How social media can make history - Clay Shirky
Summary
TLDRThe video explores the profound transformation of the media landscape, emphasizing how the rise of social media and digital platforms has empowered individuals to become both consumers and producers of content. The speaker illustrates this shift with examples, such as citizen journalism during elections and crises like China's Sichuan earthquake. They argue that the current media environment is more global, social, and collaborative than ever before, challenging traditional media models and requiring new strategies for effective communication in a world where messages are no longer controlled by professionals alone.
Takeaways
- 📱 The media landscape has transformed, making it easier for anyone to share messages globally due to technological advancements.
- 🤝 Social capital is crucial in leveraging new media tools, as they become impactful when widely accessible and integrated into society.
- 💻 The Internet supports both group communication and individual conversations, a significant shift from the previous media patterns.
- 🌍 Media digitization means all forms of media now converge on the Internet, creating a unified platform for information and interaction.
- 👥 The former audience has become active producers of content, contributing to a democratized media environment.
- 📡 The Internet allows for instant global communication, as seen during major events like the Sichuan earthquake, where citizens reported news faster than official sources.
- 🚧 The Great Firewall of China struggled to contain the rapid flow of locally produced, amateur content during crises, highlighting the challenges of censorship in the digital age.
- 💬 The traditional media model of one-way communication is obsolete; now, the audience interacts, responds, and even collaborates on content creation.
- 🌐 Media is now global, social, ubiquitous, and affordable, which has changed how organizations and individuals approach message distribution.
- 📣 The Obama campaign's use of social media illustrates the shift towards creating environments for group interaction rather than merely broadcasting messages.
Q & A
What is the central theme of the speech?
-The central theme of the speech is the transformation of the media landscape and its impact on how messages are disseminated and received, highlighting the shift towards social, global, ubiquitous, and cheap media.
How does the speaker illustrate the changes in media?
-The speaker illustrates the changes in media by comparing the old media landscape, dominated by one-way communication (like printing presses and broadcasting), to the new landscape, where the internet supports many-to-many communication, allowing both conversation and group formation simultaneously.
What is the significance of 'technical capital' and 'social capital' in the context of the speech?
-In the context of the speech, 'technical capital' refers to the physical tools and technologies used for communication, while 'social capital' emphasizes the importance of collective social engagement. The speaker argues that tools become truly impactful only when they become so common that everyone can use them to foster social connections.
What example does the speaker use to demonstrate the power of citizen media?
-The speaker uses the example of the 2008 U.S. presidential election's 'video the vote' initiative, where citizens used phones to document and prevent voter suppression, highlighting how citizen media can ensure transparency and integrity.
How did the Chinese government respond to citizen journalism during the Sichuan earthquake?
-Initially, the Chinese government allowed citizen journalism during the Sichuan earthquake, but when citizens started reporting on corruption related to building collapses, the government cracked down, arresting protesters and censoring media to control the narrative.
What does the 'great firewall of China' refer to, and how was it challenged?
-The 'great firewall of China' refers to the Chinese government's system for censoring and controlling the internet. It was challenged during the Sichuan earthquake when the rapid and widespread creation of local, amateur, and abundant media overwhelmed the government's ability to filter information.
How has the role of consumers changed in the new media landscape?
-In the new media landscape, consumers have also become producers. With the same tools used to consume content, like phones and computers, individuals can create and share their own content, leading to a shift from a one-way broadcast model to a participatory model where everyone can contribute.
What example does the speaker give of a successful use of social media in a political campaign?
-The speaker cites the Obama campaign's use of 'my.barackobama.com,' where millions of supporters engaged in conversations and coordinated efforts, showcasing the power of social media in mobilizing and organizing political campaigns.
Why is the shift from a one-to-many to a many-to-many communication model significant?
-The shift is significant because it democratizes communication, allowing more people to participate in creating and sharing information. This change undermines traditional media's control over messaging and enables more diverse and widespread participation in public discourse.
What challenges do organizations face in the current media environment?
-Organizations face the challenge of adapting to a media environment where the audience can talk back, and where communication is no longer a one-way broadcast but a two-way conversation. They must learn to convene and support groups rather than just disseminating messages.
Outlines
📱 The Rise of Social Media in Election Monitoring
This paragraph discusses the significant role of social media and mobile technology in transforming media and society. It begins by describing a grassroots initiative during the November presidential election where citizens used phones to document and upload videos to monitor voter suppression. This initiative illustrates a shift from technical capital to social capital, highlighting how social tools become impactful when they become ubiquitous and widely accepted. The paragraph emphasizes the unprecedented scale of expressive capability in human history, framing this moment as a revolutionary shift in the media landscape.
🌍 Real-Time Citizen Journalism in the Sichuan Earthquake
The paragraph narrates how citizen journalism played a pivotal role during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. As the earthquake struck, people used their phones to report the event in real time through texts, photos, and videos, which were uploaded to social media platforms. This immediate, grassroots reporting reached global audiences, with news spreading faster on social media than through official channels. It highlights the power of amateur media in bypassing traditional censorship and the challenges governments face in controlling the flow of information in the digital age.
💻 The Challenge of Managing Amateur Media
This section explores the challenges that governments and organizations face in controlling the surge of amateur media. It discusses how the Chinese government, despite its strong internet censorship mechanisms, struggled to manage the flood of user-generated content during the Sichuan earthquake. The narrative includes the story of the government shutting down Twitter on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square as a drastic measure to prevent unfiltered information flow. The paragraph underscores the broader implications of a media landscape where the audience is also the producer, making traditional control strategies obsolete.
🎥 The Obama Campaign's Embrace of Social Media
This paragraph highlights the Obama campaign's innovative use of social media, particularly the creation of the platform my.BarackObama.com, which allowed supporters to actively engage and organize. It recounts the controversy over Obama's change in stance on the FISA bill, which sparked a significant backlash among his supporters on the platform. The campaign's decision not to censor or control this dissent demonstrated a new approach to media, where the focus is on facilitating conversations rather than controlling messages. The paragraph concludes by reflecting on the broader shift from traditional media to a more participatory, decentralized media environment.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Transformed Media Landscape
💡Citizen Observation
💡Social Capital
💡Media Revolution
💡Many-to-Many Communication
💡Digitized Media
💡Amateur Media
💡Social Media and Global Coordination
💡Censorship and the Great Firewall of China
💡Obama Campaign and Social Media
Highlights
The rise of social media has transformed the media landscape, making it more participatory and collaborative.
The 'Video the Vote' initiative during the presidential election aimed to protect voter rights by using citizen-generated content.
Social tools gain significant impact when they become widely accessible, moving from novelty to common use.
The Internet uniquely supports both group formation and conversations, unlike previous media forms.
As media becomes digitized, the Internet is increasingly the primary platform for all forms of media.
The integration of different media forms on the Internet facilitates new forms of coordination and communication.
The Sichuan earthquake in China showcased the power of citizen journalism and rapid information dissemination via social media.
The Chinese government struggled to control information flow during the Sichuan earthquake due to the decentralized nature of citizen media.
The 'Great Firewall of China' faced challenges due to the speed, volume, and local production of citizen-generated media.
The Obama campaign's use of social media, particularly MyBarackObama.com, highlighted the participatory nature of modern political campaigns.
Obama's change in stance on FISA led to a significant backlash on his own campaign site, illustrating the power of organized digital communities.
The shift from a broadcast model to a participatory one means that media is now more about facilitating group interactions than pushing a single message.
The future of media involves understanding and leveraging the global, social, and cheap nature of digital platforms.
Organizations can no longer control the message in the digital age; they must convene and engage with their audiences.
The most effective use of modern media involves creating environments for group collaboration and conversation.
Transcripts
[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.com
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
right 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 is global social ubiquitous
and cheap in a world of media where the
former audience are now increasingly
full participants
right in that world media is less and
less often about crafting a single
message to be consumed by individuals
and 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 in 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]
[Music]
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