Clay Shirky @ TED: How social media can make history
Clay Shirky, TED@State, June 2009
I’ve recently been reading Clay Shirky‘s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody and found he gave a talk at TED@State last month, hosted at the State Department in Washington DC .
He talks about how rules have change in the games of communication. Where before the internet, organizations would send the same message to everyone they are trying to reach. But all that has changed. Not only are they talking about but they are talking to each other about you:
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.
There is an additional Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (June 16, 2009):
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.
Here’s Clay talking at TED2005 on Institutions vs. Collaboration, which interestingly is before the rise of Twitter as the communication tool of choice.
