Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Tech / International Shirky on Iran
Posted by Anthony Hecht on Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:17 PM
Last month, Clay Shirky gave a talk (embedded below) at the TED@State conference titled "How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history".
His thesis is that the moment we're living through is "the largest increase in expressive capability in human history." The rise of the Internet, and more importantly the rise of the social Internet, has completely transformed the way humans communicate. Media is no longer expensive, local, and the domain of a few people with access to printing presses or television transmitters - it's now cheap, instant, global, and anybody can do it. The same equipment you use to consume media is now capable of producing it. This, Shirky argues—and I can't imagine how anyone would disagree—is HUGE. Absolutely revolutionary.
Shirky's talk wasn't supposed to be posted quite yet, but given what's going on in Iran, TED put it up early, along with a Q&A with Shirky in which he discusses how the events in Iran are a perfect example of this communication and social revolution.
"This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media."
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