How social media can make history Clay Shirky

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I don’t 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 of

observation that citizens would not be

there just to cast individual votes but

also to help ensure the sanctity of the

vote over all 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 historical

generation is living through is the

largest increase in expressive

capability in human history now 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

oil-based inks that whole comp

of innovations that made printing

possible and turned Europe upside down

starting in the middle of the 1400 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 real-time voice based

conversation then about 150 years ago it

was revolution in recorded media other

than print first photos then recorded

sound then movies all encoded into

physical objects and finally about a

hundred years ago the harnessing of

electromagnetic spectrum to send sound

and images through the air radio and

television this is the media 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 broadcasting tower or

a printing press that was the media

landscape as we had in the 20th century

and this is what changed this thing that

looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is

built 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 pattern the

internet gives us the many-to-many

pattern 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 the

phone calls migrate to the internet

magazines migrated to the internet

movies migrated to the internet and that

means that every medium is right next

door to every other medium right put

another way media is increasing

last 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

and the third big change right is that

members of the former audience is 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

press 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 twenty 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 Sichuan

Province had a terrible earthquake 7.9

magnitude massive destruction in a wide

area as the Richter 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’re 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 and the rest the

world opening offices in China right

they were people listening all over the

world hearing this news the BBC got

their first wind of the Chinese quake

from Twitter Twitter 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 Xinhua News Agency and this stuff

rippled like wild fun for a while there

the top ten most clicked links on

Twitter the global short messaging

service nine of the top ten links were

about the quake people collating

information pointing people to news

sources pointing people to the US

Geological Survey the tenth one was

kittens on a treadmill but you know

that’s the internet for you but nine of

the ten in those first hours and within

half a day donation sites were up and

donations were pouring in from all

around the world it was just 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 that corrupt

officials had taken bribes to allow

those buildings to be built to less than

code and so they started the citizen

journalists started reporting that as

well and there was an incredible picture

you may have seen it on the front page

the New York Times a local official

literally prostrating yourself in the

street in front of these protesters in

order to get them to go away essentially

to say we will do anything to placate

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

protests kept going and finally the

Chinese crackdown that was enough of

citizen media and so they began to

arrest the protesters they begin to shut

down the media that the protests were

happening China is probably the most

success

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 Maginot 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 twentieth anniversary of

Tiananmen 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 the spigot entirely law 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 the ecosystem as a whole

not just a particular strategy the

classic media prop from the 20th

century’s 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 is the

twentieth-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 we are increasingly in a

landscape where media’s global social

ubiquitous and cheap 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

people are doing 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 freaking

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

with is famously the Obama campaign did

was they famously put up my Barack Obama

calm my bow calm and millions of

citizens rushed in to participate and to

try and figure out how to help write an

incredible conversation sprung up there

right and then this time last year Obama

announced that he was gonna 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 spying 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 gonna vote for this bill and

many of his own supporters on his own

site went very public

berserk it was Senator Obama when they

created it they changed the name later

please get Feist so right within days of

this group being created it was the

fastest growing group on my bow calm

within weeks of its 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 conversation 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

my Bochum was to convene their

supporters but not to control their

supporters and that is the kind of

discipline that it takes to make really

mature use of this media media the media

landscape that we knew as familiar as it

was as easy conceptually it was as it

was to deal with the idea that

professionals broadcast messages to

amateurs right is increasingly slipping

away in a world where media’s global

social ubiquitous and cheap in a world

of media where the former audience are

now increasingly full participants in

that world media is less and less often

about crafting a single message to be

consumed by individuals it’s more and

more often a way of creating an

environment for convening and supporting

groups and the choice we face I mean

anybody who has a message they want to

have heard anywhere in the world isn’t

whether that’s the media environment we

want to operate it that’s the media

environment we’ve got the question we

all face now is how can we make best use

of this medium even though it means

changing the way

we’ve always done it thank you very much

[Applause]

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