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  • I want to talk about the transformed media landscape,

  • and what it means for anybody who has a message 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 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 insure the sanctity of the vote overall.

  • 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 their uses 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 to 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 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 real-time voice based conversations.

  • Then, about 150 years ago,

  • there was a revolution in recorded media other than print.

  • First photos, then recorded sound,

  • then movies, all encoded onto physical objects.

  • And finally about 100 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 is a curious asymmetry here.

  • The media that is good at creating conversations

  • is no good at creating groups.

  • And 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 it in the twentieth 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.

  • Where as 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

  • 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.

  • Put another way,

  • media is increasingly less just a source of information.

  • And it is 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

  • 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.

  • That is a huge change

  • in the media landscape we're used to.

  • And it's not just Internet or no Internet.

  • 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 in 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.

  • People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings.

  • They were taking videos of buildings shaking.

  • They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service.

  • They were Twittering it.

  • And so as the quake was happening

  • the news was reported.

  • And because of the social connections,

  • Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school.

  • Or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China.

  • There were people listening all over the world, hearing this news.

  • The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter.

  • Twitter announced the existence of the quake

  • several minutes before the US Geological Survey

  • had anything up online for anybody to read.

  • The last time China had a quake of that magnitude

  • it took them three months to admit that it had happened.

  • (Laughter)

  • 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 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 that's the Internet for you.

  • (Laughter)

  • 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 citizen reporting fly.

  • And then this happened.

  • People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence,

  • 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 building 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 in on the front page of the New York Times.

  • A local official literally prostrated 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 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 has seen the death of a single child

  • 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

  • manager of Internet censorship, in the world,

  • using something that is 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,

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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 off.

  • Now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages.

  • They also affect people who want to send messages.

  • Because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole.

  • Not just a particular strategy.

  • The classic media problem, from the twentieth 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 a 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 is not a lot of competition.

  • This is how you reach people.

  • All of that is over.

  • We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global.

  • social, ubiquitous and cheap.

  • Now most organizations that are trying to send messages

  • to the outside world, to 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 do.

  • 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 are 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 is 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 at last decade,

  • Most of the media that was available for public consumption

  • was produced by professionals.

  • Those days are over, never to return.

  • It is the green lines now, that are the source of the free content.

  • 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, was they famously,

  • the Obama campaign did, was they famously put up

  • My Barak Obama dot com, myBO.com

  • And millions of citizens rushed in to participate,

  • and to try and figure out how to help.

  • An incredible conversation sprung up there.

  • And then, this time last year,

  • Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA,

  • The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

  • He had said, in January, that 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 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 myBO.com.

  • Within weeks of its being created it was the largest group.

  • Obama had to issue a press release.

  • He had to issue a reply.

  • And he said essentially, "I have considered the issue.

  • I understand where you are 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 to off the site.

  • They had understood that their role

  • with myBO.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.

  • Media, the media landscape that we knew,

  • as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was

  • to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast

  • messages to amateurs,

  • 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,

  • in that world, media is less and less often

  • about crafting a single message

  • to be consumed by individuals.

  • It is 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 or not that is 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 media?

  • Even though it means changing the way we've always done it."

  • Thank you very much.

  • (Applause)

I want to talk about the transformed media landscape,

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