Maria Bezaitis: The surprising need for strangeness “When we’re at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us because when we do that, we learn,” says Bezaitis, in this talk given at TED@Intel. “In today’s digital world, strangers are quite frankly not the point. The point we should be worried about is how much strangeness are we getting?”

To hear what she means by this, watch the talk. And below, check out more talks on the great things that can happen when we talk to people we don’t already know.

Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangersHannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers Hannah Brencher doesn’t just start casual chats with strangers – she writes them intimate, handwritten letters. In this talk from the TED@NewYork salon, Brencher explains how she lifted herself out of her post-college depression by leaving letters for strangers to find – and how this grew into a worldwide initiative intended to give anyone who needs it a boost.

Frank Warren: Half a million secretsFrank Warren: Half a million secrets PostSecret.com is a place that uses the anonymity of the internet to allow strangers to tell each other their deepest secrets — the things they would never dare to tell loved ones. In this talk from TED2012, Frank Warren shares how he developed this site, and reveals just a few of the half-million therapeutic secrets that have been sent to him.

Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car?Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car? Sure, you might give directions to a stranger if they ask you on the street. But would you loan them your car? In this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, Robin Chase of Zipcar outlines her latest idea – Buzzcar, a French startup that lets people rent their cars to others, including people they don’t know, in a protected, good-for-all-involved way.

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumptionRachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption Human beings are wired to share. And a new slate of online businesses are providing avenues to match “Person A’s haves with Person C’s wants,” says Rachel Botsman. In this talk from TEDxSydney, she shares the underpinnings of this new economy that depends on a wide network of strangers cooperating.

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better worldJane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world Strangers gather to play online games like World of Warcraft for a total of three billion hours a week. In this talk from TED2010, game designer Jane McGonigal shows how that collaborative power could be used to tackle real-world problems like poverty, climate change and obesity. (Here, read about 10 online games with a social purpose.)

Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North KoreaHyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea In this powerful talk from TED2013, Hyeonseo Lee explains how a stranger helped her bail her family out of jail as she helped them escape from North Korea. She says, “The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me – and for the North Korean people when we needed it most.”

Bonus: In the TED Book, How Did You End Up Here?: The Surprising Ways Our Questions Connect Us, Davy Rothbart compiles 100 brilliant questions to help you break the ice with strangers. In this interview with the TED Blog about the book, the creator of Found magazine answers the question, “What do you think we gain from posing questions to people we don’t know?”

We caught up with Damon to get a better sense of why he feels that social media may have an asocial downside.

You argue that the electronic umbilical cord that connects us to others – Facebook, Twitter, etc — may, in fact, be strangling us. But you also say that this only happens if we let it. How so?  

Technology has always been an issue for us, whether it was a child in the 1950s watching too much TV or a prehistoric caveman playing with a new discovery called fire. Like our ancestors, what we really need to do is find a smart way to integrate our newfound technology into our lives. The only difference now is that today’s tech is being discovered or created more rapidly than before. That, to me, is still no reason for us to throw up our hands and say our lives are suddenly spiraling out of our control.

Tech isn’t going away, either. In fact, it shouldn’t! But it should be balanced with old-school, classic ways of connecting. We shouldn’t believe that letter writing, phone calls, or even face-to-face meetings were rendered obsolete, just as email, texting, and Facebook messaging are not the ultimate ways for us to connect. I think saying technology is making us less attentive is a cop out. Now we should be focused on tech integration — not subservience.

This isn’t a new problem, as you suggest with your caveman example. We’ve struggled with these issues for thousands of years.  

It is definitely not a new problem. In Our Virtual Shadow, I talk about Socrates having as much trouble with then-new technologies as we do with modern tech. Culturists seem to fall into two camps: Believing tech is our devil or that tech is our savior. Both are false, just as they were in the past.

In your book, you discuss the importance of ‘anchors of memory’, which are markers we use to remember a moment. How are those changing in our new tech-saturated age?

Anchors of memory are symbolic items we make to help remember a special time. It could be a photo of your grandfather coming back from the war or simply a Facebook check-in saying you are at a rock concert. You make them for something you deem important enough to note. Our anchors of memory today are becoming more virtual than physical, like our Instagrams and tweets, but they are just as valid as the physical photos and letters of yesteryear.

My concern is that we seem more and more focused on creating these anchors of memory – FourSquare check-ins, status updates, and so on. Unfortunately, the tools we use to create our modern anchors of memory, like the smartphone, require a level of multitasking that takes us away from the very experience we’re trying so hard to capture! It is the ultimate irony.

The computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier said he feels that social media makes us all feel blandly similar. Do you agree?  

Lanier wrote the book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. To paraphrase, he talked about social media flattening people into one big pile of mush. How can you represent the contradictions, dimensions and ideas of any one person in a simplified social media profile? You can’t. It’s like those business commercials where they promise to not treat you like a number. In my interpretation, Lanier said that social media’s architecture and format essentially turned everyone into another number. It is rubbing all the rough edges off of everyone’s personality and making them fit into a fixed box. These varied people, then, turn into a big, non-descript pile of mush.

In Our Virtual Shadow, I argue that Lanier’s theory not only applies to social media, but also to how we interpret and receive news on the Internet. For instance, I can tweet something right now to my couple of thousand followers and, because they trust me, they will retweet it to their followers, and so on. It could be shared to so many degrees that people don’t even know that it came from me. Is what I said true? There is no way to prove the voracity and, at a certain point, it’s not going to matter to the reader. It will just be accepted as truth because someone they trusted shared it. That “news” has been scrubbed of all its edges – and its accountability – and it just becomes something someone heard on the ‘net.

There’s also a lot of good that social media brings us, though, on a personal and professional side.  

There is definitely much good that comes from social media. I’m a huge Twitter fan and even cofounded my own social media app, Quote UnQuote. I think we just need to ask the same question we do with other activities: Is this affecting my quality of life? For instance, if you’re spending quality time with your family and you feel the urge to pull out your smartphone and do a Facebook post about spending quality time with your family, consider if it is really necessary at that very moment.

Social media has the ability to make things feel more urgent than they actually are. We jump from attention-stealing activity to attention-stealing activity and, before we know it, time has flown by. The point of the book is that we use these potentially-distracting tools to capture a moment, but they are just time consuming enough to significantly pull us out of the moment. We will never again, say, watch our toddler walk for the first time or have a virgin meal at the famed The French Laundry. Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the networks, however, will be right there waiting for us whenever we want to visit. Life disappears, social media doesn’t — though we are often operating based on the opposite assumption.

How do we balance out the good with the bad? How do we become more present?

The best solution is to remember that there will always be a new social media tool, a new gadget, or a new technology that will ask for our attention, but there will never be a tool that replaces our memories when we allow ourselves to be fully present. There are several recent studies that say not only can’t we multitask successfully, but that multitasking prevents us from remembering life experiences as well as we could. The next time you are having a breath-taking experience, try not to do a Pavlovian reach for the smartphone.  Researching this book made me really question my own social media habits, and, if you put the smartphone aside for a bit, I think you’d be surprised at what you recall — what you notice — and even what you feel.

“Our Virtual Shadow” is available for the Kindle, Nook, or through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. Read more »

Last week, while seeing a favorite band, I couldn’t help but notice the sea of undulating phones around me. With my view partially obstructed by shoulders, I found my eyes constantly settling onto the glowing screen of the guy in front of me, who was recording each and every song. The screen allowed me to see clearly, and yet it seemed a strange mediation of a moment that is all about the present. Yes, by recording the full show, you get to watch it later. But what did you really experience in the first place?

Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattooMeanwhile, the group standing beside me at this concert had faces flushed from a little too much alcohol. They had their phones out too, the flashes going off periodically as they snapped shot after shot — arms excitedly slinging around each other. As soon as a photo was taken, they’d lean into the capturing phone and laugh as its owner typed out a message and posted it on Facebook. Was the liquor-soaked moment really one they wanted to share with everyone, co-workers included?

Both today’s talk, “Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo,” and today’s new TED Book from Damon Brown, Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed with Documenting Our Lives Online, take reflective looks at the nuances of what it means to have an online record of life. In his talk, Enriquez classifies social media fragments as “digital tattoos,” while Brown characterizes this mediated life as our “virtual shadow.”

Which concept meshes more with your view of our digital lives? Here, a deeper look at the two concepts.

What are they?

Digital tattoos:

“Tattoos really do shout,” says Enriquez in his talk. “What if Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, FourSquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor — all these things you deal with every day — turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would?”

Virtual shadow:

As Brown writes in his book, “More than ever, we’re now focused on documenting and building the history of our lives, not on living the life unfolding right in front of us. It’s all about the check-in, the status update, the captured moment, rather than being fully present day to day. We’re each focused on what I call our virtual shadow: a collected narrative that, like a physical shadow, is symbolic of where our real selves have been, albeit a few steps behind.”

Is this a brand-new problem? Nope:

Digital tattoos:

“The Greeks thought about what happens when Gods, humans and immortality mix for a long time,” Enriquez says in the talk. “Lesson #1: Sisyphus. He did a horrible thing and was condemned for all time to roll this rock up — and it would roll back down. It’s a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you’re going to be rolling up and down for a long time.”

Virtual shadow:

“Socrates had as much trouble with then-new technologies as we do with modern tech. Words were meant to be spoken, Socrates believed, rather than written down,” Brown tells the TED Blog. In his book, he adds, “[It's] the same conflict humans have had throughout time: how do we successfully capture a potentially significant moment? It is the prehistoric caveman making images on the wall, the elementary-school class creating a time capsule, every man in an army platoon getting the same tattoo right before a battle.”

What’s the most disconcerting new technology out there?

Digital tattoos:

Says Enriquez, “Facial recognition is getting really good … Companies like Face.com now have about 18 billion faces online.”

Virtual shadow:

Writes Brown, “Google Glass can take pictures and video, check your email, text your friends, and surf the web — in short, it can record your whole life … Google claimed that they weren’t built for everyday use, but I doubt Apple planned on people texting while walking, either.”

How do we escape the grip our online lives have over us?

Digital tattoos:

Enriquez tells us, “Be cautious when faced with the choice of doing something boneheaded on Twitter or Facebook. Give it 12 hours.”

Virtual Shadow:

Brown writes, “The best way to separate mundane short-term memories from important long-term memories is to simply be as present as possible … The more aware you are of your surroundings, the more your brain can create a cohesive, solid memory. A rich memory — for instance, making love for the first time — isn’t created by an isolated sensation, like a gentle touch or the smell of a cologne, but from the collecting and connecting of all those inputs into one unforgettable multisensory experience. The brain doesn’t need better tools; it just needs us to be as present as possible when things are actually happening.”

How do photos and video play into this?

Digital tattoos:

“People don’t understand how quickly this has changed,” Enriquez tells the TED Blog. “There weren’t a lot of videos of September 11, because it was a pain in the rear to take video on 9/11. You needed a large camera and battery pack – you had to set up the camera. Now every one of us carries HD in our pockets … HD video is so simple, cheap and easy to use that it can affect a presidential campaign, like what happened with Romney.” He adds, “This 24-second news cycle, where a presidential candidate says something stupid on air and, ‘Gotcha!,’ is now beginning to apply to other people’s lives.”

Virtual shadow:

Brown writes in the book, “My favorite uncle shared some good news: He had pictures — hundreds of pictures — from our wedding day. He’d gotten some gorgeous shots, he said, and he couldn’t wait to send them to us. He also told me that he couldn’t wait to get the official video, since he’d been distracted and missed a lot. He was excited to watch a recap of what had happened while he was busy trying to capture the beautiful moments as they were actually happening.”

Is there potential for good with social media?

Digital tattoos:

“The really neat thing is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that allows a group like TED to be so successful and spread ideas,” Enriquez tells us. “And that allows Twitter to spread ideas in a very powerful way — to take on governments, take on bad officials, expose corruption, start movements, do Kickstarter. I’m not arguing [social media] shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that precisely because this stuff is so powerful, we should be careful.”

Virtual shadow:

“There is definitely much good that comes from social media. I’m a huge Twitter fan …. I think we just need to ask the same question we do with other activities: Is this affecting my quality of life?” he says to the TED Blog. “Saying technology is making us less attentive is a copout. Technology has always been an issue for us, whether it was a child in the ’50s watching too much TV or a caveman playing with a new discovery called fire. Like our ancestors, what we really need to do is find a smart way to integrate our newfound technology into our lives.”

So where do you stand, do you feel like the bits and pieces of you online are your digital tattoos, or that they comprise your virtual shadow? Or perhaps a little bit of both?

Watch Juan Enriquez’s TED Talk on digital tattoos »

Read Damon Brown’s TED Book about virtual shadows »

Photo: Ryan Lash

“I’m not arguing that this stuff shouldn’t exist,” says Juan Enriquez. “I’m saying that precisely because this stuff is so powerful, we should be careful and think about what we’re doing, instead of treating it like a lark, thinking if we post something at 2am that no one will care.”

The Boston-based entrepreneur and many-time TED speaker is mulling the impact of social media and new technology in an interview with the TED Blog yesterday. As he asks in this short talk from TED2013, what if the “digital tattoos” we create by using programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in fact as enduring as any embellishment on our physical selves? Shouldn’t we at least try to avoid being branded with the digital equivalent of an embarrassing tramp stamp?

Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo It’s a new metaphor for an old topic, one that’s busied writers and thinkers of every generation. As Enriquez himself points out, the ancient Greeks were terribly taken with ideas of immortality and how they might be remembered. Yet he believes that in modern life we’re not at all savvy about the long-term consequences of impulsive decisions. He points to Andrea Benitez, the young Mexican woman who recently ran afoul of social media when she proudly and publicly wrote about getting her father to shut down a restaurant she considered didn’t treat her with enough deference. “Now she’s ‘Lady Profeco,’ essentially Lady Macbeth,” says Enriquez of the girl, who’s been roundly trashed within social media, even the subject of an article in The New York Times.

Enriquez is not arguing that Ms. Benitez should have been free to exploit her father’s status. Neither is he saying that the solution is to swear off social media for good. Rather, he’s advocating a path of conscious tolerance. “We’re demanding that young people be responsible for stuff that lasts for a long time,” he says. “Folks should pay attention.”

But isn’t Enriquez just being old school, I ask? Sure, he and I might be horrified by the idea of every last thoughtless jape of our younger selves being captured and broadcast to a virtual audience of millions. But, well, it wasn’t. Why does he think those growing up in a new status quo won’t simply figure out the best way to manage the deluge? Might not society mores shift, so that what he sees as a permanent stain might in fact be as fleeting as a temporary tattoo? “I do wonder,” he allows. “If all our lives become transparent, if you actually get a full picture of the good and the bad of someone sitting next to you in church, how would our societal norms change?”

“I don’t know that there’s one answer,” he adds. “I’d like to think we’d be more tolerant, but often when things are exposed we clamp down and deem something unacceptable.”

In other words, it’s the grey areas we should watch for, and we should foster open conversation about the impact of our media on our actions and behavior. The solution isn’t to deny digital, though heaven knows there are plenty of such ideas in the works. (Enriquez mentions these glasses designed to impede facial identification software.) Instead, we must be thoughtful, smart, and conscious of the decisions we’re making, the tradeoffs we’re making, and the potential consequences of our actions. To apply (whisper it) common sense. That’s a concept that’s as old as the ancient Greeks … and one that’ll never go out of style.

The morning of our wedding, my wife and I only had one major discussion: Should we bring our cell phones? She loved Facebook as much as I loved Twitter, and since we’ve lived and made friends all across the country, the social networks made it easier to stay connected to our loved ones far away. We wanted those who couldn’t make it to the wedding to feel connected, too. But we decided to put the smartphones away. Our decision turned out to be the right one: I can honestly still remember every single moment of the ceremony. I was fully present.

A few months later, my favorite uncle shared some good news: He had pictures — hundreds of pictures — from our wedding day. He’d gotten some gorgeous shots, he said, and he couldn’t wait to send them to us. He also told me that he couldn’t wait to get the official video, since he’d been distracted and missed a lot. He was excited to watch a recap of what had happened because he had been busy trying to capture the beautiful moments as they were actually happening.

At this point, the discussion usually veers into our overly plugged-in society — the subsidized cell phone industry makes photo-ready smartphones really cheap, the prevalence of phones encourages everyone to take more pictures, our phones encourage us to use them every time they buzz, etc. But let’s throw that red herring back into the digital river. Our need to capture our memories certainly didn’t start with Instagram.

The decisions I, my wife, and my uncle faced are part of the same conflict humans have had throughout time: how do we capture and save a potentially significant moment? It is the prehistoric caveman making images on the wall, the elementary-school class creating a time capsule, every man in an army platoon getting the same tattoo right before a battle. Each moldy Polaroid, FourSquare check-in, and uploaded YouTube video creates a breadcrumb trail back through our lives. We want these archives, whether digital or physical, to point back to the very real experience we had, or, just as importantly, to give us insight into someone else’s experience. Silicon Valley tech culture expert Paul Philleo calls these mementos anchors of memory.

If you picture all the experiences in our lifetimes as drops in the ocean, anchors of memory are those manmade landmarks reminding us that something of note is located there. Without them, we risk forgetting our most important moments in a sea of mundane recollections. For instance, the first time you visit the Statue of Liberty, you may create an anchor of memory that is physical, like writing a passage in your diary, or an anchor of memory that is virtual, like checking into the location on an app. The physical anchor of memory takes up physical space and requires physical maintenance: keeping your diary dry, finding a safe place to store it, etc. A virtual anchor of memory takes up virtual space and requires time maintenance: making sure your account is active, managing relationships on the check-in service, etc. The physical anchors of memory represent the stuff we make the space to own, which constitute our possessions; our virtual anchors of memory represent the stuff we make the time to upload, which create our virtual shadow. In both cases, we’ve reserved a spot for a particular symbolic gesture in our life.

To better understand the anchors of memory, let’s look at them as what a programmer would call them: pointers. A pointer is an empty object whose sole purpose is to represent something else with actual content. The Polaroid doesn’t contain your 1978 family reunion, but it points to the memory of that event in your mind. A Twitter status is 140 organized symbols that, for you, trigger a particular idea. Or, in more physical terms, a city mile marker is merely metal with scribbles on it, but it shows you where you have to go to get to that particular place.

But what happens if the pointer, this empty piece of symbolism, aims at something that is inaccurate, incomplete, or, worse, not of value at all?

This essay has been excerpted from the new TED Book Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed with Documenting Our Lives Online, by culture writer Damon Brown, creator of the app Quote Unquote and author of more than a dozen books, including Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture. His new TED Book takes a look at what happens to us as individuals in a world of infinite status updates, constant tweeting, obsessive Instagraming. It answers the question: Does documenting our lives keep us from living them? And more important: How can we use social media tools, which satisfy a real need to be heard and remembered, to help us stay present in actual life?

“Our Virtual Shadow” is available for the Kindle, Nook, or through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone. Read more »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Lakshmi Pratury on letter-writing

Once, Lakshmi Pratury says, she was deeply troubled by the public lives of young people on the Internet, but now she has hope — because the same kids who post their party pics online are also posting their political outrage.

Her talk turns to a sad and shocking recent event: the gang-rape and torture of an Indian woman on a bus in New Delhi and her eventual death in Singapore. The public was outraged, and it quickly turned into an international online movement to raise awareness against sexual violence. For the first time in India, Pratury says, people were using the Internet to galvanize a political response. Pratury launched a forum called Billionaires of Moments to help the woman’s memory live on, and to keep an archive of similar moments of tragedy that need to be remembered. Her wish is that someday, along with the Fortune 500, there will be a list of 100 Billionaires of moments.

Sharing is caring, and here at TED we do a lot of both — especially on social media. You can like our Facebook page, catch us on Instagram and follow us on 19 active Twitter handles. That’s a lot, we know, but sometimes good sharing means not oversharing. In other words, we want to make sure you get the information that’s meaningful to you and aren’t overwhelmed by updates from TED’s many initiatives and projects and occasional bouts of livetweeting. (See: This spring’s epic Twitter fail, in which we blew up our feed during TED2012 with livetweets from, of course, Sherry Turkle’s talk on digital communication.) Feel like you need a map? Below, a taxonomy of TED on Twitter.

For general info:

@TEDNews: Our main Twitter account. Follow @TEDNews to get the daily TED Talk plus links to new TED Blog posts, news and announcements from TED initiatives, and top-line coverage of our conferences and events. We livetweet from here on occasion.

@TEDTalks: For minimalists who only want one update a day, this Twitter account is exclusively for the daily TED Talk, posted every morning at 11am Eastern.

For information on TED Conferences:

@TEDActive: Coverage of the happenings at TEDActive and TEDYou. Follow it now to meet the TEDActive community; the conference happens February 25–March 1, 2013, in Palm Springs, California.

@TEDGlobal: Complete conference coverage from TEDGlobal, happening June 10-14, 2013, in Edinburgh, Scotland.

@TEDLiveHQ: News about our TEDLive program, which lets you watch the TED conference feed live in your home, school or office.

@TEDYouth: Speaker-by-speaker tweets from TEDYouth, which takes place every fall in New York City. Check it out now for great quotes from the most recent event.

For info from TED.com:

@TEDConversation: Find out about great conversations happening each day on TED.com – and when to join in.

@TEDHelp: The place to go for help with problems or questions about TED.com, the conferences or our mobile apps.

@TEDQuote: Get great quotes daily from our TED Talks quotes archive.

@TEDTranslations: The hub for the Open Translation Project. Find out which talks are ready to be translated, and communicate with those translating talks into 90+ languages.

For information on TED initiatives:

@TEDBooks: Hear about the new TEDBooks and their authors, as well as great links about digital publishing.

@TED_Ed: Updates from TED’s education initiative, TED-Ed, including new lessons four times a week.

@TEDFellow: News about past and present TED Fellows.

@TEDpartners: Tweets for and about TED’s global partnerships.

@TEDAds: News about the annual Ads Worth Spreading contest, devoted to finding inspiring and inventive ads.

@TEDPrize: Updates about the TED Prize, wishes and winners. The 2013 winner of the $1 million prize will be announced at the TED Conference, February 25-March 1, 2013.

@TheCity2_0: Progress on the 2012 TED Prize winner, the City 2.0.

@TEDx: News about TEDx events and initiatives, like TEDxCity2.0 and TEDxYouthDay.

@TEDxTalks: Find out about the daily TEDxTalk, from the deep TEDxTalks library.

And some accounts that are commonly mistaken for TED channels, though they aren’t:

@Ted: The personal and professional Twitter account for video editor Ted Severson, who’s been really nice about the occasional confusion.

@TED_Tweets: This channel looks legit, but it is updated by a fan rather than the TED staff.

@TED_Talks: Is this hand-updated by a fan or a robot? We don’t know.

@ted_com: Another account that looks official, but isn’t.

@RandomTEDTalks: TED-esque talk titles, generated by an algorithm from real TED Talks (with a few handcrafted headlines thrown in). Absolutely worth a follow.

@WhatTedSaid: The official Twitter account for the Seth MacFarlane film Ted. Sigh.

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