16 June 2009

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.

What do you make of what's going on in Iran right now.
I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It's Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it's easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I'm sure it wasn't conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it's had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook's model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who've made it their business to help keep it open.

Do you get a sense that it's almost as if the world is figuring out live how to use Twitter in these circumstances? Some dissidents were using named accounts for a while, and there's been a raging debate in the community about how best to help them.
Yes, there's an enormous reckoning to be had about what works and what doesn't. There have been disagreements over whether it was dangerous to use hashtags like #Iranelection, and there was a period in which people were openly tweeting the IP addresses of web proxies for people to switch to, not realizing that the authorities would soon shut these down. It's incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we're seeing the medium invent itself in real time.

Talk some more about the sense of participation on Twitter. It seems to me that that has spurred an entirely deeper level of emotional connection with these events.
Absolutely. I've been saying this for a while -- as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. But Twitter is also just a much more personal medium. Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement. We're seeing everyone desperate to do something to show solidarity like wear green -- and suddenly the community figures out that it can actually offer secure web proxies, or persuade Twitter to delay an engineering upgrade -- we can help keep the medium open.

When I see John Perry Barlow setting himself up as a router, he's not performing these services as a journalist. He's engaged. Traditional media operates as source of inofrmation not as a means of coordination. It can't do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it's just retweeting, you're aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention is really valuable.

Of course the downside of this emotional engagement is that while this is happening, I feel like I can't in good consicence tweet about anything else!

There was fury on Twitter against CNN for not adequately covering the situation. Was that justified?
In a way it wasn't. I'm sure that for the majority of the country, events in Iran are not of grave interest, even if those desperate for CNN's Iran info couldn't get access to it. That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.

CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn't serve them very well anymore, and that can't be good for CNN.

Do you get the sense that these new media tools are helping build a global community, forged more by technology and a desire for connection, than by traditional political or religious divides?
You can see it clearly in what's happening right now. And it cuts both ways. The guy we're rallying around, Mousavi, is no liberal reformer. But the principle of freedom of speech and fair elections and the desire for reform trump that.

So how does this play out?
It's complex. The Ahmadinejad supporters are going to use the fact of English-speaking and American participation to try to damn the dissidents. But whatever happens from here, the dissidents have seen that large numbers of American people, supposedly part of "the great Satan," are actually supporters. Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

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16 June 2009

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics. (Recorded at TED@State, at the US State Department, June 2009, in Washington, DC. Duration: 17:03)

Watch Clay Shirky's talk from TED@State on TED.com where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 450+ TEDTalks.

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03 June 2009

TED@State: Clay Shirky on what the government needs to know abut social media

Clay Shirky studies social networks, connections and subcultures that are using emerging technologies to connect. In Shirky's prescient talk at TEDGlobal 2005 (given in the Era Before Facebook, if such a time can be imagined), he talks about how social media will allow for loose collaborative networks, where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.

Today at TED@State, he talks about the new social media landscape -- where we are all both consumers and producers (as he says, it's like if you buy a book and they throw in a printing press for free). He talks about the recent earthquake in China, reported by ordinary Chinese citizens over social media, as it happened. (The last earthquake in China was not reported by Chinese officials for 3 months.) Using Twitter, photo-sharing sites and email, news came pouring out of China. Donation sites sprang up, activism cropped up around the destroyed elementary schools. And then China shut it down. But China’s censorship system depends on a top-down approach to media. And social media breaks that model. As China learned this week, to censor tweets and photos, you need to block Twitter and Flickr.

A story from the Obama campaign (which Shirky calls one of the most innovative uses of social media ever). During the campaign, Senator Obama announced that he would be changing his vote on FISA. A group formed on his own campaign website, MyBO.com, called "President Obama, Please Get FISA Right." The group grew larger and more vocal. Obama engaged with the group, explained his vote. The group members still weren't happy -- but then they realized that, though they had nearly taken over Obama's campaign site, nobody had ever tried to hide the group, to delete it, to take it off the site -- the role of MyBO.com was to convene their supporters, but not to control their supporters

Engage in Q&A here in the comments!

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03 June 2009

TED goes to Washington: Today is TED@State

TED is in Washington, DC, today, helping to throw a first-of-its-kind conference: TED@State, bringing great ideas from TEDTalks to Washington. This afternoon at the State Department, five TEDTalks stars -- Clay Shirky, Paul Collier, Jacqueline Novogratz, Stewart Brand, and Hans Rosling -- will share insight and new ideas; music will come from the legendary Zap Mama.

Our partner in this event is the Global Partnership Initiative, based at the State Department. This initiative was launched in April to establish public-private partnerships with foundations, businesses and NGOs ... and TED@State is the first major event under this initiative. The Special Representative for Global Partnerships, Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, is proud to welcome TED and these visionary speakers to the Department of State (read her remarks to the audience).

You can follow TED@State on our Twitter feed @TEDNews -- or look for the hashtag #TEDState. Look for TED@State onstage and backstage photos on Flickr. And we'll be reporting on each speaker here on the TEDBlog, and hosting the post-event Q&As right here.

Watch CNN's report on TED@State >>

Above: TEDTalks star Hans Rosling meets with TED's Director of Film + Video, Jason Wishnow. Photo: TED / Mike Femia.

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22 October 2008

Whither Web 2.0?

Via Slashdot, blogger Andrew Keen writes that economic troubles will trigger the decline of the "free" economy, collaboration, and open-source -- including communities such as Wikipedia -- and even, perhaps, the blogosphere itself.

People will be less likely to give away "their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue," writes Keen.

But one Slashdot commenter points to Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks for evidence to the contrary: "For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month,every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives. There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who rush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the end of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtime or to increase our billable hours; or at least regret it when we cannot."

Benkler's 2005 TEDTalk argues that a collaborative economy does not easily falter.

Watch other related TEDTalks:
+ Clay Shirky on why free communities are more thorough, creative and productive than formal institutions designed to accomplish the same things.

+ Howard Rheingold on way-new collaboration -- and why cooperation succeeds.

+ Chris Anderson of WIRED on tech's long tail. (He recently predicted the rise of a free economy.)

See also: Cameron Sinclair on open-source architecture, Richard Baraniuk on open-source learing, and Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia.

What do you think?

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22 August 2008

Clay Shirky on our cognitive surplus

There's a great talk from Clay Shirky in the latest issue of Edge -- about all of our surplus, unused brain power, and what we might be able to do with it if we turn off our TVs:

How big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project -- every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

Watch the video or read the transcript >>

Having trouble leaving a comment? (We're working on it...) Email it to us: blog at ted dot com

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21 July 2008

Four new books by TEDGLOBAL 2005 speakers

Four of the speakers that participated in the first TEDGLOBAL in Oxford (July 2005) have all published new books recently.

Former Afghani minister and head of Kabul University Ashraf Ghani (watch his TEDtalk), together with Clare Lockhart, has penned "Fixing Failed States: A Framework For Rebuilding A Fractured World". They discuss the "between forty and sixty nations" -- that's one-quarter of all the countries in the world -- that are broken to various degreees and have become "the breeding ground of networks of criminality and terror", and suggest an integrated state-building approach that goes beyond military intervention and humanitarian aid to make them "stakeholders in a global system". It's a radically optimist book. Since Ghani spoke at TEDGLOBAL, he and Lockhart have co-created the Institute for State Effectiveness.

In "We Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production", British innovation and creativity guru Charles Leadbeater (watch his TEDtalk) makes the case, based on countless well-documented examples from all over the world, that innovation in the era of the Web has become a collective, collaborative effort. "You are what you share", he writes. Walking his talk, he shares part of the final book and the full first draft on his website.

Groups of people increasingly coming together to share, work or take public action are also the starting point for Clay Shirky's new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations". The social-media master (watch his TEDtalk) contends that "when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring". For example: "We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love". The reference, obviously, is to Wikipedia, which is just one of many examples used by Shirky. Recently, he told me that the book somehow was born at TEDGLOBAL 2005: "That speech was the opportunity to link a lot of my earlier work into a coherent structure". He's blogging and discussing the book at HereComesEverybody.org.

Carl Honoré's previous bestseller "In Praise Of Slow" discussed our culture obsessed with speed (that's the topic of his TEDtalk). In his new book, "Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood From The Culture Of Hyper-Parenting", he applies that lens to growing up in today's developed societies, and says that we are raising "a generation of overprogrammed, overachieving, exhausted children". Based on extensive research -- fact after example after anecdote (including that of the father of a tennis player who drugged his child's opponents) -- and beautifully written, "Under Pressure" is not a parenting manual. "Slow", in the meantime, has built up to somewhat a global movement, and Carl is one of the co-founders of a website for all things slow, Slow Planet. Where they remind us that "slow is not about doing everything at a snail's pace; it's about working, playing and living better by doing everything at the right speed".

The next TEDGLOBAL will take place in Oxford, 21-24 July 2009. More details will be forthcoming in September.

(Note: Some of the cover images above may be different from what you will find online or at your local bookstore, depending on the different country-specific editions of each book.)

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