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)