Translator: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you, Jose.
I cannot think of a better way to start my talk
than what he ended with about the interactions between people
because that is what I think that cities are really based on.
If you think about, over the last three years or so,
we have seen scenes like this;
places like Tahrir Square, the Maidan uprising in the Ukraine,
Gezi Park in Turkey, the "Umbrella Revolution" in Hong Kong.
All of these things were movements that were enabled
by technology and social media, but for many reasons,
seem to have fallen short of people's expectations.
Perhaps we could look at some of the reasons why that might be.
I think that has to do with the fact
that we have not really studied how people organize themselves,
and we do not really understand
how people are organized on channels like social media.
If you think about the fact
that you are probably sitting next to somebody that you know tonight,
people organize themselves in a pattern called "homophilia",
where they basically gather with people who are like themselves.
We do this all the time, for all kinds of practical reasons,
and without even thinking about it a lot of the time.
There are some other ways that we could think about this.
We could just be all random, some of you are randomly sitting next to other people.
Then there is this idea of "xenophilia";
of actually going out and trying to interact with people you do not know.
Many of you tonight are here to network and things like that,
to meet new people.
Some of that is a factor of xenophilia, but if you think about it,
all of you are college-educated,
you are not necessarily meeting people who are very different to you.
That is what we are going to look at next.
There are patterns that emerge in organisms, in life,
that characterize healthy colonies.
This is not limited to mammals, it is not limited to humans.
Dr. Sandy Pentland at MIT who is, perhaps,
the leading expert on computational social science,
has posited that creatures like these have healthy patterns of interaction.
The healthiest pattern of interaction involve; short and frequent communication,
high participation from everybody within the entire network,
and also acknowledgment of the messages that are being sent.
Also, exploration.
This goes back to the idea of xenophilia,
of reaching out to people that you do not know.
The opposite of those things is low-frequency communication,
low participation, broadcast instead of getting feedback,
and little to no exploration.
It is actually found
that when we do not explore as humans, it affects our brains.
It affects the offspring of future generations,
such that their brains do not want to explore.
This has big implications for social change in the world.
This is my hometown of Baltimore, you may know Baltimore
from such TV shows as "The Wire", and "Homicide: Life On The Streets".
We have a little bit of a reputation around this,
because we have this very segregated society.
If you look at the folks on this end of the network,
this is where the TEDx community is,
we are mostly geeks, and we are mostly white.
That is not all true, but that is mostly true.
All of the politics, and the media, and the newspaper, and the radio, and TV,
all happen in this end of the network,
On this end of the network, we mostly have younger people
who are mostly African-American, some Latino, who are mostly interested
in hip-hop music, and rap music, and club culture, and things like that.
There is at all nothing in the world wrong with any of those things.
However, these people are not very interested in politics yet.
They are not connected to this part of the network,
and what you have is communication patterns
where these folks are not exploring people that are different from them,
and these folks are not exploring people that are different from them.
In the middle you have sports.
These things tend to connect people so you have football, American football,
baseball, "Under Armour" is there because they are based in Baltimore,
Michael Phelps, the Olympian is there.
It gives you the sense that the city is very segregated, and I can tell you
from being there on a day-to-day basis that it is very segregated.
Let us take a look at another city.
Rio de Janeiro is a really complex, mixed up city.
I mapped this a few weeks ago.
You have a similar kind of spectrum going on here.
From geeks, the TEDx community, down here,
up to the favela music community.
One of the things you see here is a lot of mixing in the middle.
The explanation I got from people that are there
is that people do not segregate themselves by culture, whether they are rich or poor,
they like the same kind of music whether they are rich or poor.
They tend to be very open-minded about the cultural choices that they make.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Istanbul.
This was a really interesting map,
and perhaps one of the more interesting ones that I have done so far.
One of the things that you see here is again,
you have the TEDx community up here on one end of the spectrum.
This is a fairly progressive political group as well.
tend to be college-educated, a lot like you guys.
You guys would all get along great with this crowd in Istanbul.
Very heavy IOS usage, a lot of brands in media.
This is more the conservative, religious, and political tweets;
the kind of thing you get out of the ruling party in Turkey right now.
Then sports, mostly football, connecting people again.
But this next group is really the one to watch.
Young men, mostly frustrated young men,
who really want girls to like them, and they write poetry to prove it.
(Laughter)
These guys, they are about 17 to 19 years old for the most part,
they are desperately trying to get noticed by anybody.
Some of these guys have 50,000 followers for the little poems that they write.
They are all talking to each other about their problems and frankly,
if you want to start changing Turkey, you need to figure out
what these guys are going to do when they'll become politically active.
They could go here, they could go here, they could go down here.
We are trying to figure out now what route these guys are going to take
to becoming really active people, politically.
There is another little group down here,
that seems to be the elder siblings of these guys.
Young adults, writing about the challenges that they face in life.
We do not yet know because we just started taking these snapshots
how people are going to move around between these different nodes.
Up here, we have another interesting phenomenon
that tends to happen in repressive regimes.
This is sex, generally, and gay porn specifically,
These things come up, and the issue here
is that people cannot find that sort of content on the regular Internet
because it is censored.
We found that same pattern in Saudi Arabia.
You do not tend to find it in American and European cities,
it is an aberration of censorship culture.
A couple of days ago, I was in Munich.
Munich is very interesting in that the amount of Twitter traffic
is roughly ten times less than what we see here in Barcelona,
and maybe 12to 15 times less than what you see in Istanbul.
One of the first things you notice is this; this should come as no surprise.
The sports fans are very clearly identified.
You have tech geeks, and computer stuff, and big data people over here,
radio, newspapers, magazines, photos,
more radio, newspapers, magazines and photos really,
social media marketing, and online publications, the Pirate Party
- I do not know if you guys know Germany, but there's a party called
"The Pirate Party" that originated out of Berlin,
that is getting a bit of traction in different places.
People talking about travel and hotels, very marketing-orientated sort of stuff,
web-developers, and coders,
then more politics and radio, very mainstream media here in the center,
this seems to be strictly political.
The point here is that Munich does not seem to feel
a great deal of compulsion to communicate a whole lot.
They seem to be content to broadcast their little messages
and sell their brands they are trying to sell.
The TEDx community is here, but you fee like you are missing these other parts
that will probably start to appear over time.
I do not know whether or not it is because maybe Germans are not so inclined
to be sharing all the time or talking about their things,
but frankly, the thing that we see
that seems to be highly correlated with social media use and expression
is repression and unemployment, of one kind or another,
or activism that seems to be coming to life.
Here is what we have all been waiting for, Barcelona,
I have been working on this for the last month,
and you see some interesting things.
Obviously, FC Barcelona is a big part of life here,
and that is well represented in the data.
There is also a very large international community
that identifies, that is associated with this group,
but I decided to chop them out in order to make this more compact.
This is the Catalonian independence Movement,
and you would expect that to appear, especially lately,
it has become a very clearly defined node within the network here.
You guys probably know this psychology a little bit more than me,
but Jose and I came up with this kind of a description
really people criticizing the way things are from a left-wing perspective,
people being more concerned about financial justice and things like that,
so there is PAH, I do not know if you guys know them,
but that was a group that we identified that was strongly located here.
Then literature, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses;
they are the opposite of the soccer fans, maybe not totally surprising.
Arts, and culture, and events.
TEDx Barcelona is roughly in this interface right here.
Then entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs, start-ups, IT, mobile tech.
And then writers.
This is sort of a grab-bag of different writers,
but they seem to be a little different than these guys
who are talking more about criticism and culture.
Then in the middle, you have got this nice selection of mainstream media:
televisions, sports magazines, news, and culture.
You could dig into these accounts
and you would recognise them as being big media outlets,
but the thing that is really worth noting here,
is that this city, you notice how it is not linear.
It is not all dragged apart
from one end to the other the way Baltimore or Istanbul is.
It is nice and round.
You guys seem to be talking to each other, and you are talking to each other a lot.
Yeah, you are talking to each other about Catalonia and FC Barcelona
and things like that, but I think that might be great.
It seems like you have a really nice culture here
that is not suffering from what I would characterize
as a great deal of tension, the way that some of these others seem to.
If you then add in all of the connections between everybody,
you can see that it really forms this nice fireball.
The FC Barcelona folks are connected very much to the Catalonian folks,
and it seems like a good structure for the city.
One of the things that I always like to do
is look at what is at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
If the entrepreneurs, and TED communities, and stuff are up here,
who is at the opposite side?
It is the independence folks.
I am sure that many of you are involved in that movement,
and have opinions about it, and things like that,
but it is always interesting to look at what is on the opposite side,
who is the most unlike you, where do you not have relationships?
Maybe these guys need to get relationships with you guys,
or maybe you need to get relationships with them,
clearly there is a bunch of relationships already,
but that might be an area to explore.
Likewise, there are other folks that are opposite each other on the table
that probably should get to know each other.
One of the things that I want you to think about is that this data
is being collected at Twitter, and at Facebook, and at LinkedIn,
and a bunch of other places; WhatsApp and Snapchat, etc.
They are building maps of your cities
as really detailed, psychological maps of how people function.
So is the United States' NSA, the Great Britain's Intelligence Agency,
so is Germany and there are a bunch of people that are gathering this data,
and frankly, if you want to build a better city,
you need access to this data.
You need to be able to get at it, and I think we also need to think about--
You know how you get recommendations on these networks to connect with somebody
who you probably know or should know?
Well, what if you could get a recommendation to connect with somebody
that had a point of view that was very different from your own?
That would be powerful, and that is something
that these guys are starting to think about
but right now, it is not a business priority for them.
We need to start having that conversation.
I believe that this kind of data is really the basis for journalism going forward.
We used to be able to rely strictly on reporters, and newspapers,
and advertising to help people go do this kind of discovery for us;
to figure out how the structure of cities worked,
but frankly, that is not working as well as it used to,
and we now have access to this new kind of data that can help us
to understand our cities in profound new ways.
I think we need to think about using this kind of data as the basis
for journalistic efforts going forward.
I believe that this kind of data is an important human right even,
as the free press was until this point.
If we do not put this power into the hands of the people,
it will end up in the hands of somebody else.
We need to start to ask for it, so next time you click, "Like" or, "Follow",
start thinking about asking for a copy
of the data set that you are creating when you do that.
Thank you.
(Applause)