Name: 【TED】Mikhail Zygar: What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media (What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media | Mikhail Zygar)
Uploaded: 2018-08-15T15:54:33.000Z
Duration: 4 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There is a stereotype that history should be focused on the rulers,

As a result, people in many countries, like mine, Russia,

look at history as something that was predetermined

and common people could not influence it in any way.

Many Russians today do not believe that Russia could ever have been

or ever will be a truly democratic nation,

and this is due to the way history has been framed

To prove it, I spent two years of my life trying to go 100 years back,

I asked myself, what if the internet and Facebook existed 100 years ago?

So last year, we built a social network for dead people,

digitized and uploaded all possible real diaries and letters

So any user of our website or application

can follow a news feed for each day of 1917

and read what people like Stravinsky or Trotsky,

Lenin or Pavlova and others thought and felt.

We watch all those personalities being ordinary people like you and me,

and we see that history consists of their mistakes, fears, weaknesses,

Our project was a shock for many Russians,

who used to think that our country has always been an autocratic empire

and the ideas of freedom and democracy could never have prevailed,

just because democracy was not our destiny.

Yes, 1917 led to 70 years of communist dictatorship.

But with this project, we see that Russia could have had a different history

and a democratic future, as any other country could or still can.

you learn that Russia was the first country in the world

or one of the first ones to grant women voting rights.

Knowing history and understanding how ordinary people influenced history

because history is just a rehearsal of what's happening right now.

we started a new online project that is called 1968Digital.com,

that gives you an impression of that year, 1968,

that, in many ways, created the world as we know it now.

by imagining what if all the main characters could use mobile phones ...

were facing the same challenges and were fighting for the same values,

no matter if they lived in the US or in USSR

or in France or in China or in Czechoslovakia.

By exposing history in such a democratic way,

we show that people in power are not the only ones making choices.

That gives any user a possibility of reclaiming history.

Journalists, scientists, philosophers matter.

【TED】Mikhail Zygar: What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media (What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media | Mikhail Zygar)

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【TED】Mikhail Zygar: What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media (What the Russian Revolution would have looked like on social media | Mikhail Zygar)

matter

determine

impact

applause