Clay Shirky on the future Delivery of news

Recorded at the U.S. State Department, Clay Shirky talks in this TED Talk about how technology becomes phenomenal, or its uses become broader and more important (or more socially interesting), once that particular technology becomes technically boring and “everybody takes them for granted.” He used the example of the monitoring of elections via SMS in Nigeria in 2007, followed by the 2008 U.S. election and how we monitored our votes using cameras and phones. In other words, a first world country followed the example of a third world country not because the technology was new or revolutionary, but because the technology had become so common that it was part of the social landscape and therefore seen purely as a tool for everyday use.

Shirky goes on to explain how the media landscape has changed forever. Some of this is new, most of it isn’t, but Shirky’s analysis and explanation of the current and future state of media is well worth the time to watch. In particular, how we create environments for discussion and shape that conversation, has become the ONLY effective way of delivering a message and defining that message as “news” or anything else is getting harder and harder to do. I think one of the most important changes that has occurred is that today, we learn more from the discussion of the news than we do from the initial delivery of that news. ‘Twitter, Facebook, and cellphones can now make history.’