 Let me first introduce members of the panel. I'm meeting them myself for the first time, so tell me if I'm not pronouncing names correctly, such as yours, Marvin. Marvin Amoury, as a council and head of the Amoury Group of Law Firm, specializing in advising Silicon Valley companies on public policy issues. Dana Fisher is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, focuses on political decision making, grassroots activism, and civic participation. She's the author of Activism, Inc. Eric Tyler is with the Global Assets Project of the New America Foundation, is conducting research and advocacy at the intersection of technology, globalization, and economic development. And Colin Nagy is executive director of the Barbarian Group, previously a partner at Attention, a social media marketing organization. And I was struck by the fact that your bio said that you helped Tina Brown set up the Daily Beast. We're all very grateful for that. Some people would be grateful, some people would be angry. Well, we have a wide range of expertise here. And I'm not sure it all fits together so neatly. And I wanted to start with you, Eric, actually, because I think you're a little bit of the odd man on this panel. But you're here, I think, to remind us that networks, IT, technology, and connecting people can be disruptive in very different ways. Social media is not really your space, if I understand it. You're principally interested in mobile banking and in development. Just tell us, give us a couple of minutes on what you're up to in that space. Absolutely. I think one of the things that I've tried to keep in mind and as we have this conversation is that this is a global phenomenon, meaning that the rapid spread of technology and the growth of social media is happening all over the world. You look at 900 million or more Facebook users, 80% of these are outside of the United States and Canada. When you look at the 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions that are around the world, 2 thirds of these are in the developing markets. And so when you start to talk about the conversation that's going on in the global scale, you realize that not only companies have a new found and unprecedented opportunity to connect with new markets and new customers, but you also have to see individuals being able to connect with a diversity of different opinions, a diversity of different insights. And I think this is something that I've really started to touch on, not only when it comes to what's going on in the United States, with social media, but as well with mobile phone technology, which is exploding in the developing world. But what do you think about mobile phones and banking? Yes. Which is a sort of particular, very hot aspect of what's going on in the development space right now. Do you make a connection between that and social media? I mean, because you're talking about a specific product, aren't you, the ability of countries to leapfrog a stage in technology, go directly, I mean, not have wired telephone networks at all. Just go to and not have branch banking, but through technology, go directly to a new form of banking. What's the connection, if any, with social media? I think it speaks to the level of integration that technology has in our everyday lives. And so in that respect, there is a lot of parallels. So I was conducting research in Kenya, and I was taxing from a meeting, and I was leaving the taxi and fumbling for cash. And I remember the taxi app driver leaned over me, and he said, it'd be much easier if you could empace and use money. Right. And empace it for all of you that don't know is a mobile money transfer system that seamlessly and in real time transfers funds from one mobile phone to another. And the way that he said it was the same way that we would talk about Googling information about a colleague or something along those lines. And I think when you talk about social media and when you talk about communication technologies or mobile money, a lot of these same conversations are increasingly happen where we can learn from other markets. And when you can look at leapfrogging technologies in Kenya that are happening and that have a real place to learn from, I think it's a really interesting story. And I think increasingly we're gonna see this in the social media space as well. Yeah, it's very interesting. Okay. Well, listen, I wondered if we could perhaps explore some lines of skepticism concerning what we've just heard. I mean, we've heard from two leading practitioners in social media. And I think they did give a very optimistic take on this development. Now, I am instinctively optimistic about a technology that eliminates, I'm an economist by background, instinctively optimistic about a technology that eliminates the costs almost entirely of a critical communications function of broadcasting. But there are some problems, I think. There are a variety of issues raised. I wondered if we could focus on those. One distinction I'd just like to make at the beginning is between commerce and politics. Let's get those, let's get that distinction clear. There's, as it were, the commercial interest in social media and there's what social media can do for our politics, for our political system and for political engagement. Think we need to keep those two things on separate tracks. But just to get the ball rolling here, I wonder if I actually, just to give an overall take of how optimistic or pessimistic are you, that these technologies, that this, you know, tidal wave of innovation is actually going to make us better off, is gonna raise our welfare. Where do you stand on that spectrum? Is this a great thing or actually not such a great thing? Marvin. So I think it's a great thing. And one of the reasons I think I'm here is because I worked on the SOPA and PIPA campaign which involves a lot of social media, a lot of outreach through Twitter and Facebook. Partly in order to save Twitter and Facebook was our argument. And one of the reasons why I'm optimistic is because I don't think of social media as media or as broadcast. So like 15 years ago when people started using the internet, they'd talk about cyberspace. Like it was a different space and totally different. And a few years later, it was just a network for connecting all of us. And when I think of Facebook and Twitter and other social media, to me they're not broadcast media or like your TV screen. They're more applications that connect all of us. They're more like your dinner conversation than the TV screen. And so when you try to think about how do I engage people on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest? But you realize that they have their own conversations and you want to be part of that conversation rather than to broadcast at them. So that's where the main reason I'm actually optimistic about them. I think they're here to stay. I think the entire web is social. Even when you go to cnn.com, there's a Facebook button, a tweet button. When I read stories on NPR on my phone, I just press tweet, I share. And so I think it's a sort of a way of connecting people and not a different medium or a different cyberspace. So that's why I'm optimistic. Okay, Diana, what do you think? Well, I would say I'm also optimistic but for different reasons. I think that social media in total is a wonderful channel that is connecting people in new and innovative ways. However, at least what my research and a lot of other research has found is that it's a great way of getting connected, but it's not a great way of staying involved. And it's not, as Matt was saying before, it's not a great way of affecting change, but rather it's a way of beginning the conversation. And so I think that it will continue to diffuse and inundate people with information and allow them access and channels to make change and to get politically involved. I mean, one wonderful example would be the My Barack Obama campaign website, the Mybo website from the last campaign because it did a wonderful job of getting people on, many of whom had not been involved before, many of whom were young people. And then it channeled them into a lot of different face-to-face activities. And it was the face-to-face activities that made long-lasting campaign supporters, activists, and potentially people who will cause trouble in the next election. So you're thinking of it as an enabler of that kind of interaction rather than a substitute for that kind of interaction? Oh, most definitely. I mean, it's a channel. It's a channel that perhaps there are too many voices that are coming into the channel so that people are inundated with information, but it's a channel that can be used and harnessed in many ways, but most of them end up being about real face-to-face communication, not just about what's happening with people that you never talk to in person. I think, Colin, I just reread a wonderful book, The Powers That Be, about the rise of radio and television, how ridiculously disruptive they were at the time. And it's something that provides a lot of necessary context as you're thinking about the evolution of social media and everything that's going on right now. I do think any pessimism that I would have is likely rooted in the fact that we are in this kind of gawky adolescent phase where things are kind of like working themselves out. I do get a little frustrated in seeing how, you know, misinformation and intentional kind of, intentionally disingenuous things can actually travel pretty quickly. And I think that's a little scary because with the role of the Financial Times and the Atlantic and the New York Times, like typically there's a lot of editorial oversight and there's a lot of institutional professionalism. And I think that that's one of the pessimistic things. Overall, I do think that this is just natural evolution of media. It's very interesting. It's like a coral reef. It's like changing every day. But we are in this very transitional adolescent phase and sometimes it's not very pretty. Okay, and you're open-minded about where it might go. I was just trying to make sense of it and I'm also trying to look at the kind of historical analogs to make sense of it because when you look at the rise of radio, when you look at the rise of television, there's a lot of kind of correlations into how disruptive and how the world didn't know what to make of it. And I think that we're in that really interesting phase right now, so as an interested observer of this, I think it's important to keep an open mind. I can't say that I'm 100% optimistic or I can't say that I'm 100% pessimistic. Okay, okay. Do you have anything to add on this? Yeah, I was just... On the optimism scale. I would just say I'm a cautious optimist, in many respects, so meaning that there's a great leveling and there's a tremendous increase in the number of different players from a wide range of backgrounds that are accessing new technologies. However, as the panel before discussed, access, just because you're connected, doesn't actually necessarily lead to change. And making that next step is something that we're still seeing and it still remains to be seen. I think it's gonna be the opportunities there, but it's still early on and we'll just see how it goes. Let me see if I can sort of, just for the sake of argument, push us in a more pessimistic direction. I mean, let's start with the commerce side. I was struck by the episode that we had described in the previous session over the response through social media to that product, the KitKat ad that was subverted by Greenpeace, successful social media campaign, the company changed its sourcing of the product. The thought that went through my head when I heard that story and knowing nothing about the details was, well, I wonder how the farmers producing the palm oil in the country in question thought about that. I mean, there are cases where pressure, before the age of social media, as it were, grassroots pressure has forced companies to make changes which arguably don't serve a wider public interest. It brings, what I'm raising here is the question of what, to what extent can we assume that information is knowledge and knowledge is wisdom, right? Mere activity, mere engagement is not necessarily a good thing. It has to be intelligent. That's a great point. I think that the scary thing too is a level of superficial engagement where sometimes these platforms allow for very kind of like light touch engagement and it can kind of come together and be the digital equivalent of a bunch of people with like pitchforks storming a house without actually those people necessarily knowing a lot of the context and background to it. So I think that there's gonna be two sides to all of this. I mean, for every one of those kind of scary examples, there's probably three or four examples of a grassroots community or a community or an activist group that has kind of come together and coalesce to like do something interesting. So I do agree with the point that very superficial advocacy is kind of scary. And also, I remember like four or five years ago I was talking to Financial Times about this and my question was like, as a presidential candidate, would you rather have like 10,000 followers or friends where all they had to do is click like or would you have like five hardcore organizers? So there's varying levels of this, you know. Of this participation. Well, I would just add that there's nothing really new about the phenomenon you're talking about. I mean, if you read about or remember the time that during the World Bank protests and protests against globalization, Seattle in 1999, there was all this discussion of the people who took to the streets because they really wanted to just throw a rock through Starbucks window. Were they educated people about international financial institutions? Did they really understand global processes and how the economy was shifting? No, many of them did not. No, but there's a scale issue here, right? I mean, whether the Seattle protest is right or wrong, it was a remarkable event because it was such an outlier. It was so unusual to have that gathering, that intensity, people paid attention. Social media sort of scaling that up so that politicians on one side and companies on the other exposed that kind of pressure constantly. Well, the protest movement around globalization actually consistently brought out very large groups of people around the world, I mean, including the World Economic Forum protests that happened in New York City in February after 9-11. So it's actually not that Seattle was an outlier. Seattle was part of a wave of contention that happened around the world. It is true that there are more people who are engaged on social media than they were taking to the streets, although there's a very big difference as was being discussed already between people who are just retweeting something and people actually getting off their butts and going downstairs and actually outside or even having to take public transit or get to a protest event. And that's, I think, the big question about how much social change can you make while you're sitting somewhere on your phone? I'm gonna defend superficial activism and unintelligent activism as well. And for two reasons. Who's to judge what's intelligent or what's intelligent activism? Before the internet, we had curators of content, the news editors, the big TV news organizations, and now we have things like Wikipedia and Amazon reviews. And as it turns out, average Americans know a lot about everything on Wikipedia. And according to studies, the information on Wikipedia, even on scientific matters, is just as accurate or inaccurate as the information on Britannica. So as it turns out, I do think there's a lot of intelligent activism. There's no way to determine what's intelligent and unintelligent beyond a democratic discourse. It's like the Winston Churchill line, democracy is the worst of all governmental systems except all the others that could be tried. So it's sort of in an imperfect world that we have, we sort of are stuck with uneducated activism and educated activism. And the second reason I'll defend uneducated activism. Like during the SOPA and PIPA campaign, which I know better than the WTO protests, there were a lot of people who didn't know much about copyright, who didn't know much about the First Amendment, didn't know about 230 immunity, the DMCA. But the DMCA or 230 immunity, two different communities. And but we could explain to them in simple terms what the law was going to do, what the effect was and get people who were credible to the mass of slaktivists to be involved when it mattered on an issue on a particular day. And I don't think that they were misguided. I think that we informed them that there was a democratic dialogue going on and we could have, had we lost, we would have thought they were misinformed. We had our chance. Right. I only disagree with you to the, and what you said on one respect though, which is that it seems to me Wikipedia is like the paradigm instance of intelligent activism as it were. It is a social networking phenomenon and an amazingly successful one. I think a lot of people, including me ahead of time would have said, there's no way this is going to work. Can you be serious? But it's a triumph. I mean, it's an astonishing thing. So if nothing else, it shows you, there are different kinds of social media. But the problem with unintelligent activism, in other words, not Wikipedia, is that, well, one might argue that a problem is that it makes it harder to give intelligent answers to difficult questions. I mean, the classic case would be what do you think of a certain policy proposal? Do you want your taxes up or down? Tax cuts, like. What about public spending? Does that need to be raised or lowered? High public spending on essential public services, like. You know, politics isn't about liking a series of proposals. It's about balancing things. In other words, it's complicated. It's not like, is this a good novel? Does this candy bar taste good? It requires much subtler form of thinking. And the question I'm raising is whether these, whether social media actually facilitate a more sophisticated form of thinking or actually get in the way of it. I think that it's problematic to use this intelligent, unintelligent dichotomy in terms of thinking about people's engagement through social media or other ways because there have always been people who get more or less engaged and educated on issues before they get involved. That's nothing new. It's the fact that the social media provides a channel for more people and more people are using it so that they can, in some cases, bypass traditional institutions that would otherwise provide the information and diffuse it. But at the same time, what the poll shows is that people, when they're trying to educate themselves, tend to go to the same traditional places they used to before and that people, because they're learning more potentially, are less trustworthy or trust, not trustworthy, but trusting of traditional institutions. Were you surprised by that, by the way? I was a little surprised by that poll finding that their traditional institutions are still so trusted. Well, because in a lot of cases, the traditional institutions are the least trusted, right? So it was friends and family, traditional news, academic, so I was very happy about that, scientist. So I actually wasn't surprised at all. But also, there's not that big of a difference between people who use social media and people don't, which is awesome. That was also very, very striking. And again, I think surprising. The political profiles were almost identical, weren't they? I mean, to within a percentage point, use of social media no different from the population at large. Yeah. I think a helpful lens to sometimes, a more helpful lens to look at this through is different degrees of activism. So maybe on one side, on the minimalist side, you have liking on a Facebook like, and then editing a Wikipedia page, contacting your representative and then going out in protest. And when you look at formally what, or traditionally what people were doing before being connected to these digital realms and then what now they're allowed to do based on what was previously accessible to them, that's more of a helpful kind of parallel to run through. Right. And it may be partly to do with the intensity of the engagement, right? Exactly. That's the hallmark of Wikipedia. It demands a fairly intense engagement from the activists, so to speak, who are involved. But in other domains, I'm sort of conscious of those, you know, a very low signal to noise ratio. I mean, when I read the comments threads on my columns or on other people's columns, you know, nine out of 10 or maybe more make me think, why am I even bothering? And that one out of 10, you think, good point. I think that's an important distinction and it's starting to change a little bit because in the past I would be blown away by reading the Washington Post comments, which I think at one point were kind of anonymous so you could just, you know, troll 743, you know. And now, you know, as more sites are kind of incorporating, you know, Facebook and actual identity and your identity is tied to, you know, what you comment. Sometimes I think that that's actually a net positive. There was a really hilarious thing, I remember in the early days of the Daily Beast where it was an article about like, you know, the Iranian nuclear program. And there were two or three, like there was two nuclear scientists like battling it out in the comments, being like, oh, the T-472 processor is not, it was like, wow, this is amazing, you know. Like this is actually helping move this story forward. But I would say that that's the exception and not the rule because most of the comments are like, first, you know, or like. Right, right. We also should keep in mind compared to what? And so, sure there might be nine out of 10 comments that are not very bright, but compared to what? Compared to talk radio? A lot of people think that most of it's a silence. It's really what I was comparing. Okay, sure. But if we're gonna compare it to other social media, right, compared to talk radio, there's a very high noise to signal ratio there. Compared to TV, you know, there's, you know, people think that there's 200 channels and nothing on. Even local TV news is often not all that informative. And so is, you know, the internet or these sort of social applications, are they perfect? No, is it a Athenian democracy? Not yet, but they're better than what we had before. There's not one person who makes a great comment. There's that one person on YouTube who can actually sing and it's awesome and you share it with your friends. There's that one person who has a blog and they're actually a good, thoughtful writer. And you'd never seen them on TV commenting. That's a great point. I think the way I've been thinking about a lot of this lately is, you know, social media, it's really like nothing new. I mean, there's been like message boards and forums and things like that since like very early on in the internet. But if you think about this as like, the plumbing is just getting much, much more efficient and it's continuing to do so. And I think that, you know, relating back to the mobile example that we had earlier, it's like, that's, maybe that's not social media, but this communications infrastructure, whether it's Facebook or whether it's the democratization of kind of mobile technology in developing countries, like the network is getting a lot more efficient and with that comes a lot of really good, interesting things, but a lot of like kind of scary challenges as well. And I think what's also helpful to keep in mind is that we're very much so at the tip of the iceberg and the rate that technology changes things in the rapid rate of growth and just transforming different sectors in the rise of different players and the demise of others, it's really exciting, but we're learning constantly and we're still working out the kinks as you were saying. And I think it's gonna be a constantly evolving channels and evolving practices. One thing that struck me, in fact, it just came up again, it was in the first session as well as this issue of anonymous commenting on social media sites. In a way, that was a slightly surprising convention that very quickly got very established and it's now difficult to displace. I myself think it would be a good thing if people published their email address alongside that comment. One of the things that, well, of course, one of the results of that, this goes to the issues we're discussing, I think, is that there'd be far fewer comments, right? People would not want to just, you know, issue a stream of profanities or fewer people would want to do that if they had to have their email address on it, but query might that be a good thing? I think there's fewer better comments. There's two schools of thought with this. I mean, on one side you have Facebook really driving identity, like personal identity as being kind of your passport around the internet and then the other school of thought which is a little bit more of like the Wild West internet is like Chris Poole who started 4chan which is kind of like the weird Pandora's box of the internet where like weird things come from. But actually sometimes amazing things and sometimes terribly disturbing things. You don't know what you're gonna get. But the point is is like, he has actually a fairly interesting contrarian point is that sometimes anonymity allows people to say things, create things, do things that they would never do as like, you know, as you're signing their name to and sometimes those things are kind of like interesting and constructive. So it's a very interesting debate on the role of, because the early days of the internet, a lot of people just had like a screen name or a handle or whatever, you know. I think my, I can't even remember my first AOL screen name but it was probably a bunch of numbers and like, you know. Right. So in terms of civil discourse and in terms of things that are like constructive having identity attached to it, I think is probably a productive thing. But in terms of like the weird whimsical strange side of the internet, you know, sometimes anonymity helps push that along. And it's not always bad stuff that comes out of that, you know. If we go global, that's where the debate has been most marked. Twitter allows anonymous speakers. Facebook has a real name policy. And if you're using your real name and you're a protest from the Middle East, that's, that can result in you getting, you know, taken in all of your Facebook, you know, handing over your password, all of your friends getting taken in. And so there's often been protection for anonymous speech. And even in the US, right, you probably want two different platforms or two different ways of engaging with the world. Sometimes you engage with the world, everyone knows who you are. Sometimes you're anonymous and you take advantage of that anonymity even in the real world. And that's a good thing. I think so. I'm sure you were rude to someone in the last year and you're happy that I know your name. I'm never rude, not you, but me maybe. Well, I think also though there's an important point that Marvin's rating with regard to, you know, there's a question of civic participation, political discourse, but then there's also civil disobedience for people to feel comfortable engaging, you know, hopefully a civil way of engaging in, you know, disagreeing with institutions, it makes it a lot easier when you can be, you know, nameless and faceless if you want to participate in a protest. I mean, certainly Arab Spring shows us that. And, you know, to a smaller degree, if you think back to the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York, where the police rounded up anybody who was discussing doing civil disobedience and they basically were held because they were identified through specific chat rooms et cetera and so forth. So, I mean, there are different ways that people want to get involved and certainly the quality of the discourse is probably improved when you have to identify yourself and create an, you know, identify yourself clearly, but there are ways that people may have to get involved where if you want to speak against the powers that be, it's much better if you are anonymous or not known for who you really are. Just a quick point. That's both freedom of speech and association of gathering in different groups than doing that anonymously. Right. Marvin, you said that, you know, this isn't Athenian democracy. I mean, one question is whether in the end it could be. I mean, I'm a skeptic about this myself because, you know, I'm not sure that as it were, mere engagement is what's required. It's the point I was making earlier. Nonetheless, and also as the polls say, you know, people don't trust our political institutions and, you know, more engagement is not a solution to that problem. I mean, that may be the core of the problem. Nonetheless, there's a spectrum here between, you know, traditional representative democracy where basically you vote for somebody, let them get on with it and just sort of absent yourself from the process versus a more participatory or direct democracy where you're engaged in a more intense way all the time. And you see models like this out there in the world. Sweden, Switzerland has a sort of direct democratic system with lots and lots of referendums and so on. You could make the case that California is the same. Switzerland seems to work. California doesn't seem to work. I wonder if, you know, if you speculate about where we might be, you know, in 10 or 20 years, do you see us moving away from, you know, a traditional, as it were, a parliamentary style of representative democracy towards a more intensely engaged, direct democracy? Is that something that you might envisage? So I'll take a crack. So when I think of the public not trusting our institutions, I, you know, it's one of those things where if you're selling garbage, no matter what your communication is, people don't wanna buy it. And so when we look at our institutions, I think a lot of people, you know, think that, you know, lobbyists run DC and it's a broken political system and the Democrats and Republicans aren't working together. And every two years or four years, there's all these hate campaign ads for 30 seconds on their TV screen. And so I think there's actually a legitimate problem that people recognize and no matter, you know, however often Barack Obama tweets, although I love his tweets, and you're not gonna solve that trust problem with the American public. And so I'm trying to predict what happens five, 10 years from now in terms of our democracy will, you know, the tools alone aren't enough people have to be, you know, we need a solid education system, et cetera. But on the other side, we have not only these decentralized tools for communicating, we have the super PACs. We have the sort of established players in the political system. And it's possible that the public will just feel less and less engaged because they can't compete with a $20 million check written by a billionaire in Las Vegas. So in terms of how I see people engaged on politics, I think there's a lot of disillusion around all the money in politics and whether or not their voice matters because they don't have a $20 million check behind their tweet. Right. I have a quick, just quick follow up on that. I think something that could have been completely a world historical event didn't happen two days ago, and it's really interesting. So some dude hacked into Mitt Romney at hotmail.com and gave Gawker the password, right? Gawker is like, okay, we're gonna get sued into oblivion so we're not gonna do this. But if they did, that could have completely altered the course of this election. Who knows what's in Mitt Romney's archive of hotmail emails from the past five years, right? So it's like, your point about, are we gonna have a more direct democracy or whatever? I think what's happening is like, there is a tremendous amount more transparency that's coming from a good side and also with things like anonymous and what potentially could have happened yesterday, like kind of a scary side too. And that full out transparency has never really been seen before. So I think that that correlates to kind of the idea that you were getting at in a way that's weird. Cause I was just surprised that that story didn't get picked up more because you look at what Gawker did with the iPhone 4 leak and things like that. Normally they're pretty punk rock about things. I mean, imagine doing a data dump of Mitt Romney's emails from his hotmail. Is that ethical? Like, totally not. Like, do I condone that? No, it's terrible, you know? But that could be a world historical event, right? And so I just think that's kind of an interesting way to think about some of this stuff. Right. Danny, you had something to add? I did. And my train of thought has been... Well, let me just, let me give you a second to think. One of the things that occurred to me when Colin was speaking was this point which we've heard before, you know, that we're at the start of an extraordinary cultural revolution here. You know, this presumption of a private domain. I mean, I think of this especially, you know, with Facebook, you know, my kids are on Facebook. You know, they post freely. They, you know, they post recklessly. This stuff is never going to go away. It's with them forever. I mean, one thing we know for sure is that 30 years from now, we'll know a lot more about the politicians we're elected. The hotmail inbox is your entire Facebook data. I remember what I was going to say. What I thought was also, excuse me, interesting about the poll was also that if there was a difference in trust between local institutions and these national institutions, national corporations, and that's very interesting if we go back to thinking about how all politics is local. Because I think that social media and the way that social media can work, if you think about some of the examples that Matt provided, it really is effective in creating much more of a participatory democracy at the local level. It's actually feasible and possible. It's feasible and possible even in a place like Sweden wherein there are so many fewer people and people are able to actually meet and discuss and communicate with one another and identify one another. Whereas in the United States, that's just not possible. But when people want to get involved, it makes a lot more sense to get involved in what's going on locally rather than trying to get involved and take on a super PAC. Right. Can I make one point about Sweden? If you follow Sweden's Twitter feed, a different Swedish person a week has the feed. So imagine if the Barack Obama Twitter feed was just a different random person in the country every week. Okay. We're gonna take some questions from the audience in a second. Lionel, do you wanna tell us what we found out last time? Yeah. Happy to. Thanks, Clive. We have our results and we found that compared to 10 to 15 years ago, 66% of you do believe that you as a consumer have more influence in your dealings and negotiations with major corporations. 24% feel about the same and 11% of you say that you feel like you have less influence. And while we've been listening and texting our results, some of you have been tweeting in questions and we actually do have another question from Twitter for the panel. Digital Tim Grant would like to know what about the effect of social media on children? There are already a number of addiction programs. So what are your thoughts on social media and you? Facebook just announced that they wanna allow like people under 13 to join cause maybe their user growth is starting to plateau and they need to find new people. But I think that that's kind of a very interesting question because we know that behaviorally, mobile devices, a lot of these kind of like social inputs coming back at you are starting to be seen as kind of like addictive. You know, if someone posts something and you get a whole bunch of likes back and you're getting this like social validation, I could see how that probably is touching on like a little area of your brain. It's like, hmm, this is good. And I think that that's, you know, I'm not a behavioral scientist, but I would assume that like, that's something that you can probably get unhealthily addicted to. There's a certain nose lighting up. Yeah, yeah, right. So yeah, I think that that's probably something that needs to be metered or observed with kind of like younger people. What do you make of that issue? You know, being a big fan of Wikipedia, I actually want to call on expertise from the crowd. Angela, do you have a thought on this? So this is Angela Campbell. She's a professor at Georgetown. She represents a lot of the children's groups on internet issues, including Children Now, American Academy of Pediatrics, other groups like that. Do you have, she's the woman I would ask if I had this question posed to me. Again, it's a complicated question because I think one of the problems with kids using social media is unlike the televisions that which is in the living room, maybe the kids bedroom where the parents are seeing it, they don't know what's going on. And I don't think most parents have any idea what their kids are doing online and what they're doing on Facebook, a lot of times because the parents don't understand the technologies as well as the kids do. I mean, Facebook is not, they claim they don't allow people under 13 and they kick people off, but in fact there's lots and lots of kids on Facebook. Dora the Explorer has her own Facebook site page. So I think it's, if Facebook does do it, I think there's gonna have to be some real serious thought to what protections could meaningfully, how to make sure parents are involved for one thing and also that kids aren't taken advantage of because it's just so many ways they can be manipulated and they're so much more vulnerable, not only because, I mean, because they're just so young, they don't have the life experience and then this record that gets created for the rest of their life and people have talked about an eraser button and I skeptical that that could work and I think it has other problems, but I think we just don't know the answer and it's gonna be really tough till we figure it out. Thanks, thanks very much. My friend, Noah Breyer had this idea of a social network for people that just like self-destructed after you graduate from college. That's a great idea, that's a business proposition right there. The Kaiser Family Foundation came out with a semi-recent study that looked at screen time with youth and children and what they saw is that there's an ever increasing amount of time and I forget the exact hours but there's something staggering of 12 hours per day was spent on screen and I think that these more or less are inevitable trends and you see some of these rising non-profits and initiatives like Khan Academy who are working to utilize this screen time and utilize already this integration with computers for academic and learning purposes and I think a lot of these startups and a lot of these trends are increasingly gonna happen because these trends don't seem to be stopping. Yeah, that's another possible convergence and in fact, the Atlantic had a panel on this the other day on new technologies in education and the connection with social media wasn't made very strongly but that's obviously one dimension of this thing. It's really exciting as well. Okay, let's see if we have any questions in the room. Sir, look back for that. Let's wait for the microphone. Yes, thanks, Rob Colorinam with an equity group. Question with respect to the consumer side and a little bit on infrastructure. Are you seeing that communities are pulling together their either frustrations when they don't have either broadband access or some of these latest vehicles? People are talking about it, it creates buzz but let's say their councilmen or their towns don't have that speed or those gadgets available at a fair price. I'd be curious to see your thoughts there and if you could apply that a little bit internationally as well, it'd be interesting. Digital divide, who wants to comment on that? When we were discussing mobile payments now all I could think of is, wow, Africa is many years ahead of us on mobile payments. The major carriers, AT&T and Verizon and I think T-Mobile are working together on a project called ISIS, it's joint venture, they're gonna roll it out. There was a controversy over Google Wallet which was gonna compete with this new technology that Verizon didn't let on their phones and so one of the problems is that AT&T and Verizon wanna sort of control the ecosystem and control mobile payments and that's one of the reasons Verizon is several years behind. And when we look at the digital divide, why do a lot of communities not have broadband? It's partly because it's not profitable and we don't have good policies to ensure that it would be profitable and that's sort of a government corporate problem based on lobbying and bad policy. So we have two actual broadband problems. Broadband problem one, not enough broadband in rural areas or a lot of people who just don't have access, too expensive, they need satellites which is very slow. Second broadband problem is in our cities. When you compare the kinds of networks we have in Tokyo and Paris and the prices and the speeds, you'll have versus those that you have in New York or Washington DC or San Francisco, the networks abroad are sometimes 10 times faster, far less expensive, it's possible that the best social applications, the best applications period are gonna come from abroad and be drivers for innovation, they're not here. And so we sort of have two main problems of infrastructure and it's largely a policy failure, I think. There are some communities, some local areas trying to invest in mesh networking or there's the Google Fiber Project in Kansas City and there are other sort of projects out there but this is a constant debate in the broadband community and in some of the social justice communities. All right, what's your take on this? Because it is interesting, isn't it, that so much of the innovation in one aspect of this revolution is going on in poor countries. Absolutely, and I think that this concern for the digital divide is very real. And just to touch on your point, in the developing world, I believe a lot of the new connections to the internet will happen over the mobile phone. So then you have to look at the players who are driving this forward and it's the mobile network operators but at the end of the day, these are profit-driven companies. And so when it comes to these extremely rural areas, the infrastructure is developing at a rapid rate but there's always gonna be these constituencies who aren't able to be reached but these new technologies like mobile phone technologies are bridging the gap. If we did a survey, a poll of everybody in this room and what type of mobile phone they had, I would say the majority in this room would have a smart mobile technology. In the developing world, that is different. They're dumb phones who aren't able to connect to the internet. However... And the bank is done by through text or text messaging. Exactly, and so how do you... And again, it just speaks to the fact that frugal innovations are happening but then also increasingly other more advanced developments are happening as well that are gonna kind of bridge forward and take the next step towards this ending the digital divide but again, it's gonna be time to come when we fully realize, if ever realize, the completion or the end of the digital divide. Okay, I'll take another question. Just wait for the mic, please. Tell us who you are. I'm Mitzi Worth, I'm with the Naval Postgraduate School. I wanna ask about the consequences of human interaction because a few weeks ago I was at a session with two congressmen, or actually I guess they were senators and they were talking about how they just don't talk to one another and in fact the most recent example of that is they used to talk to one another when they would go through the corridors to vote. Now they're all tweeting or getting their internet messages and so we're getting no human communication up there or just getting what I call mechanical and I think the emotional aspects of that and the knowledge aspects of that and the voting aspects of that are very serious for our country. I think that's an interesting point because one of the inventions that has catalyzed more passive aggressive behavior in the world is email. Sometimes if you have to reprimand someone it's like maybe I'll do it over email so I don't have to do it. And I think that that is kind of a scary thing. I think people have to really kind of figure out what the balanced diet of all of this is and a substantial portion of that needs to be kind of like interpersonal, like actual relationships and face-to-face conversation but I do think that on the flip side of that the strange thing is I'm now in touch with more people that probably in previous years would have kind of evaporated in my life, people that I knew when I was like five years old. How often are you permanently connected to that person? That's a good thing. That's a good thing. Sometimes when these people are posting dumb things on Facebook, I'm like, maybe I'll mute you a little bit. This is something you stress, isn't it, Dana, in your work that there's no substitute for the face-to-face? Definitely, but I would just, to respond to Mitzi's comment though, what's interesting is there's no question that the lack of personal contact is gonna have implications, but politically what's interesting is for representatives and senators, elected officials of all sorts, some could argue that if they're spending their time communicating back to constituents rather than talking to one another within the ivory tower or the hallowed halls, maybe that's more important. I don't know, but I mean that would be the flip side, the alternative interpretation is if they're actually communicating with and looking at perhaps reading what constituents want before they get to a vote rather than talking to their neighbor while they walk over to cast their ballot, maybe that's more useful. And the ability of those constituents to talk in an unfiltered way to them, that's not through an intermediary. But you don't think that's the insight that's eroded that, too. I think the lack of face-to-face relationships is having a real impact on their ability to compromise because they don't have any relationship, they don't have anything at stake in dealing with somebody they don't know, and so it's really easy to say, I don't care about what you're after, I only want what I'm after. So I have a thought. I'm not sure the internet is to blame here, but if you were to go to a Silicon Valley company that's trying to get innovation and collaboration among everyone working there, you'd see a room that has a whole bunch of little, it's just a wide open room and there aren't offices, there aren't doors, people just jump on and collaborate with each other. And when you were talking, I thought, that's how we should have our congressmen, they should be in this big room, like the Twitter room or whatever, and they should all have desks right next to each other, they should be forced to collaborate and talk to each other. And that's taking it one step too far, but everything about Capitol Hill just feels like an old work environment that's not very innovative or collaborative. And there are lots of different things about the architecture of it that are probably getting away. I do think it's a net positive that people can tweet at their congressmen, but there's probably other ways to make sure that they see each other, they get to know each other, and I don't think it's just the internet to blame. To your point about the structure, I remember I think it was in a New Yorker article about Steve Jobs, like he intentionally designed their office. I think it might have been in the Pixar days where like in order to do anything in the office, you had to go through this kind of like area where like everyone kind of ran into each other and like that serendipity and those connections and that interpersonal kind of gathering, actually a lot of magic happened out of that. And I think that that relates to your point. So it's not necessarily an internet thing, it could just be kind of a structural thing. Office design. Yeah. Design thinking, yeah. Then we have another question over here. Get the mic over. This might be our last one I think. Thanks. Hello. Kevon Painter, I'm with the US Commerce Department and we were speaking about the future of social media. And I know that my personal first experience with social media happened to be on Myspace. And now I'm on Facebook, now I'm on Twitter, Instagram and it seems like there's so many more coming every single day. And one of the things that I kind of realized is that social media, it may be a fad, do you think in some ways when it comes to the different outlets that are coming every single day? So I just wanted to hear the panel's take on that, whether you think that social media outlets are more like what is hot for the year or what is hot for that time, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, which outlets do you think? I think the trend of just kind of a more efficient network and people being able to kind of communicate more efficiently, that's not going to go away and it's just going to get more complex. But I do agree that sometimes it's funny to go look back at the Wall Street Journal and how they were covering Myspace five years ago. It was like the biggest thing in the world and this is so important. And then it's pretty much like there's like a tumbleweed rolling through that thing now. So to your point, a lot of the new channels can be like fleeting and ephemeral. And I think that from a business perspective, it's very interesting because Instagram is really only its users and community. So when you see an M&A deal that's like a billion dollars and there's like tons of strategic reasons and blah, blah, blah with Facebook, but I mean that could evaporate tomorrow. And I think that a lot of the people on Wall Street that are evaluating the value of these companies are failing to kind of like price into their models and the fact that like this swarm of crickets or grasshoppers or whatever can like go to some new field tomorrow and it can happen like that. And so it's a very interesting dynamic. So to your point, I think some of the new channels can be like very fleeting and ephemeral. Some of them kind of can resonate and I think Facebook has done an amazing job at kind of keeping that up through like their product and like just keep running a really tight ship. But a lot of this, I think we're going to see a lot of like internet space junk of like ruined communities and like, you know. From an economics point of view it's very interesting that you've got such a sort of zero barriers to entry in one sense, right? The cost of getting this thing up and running is so low but on the other hand, a very, very large critical mass component, that the value of the network is the number of people on the network. And those two things are very, it's very surprising to find those two phenomena sitting side by side. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we were discussing this last night at dinner that it's, there's probably, many people believe that there is this integration that's happening so that social media, one particular medium like MySpace or Friendster is not really where people are going but rather it's the fact that these channels are being built and people are starting to integrate it into their daily lives and into their ways of interacting more generally. And that's not gonna change. Will Facebook exist in 50 years? I'm sure there are many people who think, you know, who definitely wanted to but social media will exist. It may just be a different company. Right, right. Okay, I think we're out of time. We'll have to wrap up at this point. We'd like to keep going. I mean, it's so interesting but we promise to let people go at 11. So please join me in thanking the channel. Great, thank you so much to Clive and the panelists and to all of our other participants today. We really enjoyed this conversation. It was a unique one for us for this 13th Heartland Monitor poll to be talking about social media. So welcome to all of you who were here with us for the first time. We hope to see you at the next briefing and we'll be following up with you on that. And thanks again to Allstate for supporting the Heartland Monitor poll in this series. Thank you, have a great day.