Translator: Claude Almansi Reviewer: Denise RQ
Paul Levinson: So, how are you doing? (Audience) Good!
PL: That was a a nice introduction.
So I'm trying to decide should I talk about science fiction, time travel,
the First Amendment,
but I'll stick to what I'm supposed to talk about
which is I think one of the most revolutionary developments
in our history as a species.
What I'm talking about is a development
which for the first time has put the power
not only to communicate to one another which we've always had
but the power to communicate to the world at large
in everyone's hands
and not only through the written word
but through speech and audiovisual content.
That is a major path-breaking development
and let me just start by giving you a couple of examples,
and then we'll trace a little bit of the history of that
to put it into a proper context.
I'm sure most of you know
that Barack Obama won his reelection campaign a few months ago,
and I'm sure most of you also know, if you follow the news at all,
that one of the key factors in Obama's victory
was Mitt Romney's statement
that 47% the American population
were not of interest to him, his supporters, and the Republican Party.
In a very contemptuous way, Romney said
47% of Americans are only interested in a handout;
we're never going to get their vote anyway.
That was actually a statement
that a political candidate might well have made
to his or her rich supporters,
and in fact, that is indeed the physical premise
where Romney made that statement.
But as I'm sure most of you also know,
it was not just those people at that fundraising event
who heard and saw Romney make that statement.
In fact, eventually, most Americans saw that statement.
Why was that?
A bartender had brought in a little video camera
not much bigger at all than a typical smartphone,
had put it on the bar, had pointed it to Romney,
had turned on the recording and just let the video recording run
while Romney made that statement.
We could talk about the ethics of doing that.
Is it ethical to record someone
when they don't know they're being recorded?
I think those are very interesting issues there;
I think by and large,
it's not particularly the height of ethics
to record someone when they don't know they're being recorded,
but as in most things in life,
sometimes we have a collision
of ethical problems and ethical concerns.
And so, against that questionable practice
of recording someone without his or her knowledge,
you have the other important point
that don't the American people deserve to know
who they are voting for?
I think of those two issues
the greater good resides with
the American people knowing a little bit more about the candidates.
As a matter of fact,
what happened was this very hour of Romney making those remarks
was not only recorded on this little video camera
it was put up on YouTube, and it was eventually picked up by the mass media.
And so, although the actual recording took place in May,
it wasn't until September that everyone began talking about it.
One of the words in my talk is transmedia.
And it's important to recognize
that social media, in and of themselves,
don't have the power all the time to get information out to the world.
In fact, what you often need are the traditional mass media
to come into the system
and amplify the message
that the social medium has created
and put up to the world in the first place.
So that's a key component of this revolution.
It's transmedia, meaning it rarely operates
just from one medium going to other media
or just one medium going to other inconsequential media;
rather, it operates
by going from one medium to other media
and then hitting the jackpot of the more consequential mass media
which still have an enormous amount of power in our society.
Often, we hear people talking about television versus the Internet,
cable television versus YouTube,
the newspaper versus Twitter
as a source of news.
In fact that's not, I think,
the most accurate way to look at this current media environment,
because what you find on Twitter are links to news reporting
in the New York Times, in newspapers, on television, and so forth.
Conversely what you find in the New York Times,
and on conventional, traditional news broadcasts
are clips from YouTube and various events
that otherwise you would not see covered in the mass media.
So to use a fancy word, this is a synergistic
- or another phrase -
mutually catalytic development
in which the social media contribute, and the mass media contribute.
There's a transnational aspect to this as well,
and obviously, whoever is elected President of the United States
is by definition --
that event by definition is something that has international import.
So in fact Romney's 47% remark
was not only seen by Americans who voted in the election,
but was seen by people all over the world.
Marshall McLuhan, back in 1962,
observed that new electronic media
were turning the world into a global village,
and I'm sure many of you have heard that term "global village,"
but back in 1962,
the environment was really
neither global nor a village,
because back in 1962
and what got McLuhan to make that point in the first place,
what you had were national audiences watching television programs
there was no international communication really.
The first international satellite Telstar was launched in that period of time,
but it didn't really have any programming that was conveying to the world.
So it was not yet global nor was it a village,
because in a normal village
the citizens of that village can talk to one another
- just like you can talk to each other -
and can move a conversation along,
can question information not just receive information.
On traditional television,
there is a one-way communication
in which we are receivers of information,
but we have no way to really question or even comment upon the information.
All that changes when we get into social media.
So if you look at videos on YouTube,
some of them have thousands of comments,
and I always think, when I see that,
that, "Ah, here is democracy at work,"
because here in these comments, you see people
not only receiving news but sending back information,
sending back commentary.
So the global village that McLuhan talked about in 1962
was really a metaphor back then or a sign pointing to the future.
I often like to say that McLuhan was not writing about his time,
he was writing about our time:
not because he was clairvoyant, but because he understood
with such depth how human beings wanted to communicate
that he realized we would be moving in a direction
in which we did have a village.
And so, Romney's remarks were indeed
truly seen by a global audience.
Let me just give you another example, a very different example.
Occupy Wall Street --
which was a a global movement
that coincided to some extent with the Arab Spring
and let me tell you about one person in particular
who in my view did one of the best jobs
reporting what was happening in Occupy Wall Street.
We're talking about something that happened
a year or two ago.
I was teaching a class
at Fordham University in the Fall of 2011
when Occupy Wall Street was going strong in New York City,
around the country, around the world
I went back to my office, and I looked at my email.
And right before I was about to sign off and shut down my computer and drive home,
I looked one more time at my Twitter.
I saw her just a little tweet which said
Tim Pool giving live coverage
to an Occupy Wall Street protest that was going on at Baruch College.
Baruch College, if you don't know, is part of the City University of New York System
down in the a East Twenties in Manhattan.
I clicked on the link on YouTube and pretty quickly I was brought to a page
where there was live streaming coverage, literally, of that demonstration.
And I was able to see that in real time.
It would be hours before any of the mass media picked that up.
And, as was the case with YouTube,
there were people who were commenting on what they were seeing:
literally, the police moving in, pushing demonstrators out of the way,
in my view, illegally, because it was violating their First Amendment rights.
But all that was actually shown
in real time through Tim Pool's reporting.
And it was seen internationally, literally in real time, through his reporting.
And by the way Tim Pool continued to do that,
he had a New Year's Eve live feed
of another series of Occupy Wall Street events.
It shows you what a great party person I am.
It's amazing my wife puts up with me,
because that's what I was doing at least for an hour or two on New Year's Eve,
looking at Tim Pool's live coverage.
But that's extremely significant,
and by the way, it has legal import as well,
because the New York City police arrested many people
that they said were violating this or that law.
In most cases, on no evidence,
and in one case, I was very happy to see,
the case was thrown out of court,
the person who had been arrested by the NYPD was found not guilty
and the reason was Tim Pool had been there with his little phone
-- he just uses a smartphone
hooked up to an internet connection to report what happened
at another event in which someone had been arrested
for breaking through a police line which in fact never happened.
So this has profound legal consequences as well.
But let me put some of this in historical context,
and end with a little trip through history,
just so you have an idea of why I think
this is such a path-breaking development
in our communication history.
Once upon a time, a long long time ago,
we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago,
the only way we communicated was by talking,
and in that environment as limited as it was,
because you couldn't communicate beyond your physical surroundings,
anybody could talk, and anyone could respond.
And then, we moved into a written environment,
in which the information was saved, preserved
in scrolls, in parchment, papyrus, and eventually paper;
and it was the same thing: anyone could write, anyone could read,
but very limited distribution.
In the Renaissance, in the 1450s,
Gutenberg, as we all know, introduced the printing press.
Suddenly, millions and millions of people could read
what anyone had written.
But now, a problem was introduced:
who was to decide who would do that dissemination?
An editor or a publisher had to decide.
And so, what was set up was this profound asymmetry
of who knows how many ideas, how many written works were out there,
could have been out there?
But only a small fraction of them ever made it into print.
In the 20th century,
we had the introduction of electronic broadcasting media:
this improved greatly the dissemination.
Millions of people could hear the news, see the news instantly.
Extraordinary!
But once again, who decided what would be in that news?
The answer was again: a producer,
a television production crew, an editor.
And who knows how many stories were left uncovered?
It was not until the Internet that this began to change.
There actually was one little important development before the Internet:
the rise of photocopying.
McLuhan again said the Xerox turns every author into a publisher.
Unfortunately, Xerox manuscripts don't look like books,
but again McLuhan was onto something
because you didn't need anyone's permission to Xerox your manuscript.
But that is really small potatoes,
compared to the power that's now in all of your hands;
each and every one of you, you have an idea,
you have an opinion about something, you see something that's happening,
you don't need anyone's permission,
you can upload it to your YouTube channel, you can put it on your blog,
and you, like this bartender in Florida
who reported Mitt Romney's 47% comment,
you can change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)