talk about Twitter on any given night.

On Fox’s Raising Hope, which returns tonight at 8 PM, Martha Plimpton plays Virginia Chance, a housekeeper and young grandmother to the titular Hope, her son Jimmy’s daughter, who he unexpectedly conceived with a one-night stand who turned out to be a serial killer. The show’s portrayal of a multi-generational working-class family is one of the true originals on television, and Plimpton is marvelous as Virginia, who alternates between managing her own aging grandmother, Maw Maw (Cloris Leachman), who is struggling with dementia, her job, and managing the misadventures of Jimmy and her husband Burt. And off-screen, Plimpton is a vigorous feminist advocate who’s penned editorials on the War on Women and wears the A Is For… campaign’s scarlet A on her dress at public events and awards ceremonies to call attention to the wave of legislation that would limit women’s abilities to make decisions about their own health. We spoke in August about what makes for good political art, where the rising tide of animosity against women comes from, and the subtleties of Raising Hope’s perspective on poverty and feminism. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by asking you to talk a little bit about your political evolution. I know you grew up in this incredible family of actors and intellectuals. I’ve read interviews where you talk about how Hair shaped your musical tastes…But I was curious if we could step all the way back about where your politics come from.

Well, I grew up in New York, in Manhattan. I was raised by primarily single women–my mother was a single mom, my grandmother was a single mom, my Nana, who’s sort of like another grandma to me.. She helped raise me–she was a single mom. And they were all sort of liberal and, you know, feminist, and you know, my grandmother was a New Deal Democrat, and everyone in my family had been Democrats for generations, that I’m aware of – my immediate, my direct line of descendants…I was born in 1970. My mother was something of a hippie, and she was an actress. And we were surrounded by artists and actors and writers and show people, and these are people who tend to be liberal in their approach to life and in their politics.

And, of course, in the ‘70s there was some exciting shit going on, you know? There was the end of the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, and the women’s rights movement. And I grew up in New York which meant that Bella Abzug was a common fixture on the evening news, and I knew who Gloria Steinem was from the time I was very little, and I knew who Martin Luther King was from the time I could speak, and it was just considered part of being a human being to be politically conscious and aware of the circumstances of others. This was just how to live a decent life, was to pay attention to what was going on in the world and what’s happening to people who are hurting, or people who are struggling. And it’s hard to say what the source of that is in my family, but it’s certainly always been there.

My mother actually worked for Bella Abzug in the 70s and I have some pretty goofy family stories, so I can only imagine what it would be like to see her as an elected official.

Now my Nana was a life-long New Yorker, she was born in the Bronx, and she moved to the West Side with her two daughters, and she was very politically active and she was a bookkeeper of the New York contingent of Freedom Riders in the ‘60s. She worked to get those rubber mats – you know those mats on the playground that never used to be there? Her daughters’ school was the first one to have those rubber mats, and those eventually became standard throughout the city. And Bella Abzug wanted my Nana to go into politics. She said, “You know, you really need to think about running for City Council.” And my Nana, who was a very active and a very passionate woman, said, “No, absolutely not. I’ve got two daughters to put through college. If you think I’m going to run for City Council you’re crazy.” She wanted to work in the background, you know what I mean? She wanted to work from the ground up. But I love that story, it makes me really proud that Bella tried to get her into politics.

That’s one of the things that’s always struck me – that it’s hard to have somebody get into politics when they have family commitments, as well. It’s one thing to do things locally. When you were growing up in New York, the city was full of really terrific, politically engaged art. I was wondering if there was anything you went to, or any of the people you met who were sort of particular inspirations or models of how to live a life as a politically engaged artist?

Well, yeah, the first show I ever did, when I was eight-years-old, was a film workshop of a play called Runaways. It was a musical that was written and composed by a woman named Elizabeth Swados, who was this very interesting theater maker, who came from that world of downtown crazy artists who were making sort of revolutionary, weird work. You know, stuff that was that was like I said avant-garde and sort of bridged the gap between radical, political, and poetic, and historical. Runaways was about street kids. And at the time there was a lot more work being done about people on the margins, you know?

The ‘70s were a sort of peak period for artists who wanted to explore issues of class and culture, and in the theater that was particularly true. And so most of our friends–most of my mother’s friends–worked in that area, and you know, came from that world…I don’t know if they necessarily saw their work as being overtly political, but I think that it was informed, you know, clearly informed by their desire to make people pay attention to political ideas, if that makes any sense.
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It is truly bizarre to me that television networks, in trying to capture viewers’ energy and engagement as they talk about shows after they air, would try to supplant existing tools like Twitter:

A recent study by the public relations firm Edelman found that the majority of users comment on shows and share content after they air.

Yet both that study and a Nielsen study found that some viewers do engage with related content while viewing. How to capitalize on that is the challenge. “It’s not like Instagram,” Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi said, referencing the massively successful photo-sharing app. “We’re still trying to crack the code of how do you add value to the TV-watching experience that supersedes what’s happening with Twitter and Google. I don’t think anyone has done it yet.”…IntoNow founder Adam Cahan argues that networks are starting to understand that they should not build their own apps because there is not a great return on investment. But tell that to the networks, who see themselves as having the upper hand because they control the content and have the access to the stars.

I understand that networks like the idea of monetizing branded apps, but given the costs and irritations of development and maintenance, I’m hard-pressed to see why they wouldn’t decide that governing the after-show conversation through existing tools makes more sense. If you’re the social media director at a premium cable network, why wouldn’t you just insist that an actor is available to do a Reddit chat after every single episode? HBO’s hashtags for Game of Thrones episodes are similarly a good idea—it’s an example of a network recognizing where the content lives and giving people a tool they need anyway but that also lets the network effectively tag everyone participating in it and track the conversation.

The larger problem is also just that, whether the conversation is taking place in a medium they control or not, television network social efforts often come across as hopelessly square, controlled to the point of utter dehydration. I can see why FX might be anxious about hosting Kurt Sutter’s blog, in which he goes off on critics who he thinks are insufficiently deferential to his vision for Sons of Anarchy, or his production diaries for GQ—they can be…a little rough. But hosting something like that, and giving creators who want that outlet free reign, would make networks’ sites actual magnets and real sites of engagement. In a way, the best effort I’ve seen by a network to co-opt fan social engagement is Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen’s late-night talk show. Half new interviews and drinking games with guests, and half a rehash of recently broadcast Bravo programming, the show uses social media as a bridge connecting Cohen and Bravo fans: they can Tweet in questions for the guests, and use Twitter to discuss the talk show as it’s under way. It’s programming that meets fans where they’re at and has been hugely successful as a result—at this point, Andy Cohen is a more-watched late-night host than Conan O’Brien—rather than treating fans as purely monetizable nuggets.

I was on CBC yesterday discussing the ethics of allowing young children to participate or star in reality television programming, and one of the things I’d considered raising as a point is that we’ve generally agreed that 13 is the age at which it makes sense to allow children sign up for social media networks and start crafting their public personas. And then I got into the office to discover that Facebook is contemplating ways to get children younger than 13 on the site through accounts linked to their parents’ profiles.

I can see a model of this that would work to protect children’s privacy if Facebook could meet a couple of conditions. First, I think they’d need a fine-grained opt-in system that parents would have to complete in full before activating a child’s account. The problem with most parental controls is that you can access the service without enforcing the controls. TVs and computers come equipped with V chips, but you don’t have to either opt out of using yours or turn it on and set it in order to use the internet or cable, and I’d imagine a lot of people who intend to use them never get around to it. Facebook’s access for children under 13 might only continue giving them access to applications, rather than giving them the option to build profiles and start broadcasting information about themselves. But in either case, Facebook should build in as much parental involvement as possible.

I also wonder if this move could spark a conversation about a two-tiered social environment. I’d imagine at least some parents would recoil from the idea of letting Facebook and other sites collect user information about their children. If Facebook wants to get them in as customers, they might have to reach a compromise where parents pay for their children to access apps as an alternative to monetizing children’s use by collecting data on it. I don’t know exactly what the model might look like, but I can see a social web that works that way and not just for children, with ad experiences getting increasingly customized for non-paying users.