| Recorded at | February 02, 2005 |
|---|---|
| Event | TED2005 |
| Duration (min:sec) | 16:35 |
| Video Type | TED Stage Talk |
| Words per minute | 201.25 very fast |
| Readability (FK) | 54.06 medium |
| Speaker | James Surowiecki |
| Country | United States of America |
| Occupation | journalist, writer |
| Description | American journalist |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news -- and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.
| 1 | 00:19 | This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. | ||
| 2 | 00:23 | We stood on the railroad tracks | ||
| 3 | 00:25 | that ran between my friend's house and the beach. | ||
| 4 | 00:28 | The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, | ||
| 5 | 00:31 | but at that point the water had receded | ||
| 6 | 00:33 | to a level three or four feet below normal. | ||
| 7 | 00:36 | I'd never seen the reef here before. | ||
| 8 | 00:38 | There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. | ||
| 9 | 00:43 | Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. | ||
| 10 | 00:47 | They were trying to catch fish. | ||
| 11 | 00:49 | No one realized that this was a very bad idea. | ||
| 12 | 00:52 | The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. | ||
| 13 | 00:55 | I turned around to check on my friend's house. | ||
| 14 | 00:58 | Then someone on the tracks screamed. | ||
| 15 | 01:00 | Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running. | ||
| 16 | 01:04 | The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. | ||
| 17 | 01:08 | The children managed to run back onto the tracks. | ||
| 18 | 01:12 | No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. | ||
| 19 | 01:16 | In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks | ||
| 20 | 01:19 | and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. | ||
| 21 | 01:23 | It continued to rise. | ||
| 22 | 01:25 | I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. | ||
| 23 | 01:30 | He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, | ||
| 24 | 01:33 | and that he would rather die there than run. | ||
| 25 | 01:36 | A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house | ||
| 26 | 01:39 | to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. | ||
| 27 | 01:42 | An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. | ||
| 28 | 01:47 | The slum built on the railroad reservation | ||
| 29 | 01:50 | between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. | ||
| 30 | 01:54 | Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, | ||
| 31 | 01:57 | and no one was there when the water rose. | ||
| 32 | 01:59 | But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. | ||
| 33 | 02:03 | For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around -- | ||
| 34 | 02:07 | all of this was from the houses in the slum. | ||
| 35 | 02:10 | When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed. | ||
| 36 | 02:16 | This may seem hard to believe -- | ||
| 37 | 02:18 | unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports -- | ||
| 38 | 02:20 | but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. | ||
| 39 | 02:24 | When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes | ||
| 40 | 02:27 | and long-tail boats -- mercilessly, without warning -- | ||
| 41 | 02:29 | and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, | ||
| 42 | 02:33 | I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. | ||
| 43 | 02:36 | One of the scariest things about the tsunami | ||
| 44 | 02:38 | that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. | ||
| 45 | 02:42 | This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor | ||
| 46 | 02:45 | after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, | ||
| 47 | 02:48 | will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... | ||
| 48 | 02:53 | You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, | ||
| 49 | 02:56 | to catch a boat to the hospital. | ||
| 50 | 02:58 | We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. | ||
| 51 | 03:00 | We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, | ||
| 52 | 03:03 | but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, | ||
| 53 | 03:05 | then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. | ||
| 54 | 03:09 | We don't think another wave is coming right away. | ||
| 55 | 03:12 | At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, | ||
| 56 | 03:14 | I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, | ||
| 57 | 03:17 | but I strained to listen for information. | ||
| 58 | 03:19 | They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, | ||
| 59 | 03:22 | which triggered the massive tsunami. | ||
| 60 | 03:24 | Having this news was comforting in some small way | ||
| 61 | 03:26 | to understand what had just happened to us. | ||
| 62 | 03:28 | However, the report focused on what had already occurred | ||
| 63 | 03:31 | and offered no information on what to expect now. | ||
| 64 | 03:34 | In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, | ||
| 65 | 03:37 | and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours | ||
| 66 | 03:40 | knew anything with any certainty. | ||
| 67 | 03:43 | Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs | ||
| 68 | 03:49 | that essentially sprang up after it occurred. | ||
| 69 | 03:52 | I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami | ||
| 70 | 03:57 | that also were shown on blogs. | ||
| 71 | 03:59 | I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. | ||
| 72 | 04:01 | One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well. | ||
| 73 | 04:05 | (Screaming) | ||
| 74 | 04:19 | Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again. | ||
| 75 | 04:22 | Voice 2: It's coming again? | ||
| 76 | 04:24 | Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again. | ||
| 77 | 04:26 | Voice 2: Come get inside here. | ||
| 78 | 04:30 | Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? | ||
| 79 | 04:35 | Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! | ||
| 80 | 04:40 | [Unclear] | ||
| 81 | 04:44 | (Screaming) | ||
| 82 | 05:05 | They called me out here. | ||
| 83 | 05:21 | James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. | ||
| 84 | 05:27 | In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, | ||
| 85 | 05:31 | because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, | ||
| 86 | 05:35 | although initially -- that is, in that first day -- | ||
| 87 | 05:37 | there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video | ||
| 88 | 05:41 | and some people complained about this. | ||
| 89 | 05:43 | They said, "The blogsters let us down." | ||
| 90 | 05:46 | What became very clear was that, | ||
| 91 | 05:48 | within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, | ||
| 92 | 05:53 | and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened | ||
| 93 | 05:58 | in a way that we never had been able to get before. | ||
| 94 | 06:01 | And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected | ||
| 95 | 06:04 | writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with | ||
| 96 | 06:09 | a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense | ||
| 97 | 06:13 | of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us. | ||
| 98 | 06:18 | And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, | ||
| 99 | 06:22 | a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. | ||
| 100 | 06:28 | Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of -- | ||
| 101 | 06:30 | the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, | ||
| 102 | 06:32 | that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying -- to the somewhat more mundane. | ||
| 103 | 06:37 | Because when we think about blogs, | ||
| 104 | 06:39 | I think for most of us who are concerned about them, | ||
| 105 | 06:42 | we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. | ||
| 106 | 06:47 | And I want to ask three questions in this talk, | ||
| 107 | 06:49 | in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. | ||
| 108 | 06:53 | The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, | ||
| 109 | 06:56 | about what motivates people to do things? | ||
| 110 | 06:58 | The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility | ||
| 111 | 07:02 | of accessing a kind of collective intelligence | ||
| 112 | 07:06 | that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? | ||
| 113 | 07:09 | And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, | ||
| 114 | 07:13 | or the dark side of blogs as we know them? | ||
| 115 | 07:17 | OK, the first question: | ||
| 116 | 07:19 | What do they tell us about why people do things? | ||
| 117 | 07:21 | One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, | ||
| 118 | 07:24 | and, of course, the Internet more generally -- | ||
| 119 | 07:27 | and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, | ||
| 120 | 07:29 | but I think it is an important one to think about -- | ||
| 121 | 07:31 | is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content | ||
| 122 | 07:35 | every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, | ||
| 123 | 07:40 | linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, | ||
| 124 | 07:43 | are doing so primarily for free. | ||
| 125 | 07:46 | They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, | ||
| 126 | 07:50 | to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. | ||
| 127 | 07:55 | And this is -- at least, to a traditional economist -- somewhat remarkable, | ||
| 128 | 08:00 | because the traditional account of economic man would say that, | ||
| 129 | 08:04 | basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. | ||
| 130 | 08:09 | But instead, what we're finding on the Internet -- | ||
| 131 | 08:12 | and one of the great geniuses of it -- is that people have found a way | ||
| 132 | 08:16 | to work together without any money involved at all. | ||
| 133 | 08:19 | They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity. | ||
| 134 | 08:24 | The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "Coase's Penguin," | ||
| 135 | 08:29 | talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, | ||
| 136 | 08:33 | as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. | ||
| 137 | 08:36 | And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, | ||
| 138 | 08:38 | what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, | ||
| 139 | 08:42 | who are producing enormous amounts of material | ||
| 140 | 08:45 | for no reason other than to tell their stories. | ||
| 141 | 08:47 | That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. | ||
| 142 | 08:51 | And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities | ||
| 143 | 08:53 | for organizing a whole host of activities down the road. | ||
| 144 | 08:59 | So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us | ||
| 145 | 09:02 | is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, | ||
| 146 | 09:05 | and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, | ||
| 147 | 09:09 | or, you have to pay for it to be good, | ||
| 148 | 09:11 | but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products | ||
| 149 | 09:14 | without any money at all changing hands. | ||
| 150 | 09:17 | There are a few bloggers -- somewhere maybe around 20, now -- | ||
| 151 | 09:20 | who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few | ||
| 152 | 09:23 | who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, | ||
| 153 | 09:26 | but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it | ||
| 154 | 09:28 | or they love the attention, or whatever it is. | ||
| 155 | 09:30 | So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this | ||
| 156 | 09:32 | and, I think, is writing about this more, | ||
| 157 | 09:34 | but this notion of voluntary cooperation | ||
| 158 | 09:37 | is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about. | ||
| 159 | 09:40 | The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, | ||
| 160 | 09:45 | in terms of accessing collective intelligence? | ||
| 161 | 09:48 | You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." | ||
| 162 | 09:51 | And the premise of "The Wisdom of Crowds" is that, | ||
| 163 | 09:54 | under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. | ||
| 164 | 09:58 | And they can actually often be smarter | ||
| 165 | 10:00 | than even the smartest person within them. | ||
| 166 | 10:02 | The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people | ||
| 167 | 10:05 | to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. | ||
| 168 | 10:09 | If I had a jar of jellybeans | ||
| 169 | 10:11 | and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, | ||
| 170 | 10:14 | your average guess would be remarkably good. | ||
| 171 | 10:17 | It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent | ||
| 172 | 10:19 | of the number of beans in the jar, | ||
| 173 | 10:21 | and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. | ||
| 174 | 10:26 | There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, | ||
| 175 | 10:29 | but for the most part the group's guess | ||
| 176 | 10:32 | would be better than just about all of you. | ||
| 177 | 10:34 | And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work | ||
| 178 | 10:37 | in many more complicated situations. | ||
| 179 | 10:40 | For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, | ||
| 180 | 10:43 | they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. | ||
| 181 | 10:48 | In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack | ||
| 182 | 10:51 | is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. | ||
| 183 | 10:55 | You know, if you think about something like Google, | ||
| 184 | 10:57 | which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web | ||
| 185 | 11:01 | to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information -- | ||
| 186 | 11:05 | we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, | ||
| 187 | 11:08 | and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing | ||
| 188 | 11:11 | we call the "World Wide Web" actually has a remarkable order, | ||
| 189 | 11:15 | or a remarkable intelligence in it. | ||
| 190 | 11:18 | And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere. | ||
| 191 | 11:21 | Dan Gillmor -- whose book "We the Media" | ||
| 192 | 11:23 | is included in the gift pack -- | ||
| 193 | 11:25 | has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, | ||
| 194 | 11:28 | he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. | ||
| 195 | 11:32 | And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea | ||
| 196 | 11:35 | to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone | ||
| 197 | 11:37 | who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, | ||
| 198 | 11:41 | and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion | ||
| 199 | 11:44 | that he or she knows better than everyone else. | ||
| 200 | 11:49 | But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility | ||
| 201 | 11:52 | of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, | ||
| 202 | 11:57 | and that we know is available to us | ||
| 203 | 11:59 | if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. | ||
| 204 | 12:03 | Each blog post, each blog commentary | ||
| 205 | 12:06 | may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, | ||
| 206 | 12:10 | but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, | ||
| 207 | 12:15 | more often than not is going to give you a very interesting | ||
| 208 | 12:19 | and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. | ||
| 209 | 12:22 | So, that's the positive side of it. | ||
| 210 | 12:24 | That's the positive side of what is sometimes called | ||
| 211 | 12:26 | participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. -- | ||
| 212 | 12:31 | that, in fact, we are giving people | ||
| 213 | 12:34 | who have never been able to talk before a voice, | ||
| 214 | 12:37 | and we're able to access information that has always been there | ||
| 215 | 12:40 | but has essentially gone untapped. | ||
| 216 | 12:43 | But there is a dark side to this, | ||
| 217 | 12:45 | and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. | ||
| 218 | 12:48 | One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, | ||
| 219 | 12:51 | and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, | ||
| 220 | 12:53 | is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. | ||
| 221 | 12:57 | It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, | ||
| 222 | 13:00 | bottom-up structure of the Internet. | ||
| 223 | 13:02 | It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things -- | ||
| 224 | 13:07 | that being linked from one place to another, | ||
| 225 | 13:09 | that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. | ||
| 226 | 13:13 | And much of the time it is. | ||
| 227 | 13:15 | But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact -- | ||
| 228 | 13:19 | and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, | ||
| 229 | 13:23 | the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. | ||
| 230 | 13:27 | One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, | ||
| 231 | 13:30 | once you are linked in the network, | ||
| 232 | 13:32 | the network starts to shape your views | ||
| 233 | 13:35 | and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. | ||
| 234 | 13:38 | That's one of the things that defines what a network is. | ||
| 235 | 13:40 | A network is not just the product of its component parts. | ||
| 236 | 13:44 | It is something more than that. | ||
| 237 | 13:47 | It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. | ||
| 238 | 13:51 | Now, this has all these benefits: | ||
| 239 | 13:53 | it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; | ||
| 240 | 13:56 | it gives you access to a whole host of people; | ||
| 241 | 13:59 | it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. | ||
| 242 | 14:02 | But the problem is that groups are only smart | ||
| 243 | 14:06 | when the people in them are as independent as possible. | ||
| 244 | 14:10 | This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, | ||
| 245 | 14:13 | or the paradox of collective intelligence, | ||
| 246 | 14:15 | that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. | ||
| 247 | 14:20 | And networks make it harder for people to do that, | ||
| 248 | 14:24 | because they drive attention to the things that the network values. | ||
| 249 | 14:28 | So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere | ||
| 250 | 14:32 | is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, | ||
| 251 | 14:36 | it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, | ||
| 252 | 14:39 | because other people have, say, a link. | ||
| 253 | 14:42 | People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. | ||
| 254 | 14:45 | And that phenomenon | ||
| 255 | 14:48 | of piling on the existing links | ||
| 256 | 14:51 | is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, | ||
| 257 | 14:54 | particularly of the political blogosphere, | ||
| 258 | 14:57 | and it is one that essentially throws off | ||
| 259 | 15:00 | this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence | ||
| 260 | 15:03 | that blogs can manifest in the right conditions. | ||
| 261 | 15:06 | The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. | ||
| 262 | 15:10 | A lot of people talk about ants. | ||
| 263 | 15:12 | You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. | ||
| 264 | 15:14 | When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, | ||
| 265 | 15:17 | the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, | ||
| 266 | 15:21 | no individual ant knows what it's doing, | ||
| 267 | 15:23 | but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. | ||
| 268 | 15:29 | They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, | ||
| 269 | 15:32 | they're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. | ||
| 270 | 15:36 | So, the ant colony is a great model: | ||
| 271 | 15:38 | you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. | ||
| 272 | 15:41 | But we know that occasionally ants go astray, | ||
| 273 | 15:45 | and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, | ||
| 274 | 15:49 | they start to follow a simple rule -- | ||
| 275 | 15:51 | just do what the ant in front of you does. | ||
| 276 | 15:55 | And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. | ||
| 277 | 15:59 | And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long | ||
| 278 | 16:03 | and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around | ||
| 279 | 16:07 | in a circle until they died. | ||
| 280 | 16:10 | And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. | ||
| 281 | 16:13 | That's the thing we have to fear -- | ||
| 282 | 16:15 | is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die. | ||
| 283 | 16:19 | Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, | ||
| 284 | 16:22 | because one of the great things about the tsunami -- | ||
| 285 | 16:24 | in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, | ||
| 286 | 16:26 | not in terms of the tsunami itself -- | ||
| 287 | 16:28 | is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. | ||
| 288 | 16:32 | You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. | ||
| 289 | 16:35 | You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view | ||
| 290 | 16:39 | in a way that they hadn't before. | ||
| 291 | 16:41 | There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. | ||
| 292 | 16:46 | So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. | ||
| 293 | 16:49 | And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for. | ||
| 294 | 16:52 | Thank you very much. (Applause) |