Sort it by what it does

In Egypt, the adverts between the Ramadan evening serials become a subject of their own. Families argue about them over the meal. Phone networks and property developers save for those weeks all year.

We usually sort this kind of thing by where it appears: television, the street, the phone. That tells us very little. A more useful sort is by how a thing behaves.

Did anyone go looking for it, or did it arrive in the middle of the episode? Did the family agree to it, or do they put up with it because the serial is good? Will it be forgotten the day after Eid, or will someone still be humming it next year? Is it being passed around the family group because it makes the sender look funny or helpful, or because money is pushing it into every feed?

Put the same questions to a home cook's short video of a dessert, filmed in her kitchen in Tanta, and something odd happens. It was found rather than delivered. It was asked for. It will be more useful next Ramadan than this one. Her cousin shared it because it made her look like a good cook, not because anyone paid.

On the old sort, one is television and the other is the internet, and they barely belong in the same sentence. On the new one they sit side by side, and the expensive one often loses.

Most of the questions fold into one in the end. Is it something people will talk about without being asked?