Good Quote/TED talks

Last month some of my trendy tech friends introduced me to an annual conference called TED. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design and the talks are typically centered around those types of subjects, though, there have been some from other fields (religion, for example).

I’ve really enjoyed these talks whenever I get free time throughout my day and I enjoyed one today that I thought worth quoting. The man’s name is Clay Shirky and he did a talk called “How cellphones, Twitter and Facebook can make history.” At the end of his talk he summed everything up with this statement:

“The media landscape that we knew – as familiar as it was and as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs – is increasingly slipping away in a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. In a world of media where the ‘former audience’ are now increasingly full-on participants; in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals, and it is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. Everything is changing.”

This sort of thing is especially interesting to me because it’s exactly the sort of thing I studied in some of my communication classes. It makes me wonder, though, what’s going to happen? That question may sound silly, but I really wonder sometimes: how different will technological mediums be in 2 or 3 decades when they’re already changing insanely fast as it is?

One of the staff at my church put it this way, “What if, one day, instead of saying ‘I don’t know’ when asked a question everyone just always said, ‘Hold on and I’ll check.'”

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