Translator: Nam Thai Reviewer: 诗怡 孙
Tahrir Square.
The May dawn uprising in Ukraine.
The Gezi Park protesters in Turkey.
Occupy Wall Street.
The Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong.
All these things represent movements
that were enabled by social media and technology.
And in many important ways,
they either fell short,
or people felt like they could have been more effective.
I believe that there are some key reasons
why these movements have failed to reach their full potential,
and I think it has a lot to do with
learning to use the tools that are in our pocket.
And I don't mean being able to use the user interface or the apps on your phone.
What I'm talking about is the data that lies underneath.
And I think what it really boils down to is maps.
No, not this kind of map. This is a geographic map.
This is obviously very helpful for understanding the geography
of a place like Istanbul, or figuring out how to get from point A to point B,
or seeing how streets or road, or how buildings are laid out.
What I'm talking about is maps of relationships.
This is a map of my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland,
about 30 miles from Washington DC.
And one of the things you can see on this map
is that people are segregated.
People tend to organize themselves racially,
and you can see that on the left end of the map,
you have african americans and latinos,
and to the right of the map you see primarily white people.
You also see the TedX crowd [laughs], on the far right, white end of the spectrum,
as well as geeks and people in the media, and politics.
And then you also see that sports act as a connecting tissue
between people that are primarily concerned with urban culture and music
and are probably younger and still getting established,
and people who are already very established,
and part of, you know, the civic culture in the city.
So, I've started to map other cities as well.
This is San Francisco. You can see some other patterns emerged here:
In San Francisco, you might imagine there's a large quantity
of technology people, and people involved in the start-up community
and in fact they appear very large, at the top the community of geeks up there.
And those folks are almost crowding out people in other parts of the networks.
You can see that there's also a group of people
that's big enough to be identified as a group of Twitter employees,
right next to the gamers, and the foodies, and the LGBT community,
and arts and music, hip hop, and then sports off to the side,
kind of the opposite of Twitter employees.
And you can see that this has created some tension in the city.
You see graffiti like this turning up.
where people are basically expressing frustration over the fact
that rents and other prices of living in San Francisco
have skyrocketed dramatically
as a result of the influx of venture capital and investment.
This is Rio de Janeiro.
I did this map a couple of weeks ago for TED global,
which was held in Rio de Janeiro.
One of the things you can see here is there's a lot more mixing in the middle
of the cultures, but at the same time, you still do have
a big load of geeks, down here,
Sort of the TEDx Rio crowd is down here,
the opposite of the folks that are up in the favelas up here,
and a variety of different music fans,
a flamingo football team,
there's some gospel music over here.
People cluster around things that they have a common interest in.
So, I thought it would be interesting to map Istanbul.
And what you can see here, each dot here,
by the way, this is not a geographic map, that should be clear,
but each dot represents a person,
and each line represents a relationship between people.
So when you click follow, you make a line.
And each color represents a community of people within the network.
So we can basically take an entire city,
and start to separate it out into these component parts,
and see how people organize themselves.
So on this end of the spectrum, that's you guys, primarily, I think,
The earliest Twitter users,
TEDx Istanbul is right on the far corner here,
right about there, is TEDx Istanbul.
And then various brands, media.
This group also has the heaviest iOS usage.
And this was the first part of the network to form in Istanbul
So, in terms of Twitter users, this was the first group of people that joined Twitter.
After that, you have another group
that seems to represent more conservative and religious and political tweets.
This seems to be kind of the voice of the ruling party.
As you might guess.
And they're primarily repeating content, I'm told, from Zaman and Samano Yolu.
As we're in this group, there tends to be a lot more
diversity of sources and people sharing links on their own.
This seems to be repeating a lot more content.
Over here we have sports. Primarily football.
This pattern appears to happen in a lot of cities.
We've seen it in Baltimore, we've seen it in Rio.
I've seen it in a bunch of other cities that I've analyzed.
And sports are interesting, because they act kind of like
a connecting tissue. Everybody is sort of interested in sports.
And some people are really interested in sports.
But it usually lies somewhere towards the center of the network.
Now, newer to the network is this group.
These are young men, mostly frustrated young men,
who really really want girls to like them,
and they write poetry to prove it.
[laughs]
And we were pretty astonished to find this load,
but they turn up other places too.
And I think that what you see here is indicative
of what you see in the culture, you know,
there's a lot of young men in the culture,
and they're concerned about their future
and they want to get married, and "all of the above", you know.
Who doesn't? That's a very human thing.
But you can see that they cluster together.
And they take pictures of themselves that look kind of like Justin Bieber.
And they write a lot of poetry, and share it with each other, It's interesting.
Down here, or up on this end, we have another interesting group of people.
This seems to be primarily inorganic traffic.
There's some guy named Simi Varol, who I don't know,
but apparently he's running some sort of follow-back sort of thing,
to try to generate fake followers and tweets for people,
apparently across this entire spectrum,
because they're connected in to a bunch of folks,
not least of which is probably this group of young men.
But, you know, it's kind of an indicator that there are people on the network
sort of doing things, maybe to make money, maybe trying to somehow or another
amplify other people's message.
We should probably treat that group with a little bit of suspicion.
Down here we have another group of young adults, writing about their lives,
both men and women.
And they seem to be in sort of an underdog stance,
they seem to have kind of a, you know,
poetic desire to break past whatever barriers they're facing right now.
They're not unlike these guys, but I think that they might have
their act a little bit more together. [laughs]
And lastly, the newest part of the network that we discovered,
are these folks up here, talking about sex generally and gay porn specifically.
And you can see that they're not exactly central to the rest of the network.
They're also exactly opposite of the conservative religious political views.
Really, very diametrically opposed.
So, what can we learn from this?
And unfortunately my top title has been removed from this slide.
But, there's a fellow named Sandy Petmund, who is a professor at MIT,
who I actually had the pleasure of spending some time this weekend with,
at TED-X Beacon Street in Boston,
and he's at MIT at the media lab,
and what he studies is patterns of communication within social networks,
not just human social networks but also within other species.
So things like bees and stuff like that.
And what he has found is that there are patterns of healthy communication.
And, you can actually identify what healthy networks look like
and what unhealthy networks look like.
And a healthy network is characterized by short and frequent communication
by a high degree of participation across the network,
and typically lots of links between all different parts of the network,
so it's a very tightly meshed network.
You look for acknowledgment,
so that when someone says something, other people say:
"Oh yeah, I agree." Or, "I don't agree."
Or, you know, they can at least converse that way.
And then...
Continuous exploration, and this is the idea that one part of the network
doesn't stay isolated to itself.
It's always looking for other parts of the network to try to connect to.
And that's really important, because what that means is that
People are trying to find voices that are different from their own.
And we'll come back to that in a minute.
At the opposite side of the spectrum, you can see that
all of the opposite things of the healthy patterns are in fact unhealthy
but there's another really interesting finding that his group has uncovered
along with other people working in the field, and that is that:
human brains are actually permanently altered
by existing in unhealthy network communication environments.
And that's really important to note, because what ends up happening is,
if you actually raise a child in an environment
that doesn't value exploration, that doesn't value finding new ideas,
they will perpetuate that into their adulthood
and raise their own children that way.
That's really important to pay attention to.
So,
if you come back again to look at Istanbul, through that lens,
then, I would apply these value judgements to it.
Completely subjectively, based on my study of the data,
but I think other people would look at these and come to similar conclusions.
This group up here, I would say, is relatively healthy,
because it's probably kind of been, you know, coalescing the longest.
But at the same time, it needs to explore more.
This group is very isolated.
The fact of the matter is that you guys are in a big filter bubble.
Being down here on this end of the network,
you guys need to talk to these guys.
And that's true in most cities, you know,
we are isolated into our own networks.
This group down here I would characterize as unhealthy,
because the fact there's too much broadcast traffic and not enough 2 ways communication
among them from other parties
And not enough exploration here, either
The sport spirit club that I can call healthy They sit in the middle
and they connecting people and everybody got a state
It looks to me like they should talk about
other things, too but in fact if you consider it as a connected tissue for a city
they're probably serving a valuable function
This group looks like they're pretty healthy down here, too
maybe some more exploration is needed but in this center of this spectrum they're newer to the network
that's hard to say where else it's going
we'll see how they involve over time
I would say that these folks needs to explore more they're probably just young
and they'll explore more but that raise an interesting question, too
As these folks begin to explore where are they gonna connect into
where are they gonna go
These folks, I think we can just ignore They'll eventually burn out and go away
but it is interesting to think about this group of people that really focus on reflecting a message
what in fact that could have on things like movements and uprising
and then this over here, the gay porn I believe that is a symptom of culture pushed underground
you'll only see this in place where restriction force people
to start doing thing in a different way and this kind of stuff pops out as a result
Because this it exists everywhere
Just to offer another example of that This is a ??? map I am working on of Saudi-Arabia
You can see the same thing happens here with the gay porn
You can see football that gets 2 different teams on different opposite side of things
as you might expect and you also have spectrum around some artist and female
you can see the same kind of structure applied inside Arabia as you see and
this symbol as well
I believe that self-determination really rests on our ability to map
to measure and shape our social networks
I think it is a really important point to remember because if we don't start to map
and shape our understand of social networks other people will
Governments, companies, a variety of people who you may or may not want to in charge
of your destiny and in fact, if we really want thing likes the uprising
that've occured around the world to take course
we have to have a better understanding of the social networks
I think one of the things that is important to understand
is that Twitter and Facebook and Whatapps and all of other data platforms
cellphone companies, banks all sort of people who have data that's relevant to
forming this discussion of this understanding the structure of the network in our city
but companies like Twitter and Facebook they concern about engagement
They want to keep you on their site as long as possible
they are concern about showing you people
they are like you so that you'll spend more time on their site and click on their stuff
In some way, in order to create a healthy network That ??? has described
we need to have an exploration based recommendation engine
we need to have recommendation engine that says you should be friend with this person
because they are totally unlike you
and that's something that is very lacking right now under discussion
and I can tell you from having talked to people on Twitter and Facebook
that they care about this but that's not their top priority right now
and I think the key think we start to have to do as user of these services
is to ask for these data in some way where we can start to
be informed by it rather just be ruled by it.
In another important way, understanding our networks is a new journalism
as journalism starts to fade and our ability
to use journalism to explore new idea and to connect it with what happening
in our city, because journalism budgets are going away and they lost their business model
we need to start to learn to use crossed source of data to start to understand
how our city works more affectively
And it's a little bit of stress right now to say that you can just look at these data
and replace it, journalism with this we are far from there
but the fact of the matter is if journalism isn't doing the job
we need other thing can do the job and this does have a foothole
as helping us to understand our city in a new way.
I believe that ultimately network data is as important as human need
as a free fresh world until today
Again, if we don't put power in hands of our people
it'll end up in the hands of others
the next time you wanna click like or follow ask yourself
how am I gonna get access to this information how am I gonna get access to this data set
that I am helping to create
If you like to help you can go to peoplemapstart.org we're irrigating a lot of data there
and have a lot of conversation with people try to drive our agenda forward
I think it's hugely important for future of our culture
I think we can start to look at things like segregation and diversity
and the intervention that we can take in our city to really change them for the better
and not for the worse
because you can imagine how data like these can be use in place like Syria
to make thing much for the worst
We have to take ownership of this as people
and I think it's tremendously helpful that the kind of uprising that we've seen around the world
dictate place that people realize that they do have power
to command the crowd in their pocket
but we have to take it to next step
I believe that if we can document and map the connection and the relationship in our cities
we might have a chance that create a city that we would like to have
THANK YOU!