>>Michael Wesch: So I actually got my start studying in Papua New Guinea. I was studying
new media and how it was affecting very remote areas of Papua New Guinea. New media there
was actually books. It wasn't anything exciting like you see up here.
It brought to me a number of questions that I thought were really important, mostly about
the importance of media and social change. So think, for example, just if you do a quick
run-down of human history, the importance of speaking in the organization of bands and
tribes, the importance of writing in the organization of empire, the importance of the printing
press in the reformation enlightenment and so on. And the reason why media is so important
in all of these major shifts is because media ultimately shape and sometimes limit and sometimes
even dictate what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it and who can hear it.
And you take it a step further and you recognize that media also shape how things will be stored,
how they will be accessed and actually what will be stored and what will be accessed by
who. And when you add all that up, then you are into the level of, you know, basically
what is a society's knowledge base going to be and what's going to count as knowledge.
And you take that another step and you start to see that media can shape all levels of
culture from economics to even really important things like core values and things like that.
I will get to some of that in just a moment. Now, where I'm starting from is this idea
that media are not just tools. We hear that a lot. I'm going to suggest that media are
not just tools. Media are not just forms of communication. They actually -- media mediate
relationships. So when media change, relationships change. And, therefore, you see these broad
changes happening throughout society. So I'm going to start with just a real simple
run-down of television and how it changed our society. Then I'm going to shift into
new media to show you what's happened since then.
So I'm going to, first off, look at what happens when television enters into a living room.
You have to rearrange your future. It really reshapes the relationships in the family.
And let's face it, this isn't just the living room. This is also people's dining room in
a lot of cases. This is essentially the American dining room reshaped around the television.
And as Neil Postman has pointed out, I will just do a 60-minute run-down of Neil Postman's
argument about television and how it's affected culture. The conversations of our culture
are ultimately happening here in the television era. Those conversations are controlled by
the few and designed for the masses. The conversations are always entertaining -- that's how you
get the masses watching -- even the serious ones. So our political debates go from long-form
political truly debates to what we see today which is more like 8-second sound bites, more
like an entertainment situation. The conversations are punctuated by 30-second
commercials. And these conversations create our culture of irrelevance, incoherence and
impotence. What he means by "impotence" is he asks you
-- like, he is writing this book in 1985. He asks you to imagine yourself in 1985 watching
the most important program you can imagine. Imagine watching the news in 1985 and he asks
you a series of questions. He says, So what steps do you plan to reduce conflict in the
Middle East or the rates of inflation, crime or unemployment? What do you plan to do about
NATO, OPEC, the CIA, et cetera? And then he takes the liberty of answering for you. He
says, "You plan to do nothing" which is basically what you could do in 1985. There weren't a
whole lot of options. Here we are bombarded with media. This has
a particularly profound effect on our youth and how they're learning about the world.
And I just want to show you real quickly here a commercial here. This is created by Dove
as part of a campaign to demonstrate how this mass media onslaught is affecting our young
girls. (Video.)
This is a very powerful commercial. It demonstrates, I think, Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism,
"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."
Something interested has happened recently, and you guys all know about this and how new
media is shaping our society in new ways. I have this little clip here and I think it
demonstrates sort of a hero for our mediated culture of today.
I'm going to leave out all the sociology for you guys. This guy really represents the sort
of lonely individual that the sociological thinking has been theorizing here for the
last few decades. He is this lonely guy. Comes home to Sydney.
Doesn't have anybody to hug when he gets to the airport. So he goes down to the mall with
his "free hugs" sign and eventually somebody gives him a hug here. And then you will see
that this "free hugs" movement actually starts to spread. Other people start taking up the
sign, start getting hugs themselves. And this spreads throughout Sydney, and the mall is
just sort of rife with these free hugs. Then it goes on to YouTube and gets over 45
million views and then it goes global. This is where a number of interesting points can
be made about new media and how it is shaping our society.
The first point, of course, is that it is global. The second is that, you have individual
pursuits leading to large-scale collective actions. And, third, you can also point out
that you have gone from this lonely individual thing, we've had several decades of sort of
being trapped in our homes with our television sets and suddenly people are wanting to reach
out. Of course, on YouTube there is always the
parody. [ Laughter ]
(Video.) This is where things get really interesting
because sometimes these parodies are really quite cutting and important. And I will just
draw your attention back to that Dove commercial. Here is a remix of that Dove commercial which
probably could never have existed on network television, but it did exist on YouTube. Here's
the remix. (Video).
A lot of you are probably actually familiar with this. One way or another, you are familiar
with this -- not just this particular video but perhaps movies -- or videos like this.
This one in particular was very effective. Two weeks and about a million views after
this was created, the creators of this were at the table with Unilever, Dove's parent
company and Unilever actually signed a moratorium on deforestation. So that was actually a great
moment. It actually demonstrates also that this is not a one-way conversation.
Speaking of conversations, here's an interesting -- another interesting example. This is Shawn
Ahmed. He was a graduate student at Notre Dame sitting in a room like this hearing about
poverty and thinking, "What can I really do about poverty as a graduate student?" And
he just decided to get up and leave. He actually left the university. He was saving up some
money to buy an Xbox and decided to spend it instead going to Bangladesh and trying
to do something real about poverty. What he is trying to do is change the conversation.
What he does is he goes around Bangladesh and other places in the world. He creates
now over a hundred videos about poverty through his eyes. And then he, in the meantime, gets
over 279,000 followers on Twitter. Starts up a type of organization that a lot of NGOs
could only dream of copying. Essentially, he put donors directly in contact with the
people that they are helping which is something that donors really like and he does it all
through this community-generated space like you will see here.
(Video.) There is so much here that you can point to.
One thing I want to point to is something that maybe just went right under the surface
there and that was the music in the background. The music in the background was also created
through a global collaboration of artists working together almost accidentally.
Here you've got Collin Muchler who uploaded the guitar track to Opsound. And then CoraBeth
from North Carolina picks it up and plays the violin over the top of it here that you
hear. And then that's posted and then Vavrik over here takes all these clips that are being
posted to Opsound and creates the sound track you just heard on that video.
There is something, I think, especially important about thinking about music in this collaborative
space because when you think about these collaborations that are happening here, all these spaces
are, in a sense, spaces for collaboration in which -- and each one structured in a different
way that actually shapes what can be done in those spaces. And so music actually becomes
an interesting way to look at this because it is a way of sort of seeing and feeling
the layers upon layers that are created through this.
So here's a project from Eric Wittiker, I think, demonstrates this really well. He had
some music up on iTunes. One of his fans picked it up and sung it back to him on YouTube.
He was so moved by hearing this person sing his music to him on YouTube, they thought
if I could just create a whole virtual choir. You can see there he recorded himself conducting
the choir. He put the sheet music up for free, and then he had all these people try out and
ultimately had from 12 different countries these 185 singers create this virtual choir.
But this is really just a metaphor for the different layers you see happening in this
collaborative space. And sometimes it gets very serious. Like, here you see the Kenyan
-- the elections -- Kenya elections in 2007 and the violence after that.
These four Kenyans get together and they put together this thing called Ushahidi which
allows people on the ground with their cell phones to report on the violence and troubles
that they are having at those times. Other people on the ground can then receive
updates based on where they are through their cell phones as well.
They essentially unleashed 45,000 citizen reporters to talk about so they could share
information about what was happening on the ground.
Three years later in Haiti, that same software is freely available because those four Kenyans
give it away for free and some students at Tufts University are able to implement it
for Ushahidi Haiti. You can see here they get over 100,000 messages coming in. They
are documenting these messages, placing them on the map. There are messages like this,
"We are looking for Baby Joseph who got buried under the university."
People on the ground get the updates, and these updates are mapped not using Google
Map but using Open Street Map which is collaboratively edited by thousands of people around the world.
Those are the maps that are ultimately on the ground.
And here you see Clark Craig from the U.S. Marine Corps' comment, "It is saving lives
every day. I wish I had time to document every example, but there are too many. I say with
confidence that there are hundreds of these kinds of success stories. The Marine Corps
is using your project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people
who need it most." I'll end there. Thanks.
[ Applause ] >>Michael Fitzgerald: Just one thing. We can
see why you're one of the leading media theorists, theorists on new media. I know you're also
a terrific educator. You were Professor of the Year in 2008. And you work a lot with
educating kids on these tools. What do you tell them?
>>Michael Wesch: Well, I think it's not so much what I tell them. It's how you set up
the environment. The key to me is not setting up a teaching
environment, but a learning environment. We focus so much on setting up teaching environments,
and I was just talking to Murray. Like, teaching is not actually possible. People can learn
but, it's really impossible to teach. But we set up these teaching environments where
you have all these neat fixed chairs in these neat rows, where it's basically an information
dump. Well, people don't learn well that way. You
need to set them up engaging real problems, you know, using -- working together and using
the right media at the right time, and then they end up practicing the tools that they
need to be great learners. So...