and what it means for anybody who has a message they want to get out

to anywhere in the world.

And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories

about that transformation.

I'll start here. Last November there was a presidential election.

You probably read something about it in the papers.

And there was some concern that in some parts of the country

there might be voter suppression.

And so a plan came up to video the vote.

And the idea was that individual citizens

with phones capable of taking photos or making video

would document their polling places,

on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques.

And would upload this to a central place.

And that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation.

That citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes.

But also to help insure the sanctity of the vote overall.

So this is a pattern that assumes we're all in this together.

What matters here

isn't technical capital.

It's social capital.

These tools don't get socially interesting

until they get technologically boring.

It isn't when the shiny new tools show up

that their uses start permeating society.

It's when everybody is able to take them for granted.

Because now that media is increasingly social,

innovation can happen anywhere

that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together.

And so we're starting to see a media landscape

in which innovation is happening everywhere.

And moving from one spot to another.

That is a huge transformation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the moment we're living through,

the moment our historical generation is living through

is the largest increase in expressive capability

in human history.

Now that's a big claim. I'm going to try to back it up.

There are only four periods in the last 500 years

where media has changed enough to qualify for the label Revolution.

The first one is the famous one, the printing press.

Movable type, oil-based inks, that whole complex of innovations

that made printing possible

and turned Europe upside-down, starting in the middle of the 1400s.

Then a couple of hundred years ago

there was innovation in two way communication.

Conversational media, first the telegraph, then the telephone.

Slow, text based conversations,

then real-time voice based conversations.

Then, about 150 years ago,

there was a revolution in recorded media other than print.

First photos, then recorded sound,

then movies, all encoded onto physical objects.

And finally about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum

to send sound and images through the air, radio and television.

This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century.

This is what those of us of a certain age

grew up with, and are used to.

But there is a curious asymmetry here.

The media that is good at creating conversations

is no good at creating groups.

And that's good at creating groups

is no good at creating conversations.

If you want to have a conversation

in this world, you have it with one other person.

If you want to address a group, you get the same message

and you give it to everybody in the group.

Whether you're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press.

That was the media landscape

as we had it in the twentieth century.

And this is what changed.

This thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen

is Bill Cheswick's map of the Internet.

He traces the edges of the individual networks

and then color codes them.

The Internet is the first medium in history

that has native support for groups

and conversation at the same time.

Where as the phone gave us the one to one pattern.

And television, radio, magazines, books,

gave us the one to many pattern.

The Internet gives us the many to many pattern.

For the first time

media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations.

That's one of the big changes.

The second big change

is that as all media gets digitized

the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage

for all other media.

Meaning that phone calls migrate to the Internet.

Magazines migrate to the Internet. Movies migrate to the Internet.

And that means that every medium

is right next door to every other medium.

Put another way,

media is increasingly less just a source of information.

And it is increasingly more a site of coordination.

Because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something

can now gather around and talk to each other as well.

And the third big change

is that members of the former audience, as Dan Gilmore calls them,

can now also be producers and not consumers.

Every time a new consumer

joins this media landscape

a new producer joins as well.

Because the same equipment,

phones, computers,

let you consume and produce.

It's as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free.

It's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio

if you pressed the right buttons.

That is a huge change

in the media landscape we're used to.

And it's not just Internet or no Internet.

We've had the Internet in its public form

for almost 20 years now.

And it's still changing

as the media becomes more social.

It's still changing patterns

even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well.

Second story,

last May, China in the Sichuan province

had a terrible earthquake, 7.9 magnitude,

massive destruction in a wide area, as the Richter Scale has it.

And the earthquake was reported as it was happening.

People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings.

They were taking videos of buildings shaking.

They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service.

They were Twittering it.

And so as the quake was happening

the news was reported.

And because of the social connections,

Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school.

Or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China.

There were people listening all over the world, hearing this news.

The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter.

Twitter announced the existence of the quake

several minutes before the US Geological Survey

had anything up online for anybody to read.

The last time China had a quake of that magnitude

it took them three months to admit that it had happened.

(Laughter)

Now they might have liked to have done that here,

rather than seeing these pictures go up online.

But they weren't given that choice.

Because their own citizens beat them to the punch.

Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens,

rather than from the Xinhua News Agency.

And this stuff rippled like wildfire.

For a while there

the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter,

the global short messaging service,

nine of the top 10 links were about the quake.

People collating information,

pointing people to news sources,

pointing people to the US geological survey.

The 10th one was kittens on a treadmill, but that's the Internet for you.

(Laughter)

But nine of the 10 in those first hours.

And within half a day donation sites were up.

And donations were pouring in from all around the world.

This was an incredible, coordinated global response.

And the Chinese then, in one of their periods of media openness

decided that they were going to let it go.

That they were going to let this citizen reporting fly.

And then this happened.

People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence,

that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed,

because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day,

the reason so many school buildings collapsed

is that corrupt officials had taken bribes

to allow those building to be built to less than code.

And so they started, the citizen journalists started

reporting that as well. And there was an incredible picture.

You may have seen in on the front page of the New York Times.

A local official literally prostrated himself in the street,

in front of these protesters.

In order to get them to go away.

Essentially to say, "We will do anything to placate you.

just please stop protesting in public."

But these are people who have been radicalized.

Because thanks to the one child policy

they have lost everyone in their next generation.

Someone who has seen the death of a single child

now has nothing to lose.

And so the protest kept going.

And finally the Chinese cracked down.

That was enough of citizen media.

And so they began to arrest the protesters.

They began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on.

China is probably the most successful

manager of Internet censorship, in the world,

using something that is widely described as the Great Firewall of China.

And the Great Firewall of China

is a set of observation points

that assume that media is produced by professionals,

it mostly comes in from the outside world,

it comes in in relatively sparse chunks,

and it comes in relatively slowly.

And because of those four characteristics

they are able to filter it as it comes into the country.

But like the Maginot Line,

the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction

for this challenge.

Because not one of those four things was true in this environment.

The media was produced locally. It was produced by amateurs.

It was produced quickly. And it was produced at such an incredible abundance

that there was no way to filter it as it appeared.

And so now the Chinese government, who for a dozen years,

has quite successfully filtered the web,

is now in the position of having to decide

whether to allow or shut down entire services.

Because the transformation to amateur media

is so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way.

And in fact that is happening this week.

On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen

they just two days ago announced

that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter.

Because there was no way to filter it other than that.

They had to turn the spigot entirely off.

Now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages.

They also affect people who want to send messages.

Because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole.

Not just a particular strategy.

The classic media problem, from the twentieth century

is how does an organization have a message

that they want to get out

to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network.

And here is the twentieth century answer.

Bundle up the message. Send the same message to everybody.

National message. Targeted individuals.

Relatively sparse number of producers.

Very expensive to do.

So there is not a lot of competition.

This is how you reach people.

All of that is over.

We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global.

social, ubiquitous and cheap.

Now most organizations that are trying to send messages

to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience,

are now used to this change.