0:12 [Music] [Applause]
0:18 I want to talk about the transformed
0:20 media landscape and what it means for
0:23 anybody who has a message that they want
0:25 to get out to anywhere in the world and
0:27 I want to illustrate that by telling a
0:28 couple of stories about that
0:31 transformation I'll start here last
0:33 November there was a presidential
0:34 election you probably read something
0:36 about it in the papers and there was
0:38 some concern that in some parts of the
0:40 country there might be voter suppression
0:43 and so a plan came up to video the vote
0:44 and the idea was that individual
0:47 citizens with with phones capable of
0:49 taking photos or making video would
0:51 document their polling places on the
0:52 lookout for any kind of voter
0:54 suppression techniques and would upload
0:56 this to a central place and that this
0:59 would operate as a kind of Citizen
1:01 observation that citizens would not be
1:04 there just to cast individual votes but
1:06 also to help ensure the sanctity of the
1:09 vote overall right so this is a pattern
1:11 that assumes We're All in This Together
1:14 what matters here isn't technical
1:18 Capital it's Social Capital these tools
1:21 don't get socially interesting until
1:24 they get technologically boring it isn't
1:27 when the shiny new tools show up that
1:30 they're used to start permeating Society
1:32 it's when everybody is able to take them
1:35 for granted because now that media is
1:38 increasingly social Innovation can
1:41 happen anywhere that people can take for
1:43 granted the idea that we're all in this
1:45 together and so we're starting to see a
1:48 media landscape in which innovation is
1:51 happening everywhere and moving from one
1:55 spot to another that is a huge
1:57 transformation not to put too fine a
1:58 point on it the moment we're living
2:00 through the moment our histor iCal
2:02 generation is living through is the
2:04 largest increase in expressive
2:08 capability in human history and that's a
2:09 big claim I'm going to try and back it
2:13 up there are only four periods in the
2:15 last 500 years where media has changed
2:16 enough to qualify for the label
2:18 Revolution the first one is the famous
2:20 One the printing press movable type
2:22 oilbased inks that whole complex of
2:24 innovations that made printing possible
2:26 and turned Europe upside down starting
2:29 in the middle of the 1400s then a couple
2:30 of hundred years ago there was
2:32 innovation in two-way communication
2:34 conversational media first the telegraph
2:37 then the telephone slow text based
2:39 conversations then realtime voice-based
2:42 conversations then about 150 years ago
2:44 there's a revolution in recorded media
2:46 other than print first photos then
2:49 recorded sound then movies all encoded
2:51 into physical objects and finally about
2:53 a 100 years ago the harnessing of
2:55 electromagnetic spectrum to send sound
2:57 and images through the air radio and
2:59 television this is the media land
3:02 landscape as we knew it in the 20th
3:04 century this is what those of us of a
3:08 certain age grew up with and are used to
3:10 but there's a curious asymmetry here the
3:11 media that's good at creating
3:14 conversations is no good at creating
3:16 groups and the media that's good at
3:18 creating groups is no good at creating
3:20 conversations if you want to have a
3:22 conversation in this world you have it
3:24 with one other person if you want to
3:26 address a group you get the same message
3:27 and you give it to everybody in the
3:29 group whether you're doing that with a a
3:32 broad casting Tower or a printing press
3:34 that was the media landscape as we had
3:36 it in the 20th century and this is what
3:39 changed this thing that looks like a
3:40 peacock hit a windscreen is Bill
3:42 cheswick's map of the internet he traces
3:44 the edges of the individual networks and
3:46 then color codes them the internet is
3:48 the first medium in history that has
3:51 native support for groups and
3:54 conversation at the same time whereas
3:56 the phone gave us the one to one pattern
3:58 and television radio magazines books
4:00 gave us the one to many patterns the
4:01 internet gives us the many to many
4:05 pattern Right For the First Time media
4:07 is natively good at supporting these
4:09 kinds of conversations that's one of the
4:12 big changes the second big change right
4:15 is that as all media gets digitized the
4:17 internet also becomes the mode of
4:20 carriage for all other media meaning
4:22 that phone calls migrate to the internet
4:24 magazines migrate to the internet movies
4:26 migrate to the internet and that means
4:30 that every medium is right next door to
4:34 every other medium right put another way
4:37 media is increasingly less just a source
4:39 of information as increasingly more a
4:42 site of coordination because groups that
4:44 see or hear or watch or listen to
4:46 something can now gather around and talk
4:49 to each other as well right and the
4:51 third big change right is that members
4:53 of the former audience as Dan Gilmore
4:56 calls them can now also be producers and
4:59 not consumers every time a new consumer
5:02 joins this media landscape a new
5:04 producer joins as well because the same
5:07 equipment phones computers let you
5:09 consume and produce it's as if when you
5:11 bought a book they threw in the printing
5:13 press for free it's like you had a phone
5:14 that could turn into a radio if you
5:16 pressed the right buttons right that is
5:20 a huge change in the media landscape
5:23 we're used to and it's not just internet
5:25 or no internet right we've had the
5:27 internet in its public form for almost
5:30 20 years now and it's still changing as
5:33 the media becomes more social it's still
5:35 changing patterns even among groups who
5:38 know how to deal with the internet well
5:41 second story last May China and the
5:42 sichan province had a terrible
5:44 earthquake 7.9 magnitude massive
5:46 destruction in a wide area as the RoR
5:50 scale has it and the earthquake was
5:54 reported as it was happening right
5:56 people were texting from their phones
5:57 they were taking photos of buildings
5:59 they were taking videos of building
6:02 shaking they were uploading it to QQ
6:03 China's largest internet service they
6:07 were twittering it right and so as the
6:09 Quake was happening the news was
6:11 reported and because of the social
6:13 connections right Chinese students
6:15 coming coming elsewhere and going to
6:17 school or businesses in the rest of the
6:19 World opening offices in China right
6:22 there were people listening all over the
6:24 world hearing this news the
6:27 BBC got their first wind of the Chinese
6:29 Quake from Twitter Twitter an announced
6:31 to the existence of the Quake several
6:33 minutes before the US Geological Survey
6:36 had anything up online for anybody to
6:39 view the last time China had a quake of
6:42 that magnitude it took them three months
6:45 to admit that it had
6:47 happened now they might have liked to
6:49 have done that here rather than seeing
6:52 these pictures go up online but they
6:54 weren't given that choice because their
6:57 own citizens beat them to the punch even
7:00 the government learned of the earthquake
7:02 from their own citizens rather than from
7:05 the shinan news agency and this stuff
7:08 rippled like wildfire for a while there
7:10 the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter
7:12 the global short messaging service nine
7:15 of the top 10 links were about the Quake
7:17 people collating information pointing
7:19 people to news sources pointing people
7:22 to the US Geological Survey the 10th one
7:24 was kittens on a treadmill but you know
7:27 that's the internet for you but nine of
7:31 the 10 in those first hours and within
7:34 half a day donation sites were up and
7:36 donations were pouring in from all
7:39 around the world this was an incredible
7:41 coordinated Global Response and the
7:43 Chinese then in one of their periods of
7:44 media openness decided that they were
7:46 going to let it go that they were going
7:49 to let this this citizen reporting
7:51 flower and then this
7:53 happened people began to figure out in
7:55 the Sichuan province that the reason so
7:58 many school buildings had collapsed
7:59 because tragically the earthquake
8:02 happened during a school day the reason
8:03 so many school buildings collapsed is
8:06 that corrupt officials had taken bribes
8:08 to allow those buildings to be built to
8:11 less than code and so they started the
8:13 citizen journalist started reporting
8:15 that as well and there was an incredible
8:16 picture you may have seen it on the
8:18 front page of the New York Times a local
8:20 official literally prostrating himself
8:22 in the street in front of these
8:25 protesters in order to get them to go
8:27 away essentially to say we will do
8:30 anything to Plate you just please stop
8:32 protesting in public but these are
8:34 people who have been radicalized because
8:36 thanks to the one child policy they have
8:38 lost everyone in their next Generation
8:39 someone who's seen the death of a single
8:42 child right now has nothing to lose and
8:45 so the protest kept going and
8:48 finally the Chinese cracked down that
8:51 was enough of Citizen media and so they
8:52 began to arrest the protesters they
8:54 began to shut down the media that the
8:55 protests were happening
8:59 on China is probably the most successful
9:03 uh manager of Internet censorship in the
9:04 world using something that's widely
9:07 described as the great firewall of China
9:09 and the great firewall of China is a set
9:13 of observation points that assume that
9:16 media is produced by professionals it
9:18 mostly comes in from the outside world
9:21 right it comes in in relatively sparse
9:24 chunks and it comes in relatively slowly
9:25 and because of those four
9:27 characteristics they are able to filter
9:30 it as it comes into the country
9:32 but like the majino line the great
9:34 firewall of China was facing in the
9:37 wrong direction for this challenge
9:40 because not one of those four things was
9:43 true in this environment right the media
9:45 was produced locally it was produced by
9:46 amateurs it was produced quickly and it
9:49 was produced at such an incredible
9:52 abundance that there was no way to
9:55 filter it as it appeared and so now the
9:58 Chinese government who for a dozen years
10:01 has quite successfully filtered the web
10:02 is now in the position of having to
10:06 decide whether to allow or shut down
10:08 entire Services right because the
10:11 transformation to amateur media is so
10:13 enormous that they can't deal with it
10:15 any other way and in fact that is
10:17 happening this week on the 20th
10:20 anniversary of Keanan they just two days
10:22 ago announced that they were simply
10:25 shutting down access to Twitter because
10:28 there was no way to filter it other than
10:30 that they had to turn turn the spigot
10:33 entirely off now these changes don't
10:35 just affect people who want to censor
10:37 messages they also affect people who
10:40 want to send messages right because this
10:41 is really a transformation in the
10:43 ecosystem as a whole not just a
10:46 particular strategy the classic media
10:48 prom from the 20th century is how does
10:51 an organization have a message that they
10:53 want to get out to a group of people
10:55 distributed at the edges of the network
10:57 and here's the 20th century answer
10:59 bundle up the message send the same
11:03 message to everybody National message
11:05 targeted individuals relatively sparse
11:07 number of producers very expensive to do
11:09 so there's not a lot of competition this
11:12 is how you reach people right all of
11:15 that is over right we are increasingly
11:17 in a landscape where media is global
11:21 social ubiquitous and cheap right now
11:23 most organizations that are trying to
11:26 send messages to the outside world to
11:28 the distributed you know the distributed
11:29 collection of the audience
11:32 are now used to this change the audience
11:34 can talk back and that's a little freaky
11:36 but you can get used to it after a while
11:39 as as people are do it but that's not
11:41 the really crazy change that we're
11:44 living in the middle of the really crazy
11:46 change is here it's the fact that
11:48 they're no longer disconnected from each
11:51 other the fact that former consumers are
11:53 now producers the fact that the audience
11:55 can talk directly to one another because
11:58 there's a lot more amateurs than
12:00 professionals and because the size of
12:02 the network the complexity of the
12:05 network is actually the square of the
12:07 number of participants meaning that the
12:09 network when it grows large grows very
12:12 very large as recently as last decade
12:14 most of the media that was available for
12:17 public consumption was produced by
12:20 professionals those days are over never
12:23 to return right it is the green lines
12:25 now that are the source of the freak
12:28 which brings me to my last story we saw
12:30 some of the most imaginative use of
12:32 social media during the Obama campaign
12:34 and I don't mean most imaginative use in
12:36 politics I mean most imaginative use
12:39 ever and one of the things Obama did
12:40 they famously the Obama campaign did was
12:43 they famously put up my Barack obama.com
12:46 my.com and millions of citizens rushed
12:48 in to participate and to try and figure
12:50 out how to help right an incredible
12:53 conversation sprung up there right and
12:56 then this time last year Obama announced
12:58 that he was going to change his vote on
12:59 fisa the foreign intelligence
13:01 surveillance act right he had said in
13:03 January he would not sign a bill that
13:06 granted Telecom immunity for possibly
13:08 warrantless buying on American
13:10 persons by the summer in the middle of
13:12 the general campaign he said I've
13:13 thought about the issue more I've
13:14 changed my mind I'm going to vote for
13:17 this bill and many of his own supporters
13:22 on his own site went very publicly
13:24 berserk it was Senator Obama when they
13:26 created it they changed the name later
13:29 please get fisa right Within days of
13:30 this group being created it was the
13:33 fastest growing group on mayo.com within
13:34 weeks of it being created it was the
13:38 largest group and Obama had to issue a
13:41 press release he had to issue a reply
13:43 and he said essentially I've considered
13:44 the issue I understand where you're
13:47 coming from but having considered it all
13:48 I'm still going to vote the way I'm
13:50 going to vote but I wanted to reach out
13:52 to you and say I understand that you
13:53 disagree with me and I'm going to take
13:54 my lumps on this
13:57 one this didn't please anybody but then
14:00 a funny thing happened in the convers a
14:02 people in that group realized that Obama
14:06 had never shut them down nobody in the
14:09 Obama campaign had ever tried to hide
14:12 the group or make it harder to join to
14:14 deny its existence to delete it to take
14:17 it off the site right they had
14:20 understood that their role with mayo.com
14:23 was to convene their supporters but not
14:26 to control their supporters and that is
14:28 the kind of discipline that it takes to
14:34 make really mature use of this media
14:38 right media the media landscape that we
14:40 knew as familiar as it was as easy
14:42 conceptually it was as it was to deal
14:43 with the idea that professionals
14:46 broadcast messages to amateurs right is
14:49 increasingly slipping away in a world
14:51 where media is global social ubiquitous
14:54 and cheap in a world of media where the
14:57 former audience are now increasingly
14:59 full participants
15:02 right in that world media is less and
15:05 less often about crafting a single
15:09 message to be consumed by individuals
15:11 and it's more and more often a way of
15:14 creating an environment for convening
15:15 and supporting
15:18 groups and the choice we face I mean
15:20 anybody who has a message they want to
15:23 have heard anywhere in the world isn't
15:24 whether that's the media environment we
15:26 want to operate in that's the media
15:28 environment we've got the question we
15:31 all face now is how can we make best use
15:33 of this medium even though it means
15:36 changing the way we've always done it
15:37 thank you very much [Applause]
15:38 [Applause] [Music]
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