Digital educator and commentator
Clay Shirky has detailed how mobiles, Twitter, Facebook and other social media are making history. These technological tools are allowing people to bypass censors, hold politicians to account and end the strict top-down news model that has characterised information flows since the invention of the printing press.
The speech, part of the
TED conference series, was recorded well before the recent events in Iran. However the role social media has been playing the post-election Iran over the past few weeks only add to the power of Shirky’s message.
Shirky notes that the media technologies available up to the turn of the century had some asymmetrical anomalies:
- The media that is good at creating conversations, is no good at creating groups (i.e. the telephone or word of mouth)
- The media that is good at creating groups, is no good at creating conversations (i.e. newspapers or television)
He claims that this one-to-one vs one-to-many pattern is broken by the internet, which is the first technology that is good at creating groups and good at creating conversations. Shirky explains that this many-to-many pattern combines with the migration of all the existing mediums to the internet, providing an opportunity for the former audience of the media to also become producers.
A number of examples of this revolutionary change are offered. They range from citizen journalism defeating the Great Firewall of China to the flow of ideas from the developing to the developed world in helping citizens use technology to keep track of electoral fraud.
It is an inspiring speech, but perhaps the most striking claim in the video is that today we are witnessing the “largest increase in expressive capability in human history”.
