How social media can make history - Clay Shirky

[Music] [Music] [Applause] I want to talk about the transformed media landscape and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world and I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation I'll start here last November there was a presidential election you probably read something about it in the papers and there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression and so a plan came up to video the vote and the idea was that individual citizens with with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques and would upload this to a central place and that this would operate as a kind of Citizen observation that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall right so this is a pattern that assumes We're All in This Together what matters here isn't technical Capital it's Social Capital these tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring it isn't when the shiny new tools show up that they're used to start permeating Society it's when everybody is able to take them for granted because now that media is increasingly social Innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together and so we're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere and moving from one spot to another that is a huge transformation not to put too fine a point on it the moment we're living through the moment our histor iCal generation is living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history and that's a big claim I'm going to try and back it up there are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label Revolution the first one is the famous One the printing press movable type oilbased inks that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside down starting in the middle of the 1400s then a couple of hundred years ago there was innovation in two-way communication conversational media first the telegraph then the telephone slow text based conversations then realtime voice-based conversations then about 150 years ago there's a revolution in recorded media other than print first photos then recorded sound then movies all encoded into physical objects and finally about a 100 years ago the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air radio and television this is the media land landscape as we knew it in the 20th century this is what those of us of a certain age grew up with and are used to but there's a curious asymmetry here the media that's good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups and the media that's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations if you want to have a conversation in this world you have it with one other person if you want to address a group you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group whether you're doing that with a a broad casting Tower or a printing press that was the media landscape as we had it in the 20th century and this is what changed this thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is Bill cheswick's map of the internet he traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them the internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time whereas the phone gave us the one to one pattern and television radio magazines books gave us the one to many patterns the internet gives us the many to many pattern Right For the First Time media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations that's one of the big changes the second big change right is that as all media gets digitized the internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media meaning that phone calls migrate to the internet magazines migrate to the internet movies migrate to the internet and that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium right put another way media is increasingly less just a source of information as increasingly more a site of coordination because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well right and the third big change right is that members of the former audience as Dan Gilmore calls them can now also be producers and not consumers every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well because the same equipment phones computers let you consume and produce it's as if when you bought a book they threw in the printing press for free it's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons right that is a huge change in the media landscape we're used to and it's not just internet or no internet right we've had the internet in its public form for almost 20 years now and it's still changing as the media becomes more social it's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the internet well second story last May China and the sichan province had a terrible earthquake 7. 9 magnitude massive destruction in a wide area as the RoR scale has it and the earthquake was reported as it was happening right people were texting from their phones they were taking photos of buildings they were taking videos of building shaking they were uploading it to QQ China's largest internet service they were twittering it right and so as the Quake was happening the news was reported and because of the social connections right Chinese students coming coming elsewhere and going to school or businesses in the rest of the World opening offices in China right there were people listening all over the world hearing this news the BBC got their first wind of the Chinese Quake from Twitter Twitter an announced to the existence of the Quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to view the last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened now they might have liked to have done that here rather than seeing these pictures go up online but they weren't given that choice because their own citizens beat them to the punch even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens rather than from the shinan news agency and this stuff rippled like wildfire for a while there the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter the global short messaging service nine of the top 10 links were about the Quake people collating information pointing people to news sources pointing people to the US Geological Survey the 10th one was kittens on a treadmill but you know that's the internet for you but nine of the 10 in those first hours and within half a day donation sites were up and donations were pouring in from all around the world this was an incredible coordinated Global Response and the Chinese then in one of their periods of media openness decided that they were going to let it go that they were going to let this this citizen reporting flower and then this happened people began to figure out in the Sichuan province that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those buildings to be built to less than code and so they started the citizen journalist started reporting that as well and there was an incredible picture you may have seen it on the front page of the New York Times a local official literally prostrating himself in the street in front of these protesters in order to get them to go away essentially to say we will do anything to Plate you just please stop protesting in public but these are people who have been radicalized because thanks to the one child policy they have lost everyone in their next Generation someone who's seen the death of a single child right now has nothing to lose and so the protest kept going and finally the Chinese cracked down that was enough of Citizen media and so they began to arrest the protesters they began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on China is probably the most successful uh manager of Internet censorship in the world using something that's widely described as the great firewall of China and the great firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals it mostly comes in from the outside world right it comes in in relatively sparse chunks and it comes in relatively slowly and because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country but like the majino line the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge because not one of those four things was true in this environment right the media was produced locally it was produced by amateurs it was produced quickly and it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared and so now the Chinese government who for a dozen years has quite successfully filtered the web is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire Services right because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way and in fact that is happening this week on the 20th anniversary of Keanan they just two days ago announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter because there was no way to filter it other than that they had to turn turn the spigot entirely off now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages they also affect people who want to send messages right because this is really a transformation in the ecosystem as a whole not just a particular strategy the classic media prom from the 20th century is how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of the network and here's the 20th century answer bundle up the message send the same message to everybody National message targeted individuals relatively sparse number of producers very expensive to do so there's not a lot of competition this is how you reach people right all of that is over right we are increasingly in a landscape where media is global social ubiquitous and cheap right now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world to the distributed you know the distributed collection of the audience are now used to this change the audience can talk back and that's a little freaky but you can get used to it after a while as as people are do it but that's not the really crazy change that we're living in the middle of the really crazy change is here it's the fact that they're no longer disconnected from each other the fact that former consumers are now producers the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another because there's a lot more amateurs than professionals and because the size of the network the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants meaning that the network when it grows large grows very very large as recently as last decade most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals those days are over never to return right it is the green lines now that are the source of the freak which brings me to my last story we saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign and I don't mean most imaginative use in politics I mean most imaginative use ever and one of the things Obama did they famously the Obama campaign did was they famously put up my Barack obama. com my.

com and millions of citizens rushed in to participate and to try and figure out how to help right an incredible conversation sprung up there right and then this time last year Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on fisa the foreign intelligence surveillance act right he had said in January he would not sign a bill that granted Telecom immunity for possibly warrantless buying on American persons by the summer in the middle of the general campaign he said I've thought about the issue more I've changed my mind I'm going to vote for this bill and many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk it was Senator Obama when they created it they changed the name later please get fisa right Within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on mayo. com within weeks of it being created it was the largest group and Obama had to issue a press release he had to issue a reply and he said essentially I've considered the issue I understand where you're coming from but having considered it all I'm still going to vote the way I'm going to vote but I wanted to reach out to you and say I understand that you disagree with me and I'm going to take my lumps on this one this didn't please anybody but then a funny thing happened in the convers a people in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join to deny its existence to delete it to take it off the site right they had understood that their role with mayo.