 Welcome everyone. My name is Colin McClay. I'm from the Berkman Center and I am absolutely thrilled to be here with you all to celebrate Ethan and this amazing book. This has been a long time coming and I feel like it's been sort of a marathon and then some and let me just say it has been worth the wait. So we'll get a taste of that tonight. Beginning with some remarks from Ethan that will hopefully entice you to go out there and buy a copy of this book from the COOP 20% off. You got a deal. Ethan might even autograph it for you. After Ethan gives his remarks we'll dive into three very special respondents. Judith Donath, Ann Marie Wilkins, and my other Ann Marie friend and David Weinberger. And then we'll engage you guys in a spirited discussion of what this book means and what you've heard up here tonight. So what you see on here is let's see this will only give you a little teeny sense. It's kind of a little bit of a map. Twitter map, Ethan loves maps as you may know or you'll find out partly because of what they show and partly because of what they don't show and this shows some sort of connections among people like blanket and some of the terms and hashtags used by people who are interacting with each other. Berkman Center, Ethan, me, and get rewired which is the hashtag for this book. So right here you can see kind of a little bit of the map as of now activity over the last hours and what we want to do is over the course of this conversation to encourage you to tweet with get rewired something about Ethan Z at Ethan Z which is Ethan's Twitter handle and see if we can populate this map and show some other kinds of connections and some other kinds of conversations. I do want to let you know that we are being webcast and recorded so this is public if for some reason you don't want to be on camera that's quite okay just we would encourage you to go to the back row here in front of the camera so as to be off camera. I think that's kind of what I need to say in terms of business and I just want to without waxing poetic on my love for my dear friend Ethan, I do want to note that although we'll talk about the book I think what is even more amazing than the thoughtful scholarship and artful storytelling that he has brought together in a very natural readable thoughtful and remarkable way is the way in which he did it and the way in which he operates which is as a tremendously committed generous genuine colleague and to those of us some of whom are here tonight who wrote with Ethan in the book club and to those of us who work with him at the Berkman Center and at MIT and in all the different places all the different communities that Ethan populates what comes up time and again is not just his his intellectual insights his energy his positivity but it's also his humanity and his collegary which is something that is altogether too rare in academic settings and so I think in this way he really does set a remarkable example for all of us about how to do quality scholarship and to do it with people and people in mind and every bit is committed to his own work as to those of the folks that he works with so with that I want to invite Ethan to come to the to the dais podium and take us away so Colin thank you so much and I just wanted to start by by thanking really two groups of people and the first group of people I wanted to thank was you guys for coming out and and I I sort of mean that maybe in perhaps a deeper sense than just thank you for coming out on a really hot sweaty night but this is my first book and something that I absolutely didn't realize until I had it in print and was sending it out to people is the extent to which a book is an imposition on someone else's time you give someone a book and you're basically saying I would really like you to spend 10 to 15 hours with this thing I hope you don't mind I realize you probably weren't doing anything this weekend here please take this and do something with us so the first thing I just want to say on all of this is thank you to anybody who reads it's a pretty incredible thing to put this out in the world and have people reacting to it and have people who've read it thoughtfully it's an incredible honor I'm really grateful for it the second group of people I want to thank starting with Colin McClay are the Berkman Center and I have a very strange path to what I do today I work now I'm lucky enough to be a research scientist at MIT's Media Lab and run a group called the Center for Civic Media and there's absolutely no chance I would be doing any of that unless I had come to the Berkman Center about 10 years ago and the reason for that was that I hadn't written I was a dot-com startup guy had an early social media company had done some experiments in the nonprofit world but hadn't tried writing and Berkman has an incredible culture around believing that everybody who's at the center whether they're you know the loftiest of research fellows or whether they're staff people working on administrative matters has something to share and something to put out there and whether it's through blogs or whether it's through scholarship so I'm incredibly grateful because Berkman basically trained me how to write right down to the moment where for the last four years or so we've had a group called the book club and the book club is basically a mechanism designed to try to help people get books out the door I think it's mostly David Weinberger's invention he is someone who is very good at getting books out the door but was sort of kind enough to share his expertise with a sort of a dozen or more of us who come in and out of this trying to help us get our book length projects out the door and some wonderful things have come out of it David's last book Doc Searle's recent book Judith Donna's upcoming book wonderful things sort of coming out of us so I'm very very grateful to Berkman with those thanks said let me start by talking a little bit about where I'm trying to go in this book and the idea behind having three respondents here is that we know that you guys haven't read the book and so I will try to give you a basic overview and then these three who I hope actually have mostly because David and Judith helped me write the darn thing by you know sort of learning it over me for a couple of years until I got it out the door they can also react to and we have a conversation about it but I want to start actually by talking about some ideas that I didn't manage to get into the book and these are ideas about how we look at images of the world so the image that we've had up here mostly because it's really beautiful is an image that's commonly referred to as the blue marble and it's a remarkable image it's in the first photographic image we have showing the entire world at the same time shot for morbid shot by the Apollo 17 crew there are many arguments out there that this is the most circulated image of all time there are arguments out there that this image in a very literal sense helped spawn the environmental movement or at least acted as a rallying cry for people who were interested in this idea that the planet was unified singular interconnected and fragile and that by having this image that we could look at we could suddenly understand in a much deeper way our responsibility to each other to try to act as stewards of this place and this is an idea that resonates really well with me because like a whole lot of other scholars out there I found this book by Benedict Anderson incredibly helpful and Anderson tries to do something fairly straightforward he's interested in this question of what's a nation and he ends up giving the fairly obvious observation that a nation can't be the bonds between individual people because we do not know the other 300 million people that we share the United States with a nation to one extent or another has to be imagined and we imagine ourselves as part of something bigger by looking at certain objects and certain artifacts and Anderson's really interested newspapers he makes this argument that print capitalism the fact that we can pick up the New York Times or in his example the Times of London is what makes you British by being able to say I can imagine everybody else who's reading this newspaper at the same time I can imagine England and he's really interested in maps these maps of empire when we look at a map and we see all the pink places on the map that's how we get ourselves to imagine what it is to be English to imagine what it is to be part of this empire so I started this book sort of with this question of how do we imagine ourselves as part of the internet and as Colin mentioned I'm completely obsessed with maps and I spent probably 10 years using this slide in every talk I gave at that point I was focused on working on technology in the developing world and this is a really powerful and profound image if you're thinking about how technology works in parts of the world where most people don't think about technology so by having a compound photograph of the earth at night you get a sense for just who is and who is not included in the wired world and what's interesting is that this image is now totally out of date if you've got a current image you would see a lot more of Africa electrified you would probably not see this sort of stark disparity but many of us still use this image because it has something very poetic to say about who gets to be connected and who doesn't get to be connected but there might be other better maps here's a map of the spread of SARS and SARS is an amazing disease of globalization it's actually really hard to imagine if you weren't directly involved with it the level of panic of people who felt like they were exposed to SARS because it had an incredibly high mortality rate and you suddenly had this disease that no one had ever heard of before spreading from southern China through Hong Kong showing up in Toronto and doctors essentially saying we do not know where this is coming from we don't know where it's going but we're able to figure out over time that what SARS really is is a map of connections it's a map of how different human beings are connected to one another we can think about maps like this people move in this is a map of migration where do people move from what countries do they come from where did they end up in it's a gorgeous visualization of people moving around the globe we could go over to the media lab leo banani uh done gorgeous work on a product called source map which tries to ask us about the physical objects in our world where do they come from this laptop that i'm presenting on what are the components of it where are they made how did they come together and the message that's coming out of all of these maps are that we are deeply connected in one fashion or another we're connected by the undersea cables that make up the internet that tie us back and forth and ultimately we're connected by personal links we're connected by friendships we're connected by relationships and this is a map that i've spent a lot of time worrying about this is a map it was produced by an intern at facebook his name is paul butler and this is one of those sort of dream jobs you come into facebook and facebook says here's all of our data what would you like to do with it and paul butler said well i'd really like to figure out whose friends with whom and when you put it up on a map you end up with this gorgeous sort of connected map that sort of suggests we're all linked to each other in one fashion another or at least to me that's what it sort of says at first glance and then it's worth looking a little bit further because actually we're not all connected to one another if you start looking you'll start seeing first of all china is just gone doesn't exist at all you know at this point china is blocking facebook you simply can't see it you have the dark parts of the globe that you have on the nasa map because the nasa map is really in many ways a map of an electrified population but you also have some other missing things it turns out that russia is pretty much missing from this map they're not big facebook fans they tend to use something called v contact but the other thing besides this is that this is a map that's trying to demonstrate international connection and that may not actually be what we're getting through something like facebook so one of the things that i wrestled with in this book was actually trying to get data sets out of facebook and i found people in facebook who wanted to work with me and were wonderful and i found facebook's lawyers who were not so wonderful and we were able to get some of the data out but one of the things that we ended up finding was that the average person on facebook has about 14 percent international ties the average person on facebook has about 130 friends 14 percent of them on average cross national borders of one fashion another which you look at and then you go that's amazing that's fantastic what an incredible technology to sort of knit us all together and then you dig into it a little bit and you discover that that 14 percent includes a student who's studying from abroad here at harvard and who is mostly tied to people at home so their ties are 90 international it counts the pakistani worker who's working in the united arab emirates it counts a person like me who has an enormous number of ties in gana and nigeria from my work in those countries and you end to discovering that actually it's very lumpy that what's actually happening most of the time on facebook if you could really show it is that facebook's very very good at connecting us with people who we are already very well connected with and so the reason that i bring this up the reason that i start here is that i think we imagine that the internet does certain things i think we imagine a great deal of the time that the internet is connecting us in ways that are sort of unprecedented that are expanding and globalizing our horizons and i want to question whether that's actually the case and i want to question it not just because of the internet but really the world of media as a whole because we're at this very strange and and for me paradoxical time which is that if you believe the case and it's made you know in some sides by people as absurd as thomas freedman and by more reasonable commentators as well that economies are integrating that we need to start thinking about issues on a global scale we actually seem at least in broadcast media to be getting significantly less international news than we did even 30 or 40 years ago this was an analysis done by elisa miller of public radio international of the percentage of international news and american television newscast and you can immediately say well obviously tv news but tv news continues to be the way that most americans end up getting their news this is an incredibly relevant way of looking at where we're getting information and it's possible that the amount of information about the rest of the world has been steadily shrinking since the end of the vietnam war now the good news on all of this is that of course we can get information from lots of different sources online and a lot of those sources are vastly more globally focused but what's interesting is that in many cases not in the new york times actually but in a whole lot of other major newspapers we are also seeing them get more local in their focus wonderful study done by the media standards trust in the uk that argues that the amount of foreign news in uk newspapers has shrunk by 45 over the last 30 years we've been trying to replicate this over at center for civic media we ended up finding for three u.s. newspapers over a 40-year period we saw about a 40 shrinkage we didn't for the new york times thank goodness for the new york times but as you start getting into the digital media space it turns out that in many cases we may be actually getting more parochial and looking more and more towards our own borders here's the hubbing and post which now at this point has a far greater reach in terms of online audience maybe not as much prestige but a larger audience than the new york times and huff poe actually isn't all that bad they're trying quite hard to expand their international coverage they're adding international editions but if you just look at the two of them sort of side by side you can see pretty quickly that we are even more domestically focused in some of these digital media than we were in sort of eras of broadcast and it turns out that the same thing may be happening in social media this is a wonderful new paper out by lutar and a couple of other authors looking at where people are tweeting from and what google news is talking about so in white is where people are tweeting from this is geolocation of a huge set of tweets and you'll see there are some very heavily concentrated areas western europe eastern united states uh japan korea malaysia malaysia turns out to be incredibly important on twitter the red dots are places that are showing up in google news and you're only seeing them in red because you're not seeing them on twitter so you can sort of think of the red there as places that we're still getting from the world of news and we're not really getting anything from twitter at least we might be getting it from other social media there's other ways we might be getting that information but it would be a mistake to conclude that we're going to be able to get the sort of global views particularly from places like india like sub-saharan africa by relying on the social media side of this why does any of this matter it matters because the really interesting big problems these days are global and scale if you want to go after an enormous issue like climate change it's not going to be enough to persuade americans to drive a different kind of car or to put solar panels on top of their house at the end of the day if you actually want to have an impact on this issue you need to be talking to people in china you need to be talking to people in india you need to be talking to people in nigeria you need to be figuring out how people right now who are poor but moving into middle income can both have progress and growth but not in the same way that the us had that path this matters because some of the scariest threats are the threats that come out of a connected world and whether you decide that you'd rather be frightened by epidemic or by terrorism a lot of the threats that we look at these days are transnational trans border threats we can look at something like the spread of sars we can look at the possibility as as we seem to be right now that islamic terrorists might be menacing all of us and therefore all of our mail needs to be read to protect us from it if we want to live in a world with this very high level of connection one reason to pay attention to what we know and what we don't know is what we fear but i'm going to argue that we actually have many more exciting things coming out of this connected world the negative things these connections are potentially a source of threat they're potentially the source of infection they're also the source of inspiration and for me that's where this case for figuring out how to change what we're learning about the world and what we're hearing about the world comes into play the danger is this we tend to get goods from around the world we tend to get people from around the world we don't get information around the world we've gotten very very good at sharing atoms we've gotten very very good at moving people across borders we are less good at moving bits across borders which is crazy if you think about it right it's costless it's weightless there's really no difference in some real sense between me loading the new york times and the times of india but for the most part i'm not going to we have really good data that suggests again and again that i'm not going to and the reason for it is that at the end of the day we human beings flock we are subject to a tendency called homophily it's incredibly well documented in social science that we tend to seek out people who are like us there are experiments where students walk into computer labs and we'll watch how a student figures out how to sit in a half full computer lab and a student will find their way if they've got long hair as i do they'll find their way over to a long-haired person and you ask them you know what are you doing you know someone who wears glasses will sit down with someone who wears glasses you ask them what they're doing they'll say well that person looked nice but somewhere is our talent for finding people who have the same socioeconomic background the same racial background the same belief system in one fashion or another we're incredibly good at looking for our flock and this tendency to flock was probably advantageous for us for most of human history but we may be hitting this moment when we're in a world like this one where this tendency to flock is keeping us separated from information we need to have because we are so good at paying attention to those near and dear to us because we're so good at paying attention to the other members of the flock we may not be getting the view that we actually need of the world my fear is that the tools that we're building for the internet aren't taking this very seriously i think we've been building tools to solve some of our basic desires search is an amazing tool for desire it basically says what do you want i'm going to do my very best to give it to you i don't want to challenge you i know that if that first link or two isn't right you're going to run off so i want to give you precisely what you want i want to reduce the amount of risk in this equation i want to get as precise as i possibly can and my argument is that this may actually be dangerous this may actually be bad for us we may need to encounter a certain amount of cognitive diversity to really find ourselves getting the information input that we need in the world but we're going even further in the same direction right so we're now moving into a realm of social search we're not only am i getting what i want but now i'm getting what my friends want and there's lots of reasons to be creeped out by facebook search i mean it is in fact really creepy the fact that you can constitute a search for the you know the the bars like by my female friends is really freaky but for me what's actually weird about it is i'm not sure that i want to have my friends pre filtering for me you could think of your friends potentially as an amazing source of inspiration if you're lucky enough to have a diverse set of friends that are pushing you in a bunch of different directions but if we're subject to homophily if we're encountering a lot of the same people again and again and again the danger is these tools of social search may be driving us into these very very small circles of the same content and the same ideas over and over again here's why i really care about this this guy ronald burt wrote a wonderful paper some years back called structural holes and good ideas burt was in a position that social scientists love to be he was inside a very powerful institution he got himself hired as a vice president at wrathion and because he was vp at wrathion he was able to experiment on wrathion employees and the experiment that he did was he took the purchasing department and he solicited everybody in the purchasing department and basically said tell me how you would make this company better he got everybody to write down suggestions he put them in front of the senior executives of the company and basically said are these any good and the senior executives went through all of them and said here are the good ideas here are lousy ideas here are people who are just complaining and then he correlated the results of that to the social network of people in the company and what he found out was that people who were at certain places in the social network were as he puts it at high risk of having good ideas if you found yourself as a bridge between two different parts of this network if you were in charge of purchasing in cleveland but you also had to be in touch with the office and Cincinnati all the time you had a much better chance of having good ideas than someone who worked only in cleveland and what he ends up suggesting for this is that creativity is an import export business most of us do not sit in a blank room and think wonderful thoughts because we're contemplating the pureness of the surroundings around us and simply going to the platonic essence of our minds most of us are thieves I know that I am we look for inspirations in one culture and we try to figure out how to bring them across and some thieves are really good at this if you look at how Picasso comes up with cubism it has a whole lot to do with masks that he's picking up from modern day beneath it's that inversion of surfaces that ends up coming in and becomes part of the cubist vocabulary and if you look through Picasso studio his move into cubism comes right after he starts collecting african masks which by the way he did up until his death you look at the studio right before he dies and it's basically filled with these items I'm really interested in how we can use the internet not to isolate ourselves not just to see what our friends want us to see but how to take advantage of this incredible cognitive diversity that's available from having access to people all over the world and I actually want to do this like I don't just want to argue about this I actually want to think about how we build these things we have an enormous problem right now in our dialogue about technology which is a new technology comes along like Google Glass and the assumption is well this is here now we're going to have it let's think about how we deal with the world with Google Glass like Google Glass is now mostly in the labs and you've got people in bars basically banning people from wearing Google Glass in it right so we assume that it's going to come into play and we try to figure out how we're going to react to it there's another alternative to this we could have a conversation and decide do we want this or not do we want this technology to work the way we think or fear it's going to work and what worries me a great deal of the time is when we talk about whether the internet is making us stupider or whether the internet is making us more polarized or whether it's making us fat or whether it's making us bald we're not actually talking about the fact that this is a technology that most people didn't encounter 20 years ago this is something that a lot of people in this room had a hand in building if we do not like how the internet works we can fix it if we are worried that the internet is not giving us a diverse view of the world and that is what i'm worried about we can go after that problem now this was my first stab at going after this problem this is yet another berkman project one of the many things i got to do while housed at the berkman center was to try to go after this question of how we would find out what was going on in other parts of the world by looking at what other people were saying and so global voices is now almost a nine-year-old project about 1200 people all over the world telling you what's going on in gaban what's going on in gana what's going on in germany it's been a success up to a point it's a very healthy community it's a fun site it might push you in some different directions but you probably don't read it and you know honestly i don't read it every day and it's a real problem because when we think about how we build tools to expose us to the rest of the world we actually have to think about what we really do how do we really find information how do we actually come across this stuff so i'm starting to think about this in a different way that's a fit but i carry one this is not a good day for steps i'm only at 7400 but i think a lot of people right now are thinking about this question of how do you track your own behavior i know that i don't read global voices very often because i've started tracking my own media behavior i think it's crazy by the way that we've gotten so good at tracking our bodies the steps we take the sleep cycle we've gotten into the food we eat and we don't track our minds very often we don't track what we're reading what we're thinking about who we're talking to i'd like to get to the point where we're doing cognitive tracking where we can really think about what we're encountering and this is how i know that left to my own devices i will spend my entire time reading cute cat macros on reddit and reading about the green bay packers and that i actually have to have someone pushing me to try to encounter information that i might need but don't know that i need and so we're starting to think about some of these things uh over at mit media lab this is a tool um developed in part by nathan matias who's in my lab uh also by uh sarah slavitz uh who's an amazing graphic designer uh she's a twitter handle dear sarah the tool is called follow bias and the idea behind this is it's very simple it's very straightforward you go to follow bias dot com you enter in your twitter handle it looks to see who you follow on twitter and it tries to automatically calculate just one variable just the gender how many women are you following how many men are you following in this case how many brands or bots are you following and this is the actual information for me it turns out i follow about eleven hundred people on twitter and they are mostly men i follow comparatively few women this is an embarrassing slide to put up but this is not something that would have been very easy for me to find out had someone not built a tool to make it possible for me to look at this and since i've been going out using this tool when i follow someone on twitter i spend a lot of time thinking about whether i want to follow dan nove because you know he's another white dude and like do i really need more white dudes hanging out at the media lab there's a lot of them in my life right now maybe i need to find someone else to sort of diversify my view but until we have tools that let us ask questions about what we're seeing or not seeing until we have tools that let us interrogate the media that we're looking at this is something else we're doing at the boston globe this is catherine diagnasio's work we're doing this with boston globe data to try to get a sense for what the globe does and doesn't cover and we've ended up finding out that there are large chunks of the city of boston that actually have very few stories per capita and that when you dig into what's going on in those stories per capita you're often getting communities framed or presented in a very specific way i think if we want to go after this question of what we're putting into our heads if we want to get to a point where we're getting a high level of cognitive diversity if we want to get to the point where we're encountering people from other countries and cultures we really have to consciously go after these questions we need to look at our behavior we need to put lenses on the media that we end up encountering most of us do not have the luxury of hopping on an airplane and seeing the world directly we are seeing the world through the lens of media and if we want to think about how we're seeing that world we have to think critically about how it's coming to us we're hoping to get to the point where we're starting to build some proactive tools around this is one of the tools that we're starting to think about building at the media lab called the weekly different which is something that would look at how you behave on twitter and essentially say hey you're following a lot of these same people can I push you out of your comfort zone maybe not a 180 maybe we're not going to have me you know following evangelical christians from Uganda who believe that homosexuals are the devil maybe we can find someone who's a new england progressive leftist who happens to be a strong person of faith which actually would be a challenge for me and getting me a little bit out of my comfort zone maybe we can move people five degrees or 10 degrees but one way or another if we're interested in this question of what we're getting and what we're not getting I think it's incumbent on us not to be satisfied with the limits or the problems the tools that we have in front of us right now when we do have this opportunity to sort of pick these things up and figure out a way to rewire them so that's the basic idea behind the book the good news is that there's other ideas in the book these lovely three people who I'm going to welcome the stage have had the chance to read and offer some reactions and can I welcome David Judith and Emory so look out balls coming it's a party so we're going to begin with Judith Donath a wonderful faculty fellow from the Berkman Center to take us away and then we'll have Emory Curator of the Nieman Foundation and then David Weinberger from Harvard Libraries and Berkman Center hello thank you Ethan that was wonderful there's only one point I really want to argue with you about which was when you started it's once everything else is going to be much more nuanced when you started by saying that it was an imposition to have to read this book or any book and I think the other side of books is that many books are actually a gift they give you hours of time that's fascinating you read stories you would have never thought of they provoke you to think about things you had not thought of before and this book certainly falls into that category of something that's far more is it one else I can't far more like a book the far more like a gift than an imposition and I certainly enjoyed it all the time I spent reading it part of it was the stories are it's full of anecdotes they're fascinating their Ethan is an amazing storyteller and he manages to make a very deep and complicated and very nuanced argument I mean that's one of the things that also sets this book apart is that so many books are themselves not examples of diversity and Ethan's thinking is internally diverse it's not about saying we must do this we must all be global it's really great the web is this it's you know making us more diverse or it's keeping us from being diverse or the diversity is always good so part of the complexity of reading it is that he is a writer who will say but a lot he goes back and forth with ideas so you're reading a mind arguing with itself but through extraordinarily entertaining stories and so part of it was in the reading I spent a lot of time arguing in my head about this I have a tendency to be very like no you're wrong and so part of it was the initial question about well why why at heart do we really want this type of diversity you know what is the value of being global like that and partly from being in the book club with Ethan there are ideas that we have started talking about and that I've written in different directions so I want to take a couple of those pieces and argue them out with you and one of the things that is fascinating about a story like this is we are living in a really really complicated time I think probably most people who are live think their times are complicated but ours partly because of massive technological change globalization etc is very complex I have a 12 year old who keeps asking me she says you know in the 60s everyone wore micro mini skirts and they were and it was very psychedelic and what is it that characterizes our time now and if you read things like vogue they say this is a very complicated time to get a grasp even on style because it changes and there's so many subcultures there's not a single dominant way of thinking or dressing the way that you could have seen even a few decades ago but when we look at the types of change that we're living in one around these issues around the social networks is a really fascinating one to look at the changes that technology is bringing and the challenges that Ethan is bringing out about saying what actually do we want to be building we should we can be changing our tools we don't necessarily want to say that Facebook and Twitter are the be all and end all of technological aids to social networks but what are our connections for today and one of the interesting things if you look maybe 150 years ago people needed very very very strong ties and in the world of social network analysis a strong tie is someone you spend a lot of time with you um you may have multiple ties with them you have many many friends in common you spend a lot of time with them and at a time when you weren't getting everything from a market when all of your food and your home you relied on friends to build it how many of you have read the little house in the big wood series you know so maybe about a quarter of a it's a story about what it was like to grow up in pioneer days in america it's mostly nonfiction and one of the things that's remarkable about it is the level of self-sufficiency that people needed you know not that long ago if you wanted a house you needed to have people who would come who liked you enough to help you do this and they would depend on you back and forth so fast forward to today we live in an era where all of those things not just building your house i mean almost none of us have built our own house but getting food everything has been outsourced to a market so we don't need that kind of strong tie one of the things that's nice about not needing strong ties is that in a world where you can have more weaker ties people you spend less time with they can be more diverse if you have if you rely on a small set of close friends and family you share all the information together you're probably not that different you need in order to have a very diverse network you're probably going to have a lot more very much weaker ties that aren't going to come and spend two days building a house with you maybe they'll have a bear with you and so one of the things you see today is people have many more weak ties now if you look at the type of ties that you see online they're extremely weak ties there's the notion of the facebook friend who is someone you maybe met at a conference and you kind of like them you may never see them again but your friends on facebook and now you know something about who their kids are etc and we're having a growing connect set of these kids who are growing up today when they go off to college aren't going to leave behind the person they sat next to in first grade they'll probably always be facebook friends or whatever the equivalent is you'll never lose them but they're certainly not someone you'll rely on so we're growing into a world where you can have a huge number of extremely weak ties but what's remarkable is that's at a time when our need for connection is much smaller than it has ever been in history not only has the house building and the food sourcing been outsourced to the market but huge amounts of things like personal care have been outsourced we don't need to have a friend babysit for us you can hire a babysitter you could search for babysitters online you know I have kids I found their babysitters through sitter city I didn't even have to you know if you move into a new neighborhood you no longer need to actually meet other people who will tell you who are the reliable teenagers you can find that information out online so almost everything that we have relied on other people for we are increasingly finding commercial or net or online solutions to and so it's not so much that we don't like having people as much we enjoy going out we enjoy having friends but the things that forced you to get out and make friends and the things that forced you to have ties with them are really disappearing from our world and so all of our ties with other people are becoming increasingly volitional which is nice they can be very diverse we can have this choice but when faced with maybe being shy maybe maybe instead of making that friend in a new neighborhood we can just look it up so the forcing function on personal ties is much much less than it's been before so when we look at issues around these questions around global connectivity that Ethan is raising here it's not necessarily just an issue of being global it's an entire question of in our current technological market driven world how do we get people to pay attention to others at any scale and also the other question that I've sort of debated a lot in my head in reading Ethan's book is that question and Ethan raises it in a very interesting way going back and forth between global as being international but a lot of other questions around diversity you know even if you look at this issue of like how many women are you following if Ethan was said I've really boosted all the women that I'm reading I am now following 75 percent you know wine drinking mommy bloggers it might not actually be that diverse yeah the range of ideas there might be relatively small and so a lot of the other question is to is to really think about what does it mean to make diverse ties with other people and that's one of the really hard pieces is finding helping developing the tools that help us find that connection with another person that lets you care enough about them at that kind of easy level of developing a relationship that then becomes something that ties you over in a longer span and so I think a lot of it a lot of what's interesting in our era and this would be my last point I'll move on I had two friends who came out with books basically simultaneously this spring one is Ethan with rewire about the nature of globalization they were both to some extent about our relationship with news and the other was a woman named Nancy Joe sales whose book the bling ring had just come out and it's a very very different book about our relationship to news and what draws us into it for those who haven't read about the Sophia Coppola movie the bling ring is about a group of teenagers in Los Angeles who became so celebrity obsessed they started breaking into the homes of celebrities they broke into Paris Hilton's house they broke into a lot of other celebrities house and just started stealing objects from them and they would like start wearing their clothes and sometimes they break into their houses multiple times and they just felt such familiarity with these celebrity figures that they sort of kind of moved into their homes and started taking little pieces of their lives to feel like it it's a terribly perverse version of having met another person through online journalism but in some ways it's a total success story they really deeply cared about them so we want to kind of tune it down from that extreme but to really understand what it is that in our era of meeting people through online stories through online journalism through all these different pieces how do we make those kinds of connections that lets us see them as individuals care about them deeply enough to want to make a further connection and perhaps not actually break into their house but become take a little piece of their world and make it our own so thank you thank you so much I'm going to be thinking about that for the next several weeks and thinking about a couple of chapters that I wish I could revise at this point but I wanted to react to one piece where I feel like you're on which is this idea that yeah sorry but I'm pretty loud all right now I'm louder so this idea that as we move to markets to meet our needs we need fewer and fewer strong ties I think that's really astute and I think it's worth asking this question what sort of ties do we need now in many ways sort of social search essentially says as long as you've got this network of very very weak ties you can get recommendations you can figure out how to navigate the world we know you buy your posty and so as long as we know a little bit about them we'll be able to recommend to you we'll be able to filter you to the right babysitter so on and so forth and I think the case that I'm trying to make and someone was tweeting that basically we can't go a single event here at the Berkman Center without mentioning Granaveter but one of the things that I tried to look at in this book was was going back to to mark Granaveters the strength of weak ties and looking at this idea of the bridge tie and the bridge tie is someone who's tying you into a different part of your social network much as as Ron Burt is talking about these figures within organizations who are at structural holes but I think what's really important as we start becoming dependent on markets is that we're becoming dependent on sets of people who we don't know and often don't understand and it may be that we're fine with that or it may be that that puts us in this very fragile place in life where we don't understand the needs and wants of the others who were depending on for in some cases are very basic needs and bridge ties so to suggest the possibility that perhaps we can find some people on our network who can push us in a different direction and help us sort of understand what's going on from that perspective so I'll have one really quickly it's gonna be very super quick absolutely super quick but yes the strength of weak ties the ties have strength because they're diverse not because they are weak and one of the great things that social media are doing now are helping us find the elements in our weak ties that we wouldn't have known about but are multiple things we have in common and a lot of what's important is in making ties strong is their multiplexity that it gives us the ability to discover that a person we thought we knew slightly we actually have many more things in common than polite conversation had let us know thank you two tweets so I wanted to start where Ethan's book begins which is actually a dedication to his young son for drew he writes who will grow up in a world as wide as his dreams so I began with my daughter a teenager and a day not very long ago when I glimpsed her working at her laptop and noted a very striking screensaver it was a photo taken in 1979 which was 15 years before she was born and it's of a volleyball game between Mexican and US citizens but this game was unusual and that each team was physically planted in its own country the Mexicans in Naco Mexico and the Americans in Naco Arizona dressed in their street clothes and cowboy hats and using as their volleyball net a rusted border fence that divided their countries it's a very beautiful and provocative image and I haven't thought about that photo in a long while but couldn't stop thinking about it as I was reading rewire Nathan Ethan's very powerful book so I came back to it as a sort of visual metaphor for both the promise and the barriers in the age of connection that for me you were so brilliantly describing so hardwired for humanity and curiosity and relatively recently equipped with the technology to reach more widely and act more readily on both we still face the equivalent of these border fences and many of our daily interactions and so my reactions to the book and a few things I wanted to talk about today are formed as a near reaction as a near lifelong journalist trying very hard spent many years trying very hard to overcome the flock tendencies that Ethan articulates and rewire so first language and culture can be alienating without what Ethan calls these bridge bloggers or bridge builders to connect us across the divide and there are many many divides without such bridge builders the Arab Spring was an exception and the chances that we will encounter these moments moments like that stories like that stories just as important are meaningfully fewer without with a diminished journalistic core I dislike sports metaphors but allow me one so thinking about this volleyball photograph ideas by the multitude are spiked over the net every moment I don't know what's going on on the twitter screen behind me but I'm sure it's full of brilliance but not all of these ideas find their way into play think of your own experience with publishing whether it be a book or a tweet authors are often as surprised by their successes as by their failures for the reason that tastes and interests are more vicissitudinous than immutable we don't know what connects we guess at what connects time is finite in searching to recover the knuckle volleyball photo this week I scraped the surface of a whole wonderful world of immigration law of drug weapons and people running of the scene of the longest sustained battle of the Mexican revolution which I didn't know of a courageous local newspaper El Mirador which has exposed corruption at a local orphanage I've never heard of and the construction of metal walls along sections of this border which may have signaled the end of the local volleyball game I say may because I did not have time this week to further press the issue as perhaps my daughter did not while studying for the ACT and the SAT and taking high school final exams and volunteering on a political campaign and doing some local community service which brings me to empathy empathy is not infinitely elastic I love what Ethan's book and what Ethan himself demands of us of himself and others and wish we were all the better angels he seeks in the world but it's possible that our current technological ability to connect outpaces our empathic capacities in her very important book talking to strangers anxieties of citizenship since brown versus board of ed Danielle Allen reminds us of the advice that we give to children that we have all given to children and that is true across classes and race don't talk to strangers Danielle identifies this taught suspicion of others as a foundation of our civic found education and argues that we should substitute it with what she calls a citizenship of political friendship I think Danielle and Ethan are effectively and compassionately arguing for something similar but both against some historic habits and redoubts that require generational change not merely technological possibility and as the one so-called mainstream media representative here let me say one more thing about the beleaguered msm in rewire Ethan correctly underscores the serious decline in the number of foreign correspondents writing for us newspapers a trend that roughly mirrors my own personal experience when I left the Chicago Tribune as editor five years ago we had about a dozen foreign bureaus today there are none and the paper is relying for a much smaller foreign report on the Los Angeles Times and others Ethan writes quote fewer dedicated correspondents doesn't necessarily mean less international coverage in u.s. newspapers but I think the evidence to the contrary is abundant a corollary to the diminished staff of correspondence is the disappearing staff of editors thinking and worrying about and studying the world each day searching for news across the oceans and for ways to connect it to their readers if Ethan is right and I think he is about homophily love of same literally and our tendency to seek out and embrace people like ourselves then that loss of journalists who intuitively understood that and spent their days looking to interest us in and connect us to people unlike ourselves comes at a particularly cruel time just as our ability to connect with so many unlike us has never been greater and this is true locally too it's not just a foreign story when I think of where my daughter sat in Hyde Park in her home in Chicago looking at this photograph and two blocks from her was the Obama household and seven blocks south of them one of the poorest communities in the nation Woodlawn the divide that the Midway plassants 59th street at the University of Chicago the divide that that represents between knowledge and empathy is huge the internet's celebrated virtue and enabling us to create and edit our own daily we is in stark institutional contrast to a newspaper's historic job as the daily we there are some and many good reasons that model has faltered but it's possible that it's a collateral casualty of what Ethan most seeks that which he in his closing paragraph calls a world that values diversity of perspective over the certainty of singular belief thank you so much thank you so much for putting empathy on the table um this book took me a long time to write probably five years of actually writing it and seven or eight years of picking arguments and fights with people because that's what we do at the Berkman Center and I spent the first two or three years picking fights with journalists because I assume that it was the MSM's fault and and that this decline in international coverage was pointing towards a market tendency in journalism that was trying to cover what was easier to cover what audiences wanted trying to give people precisely what they wanted and one of the things that's become clearer over time is realizing to what extent journalism or at least quality journalism uh is about engineering empathy uh and I talk a little bit about engineering serendipity in the book and helping people sort of stumble on the unexpected bit of information that they need but empathy is stumbling upon the emotion that connects you to someone that you wouldn't otherwise be connected with so I'm very very grateful for that and I would add that connects them back to you in some meaningful way I was thinking um as I was preparing for tonight about um you know some long ago dreaded focus group I sat in um when I was at the newspaper and a gentleman describing a very particular story and how he had this was in the late 90s and there was the um crisis with the Thai bot which caused horrible economic ripple and he was explaining how he in a suburb of Chicago was made to understand why that mattered to him that with 401ks and diversified investments in the rest of this now mattered so I was making notes on that to myself today and it was interesting that the iPad kept correcting bot to bat so like why am I even using this word but it wasn't just accidental that he discovers that it takes it's not pure empathy it's um it's maybe sympathy based on some self interest right but it takes somebody to make that connection to that person and your own interests and that's not a bad thing it's actually a skill David so I want to echo Judas um you're being ridiculous about the imposition thing let's just start there so we get to spend 10 to 15 hours with you in a book and I can't imagine anything better than that except having gotten to spend 10 years with you I've learned more from you than I have learned from anybody so thank you it's a wonderful book I think you got a taste of that here it's a book from Ethan's head and from his heart and from his wide wide wide experience let me just give you one example of so you talked a little bit tonight about it turns out we are better at moving atoms around the world than moving bits and so this is a wonderful eye opening point it's in the very first chapter and the way that Ethan makes the point in the book where he has a little more time is to take us through the story of Fiji water and why we're better able to get water water moved around the globe than information about what's going on in Fiji and I will I won't ask for a show of hands but I'm quite certain that all of us but many most of us certainly may have drunk more Fiji water than we've drunk Fiji bits it's it's a wonderful way of making the point and the book is just full this is how Ethan's Ethan's thought and very much like your point the back and forth the is your ability to question yourself and to think more than one thought at a time it's just just a wonderful book so in the book even makes a number of assumptions which I think are I'm not going challenge at all they're important and right the first is that technology does not determine how we take it up if it did then you know we it would be settled we wouldn't be looking for new ways of doing it and if it were as good as many of us were hoping it would be and as determinant as some of us thought it would be then we would not have the very issue that Ethan is pointing to this is not techno determinism it's the opposite it's totally removed from it if anything it's techno opportunism that the internet presents us with an opportunity and we have not seized it and Ethan makes that point through data and stories in a way that nobody else has second assumption that he makes is that we're situated that we only understand the world from a point of view that point of view is deep deep in our culture and our language that and that this is not a failure it is a necessity it's the only way we can understand things is from a point of view from a cultural point of view and that in fact it's so far from being simply a grinding necessity that it's a source of joy it also for Ethan implies a type of what's used to be called anyway pluralism of an appreciation of other cultures that there isn't one right culture that our culture is not the right one and so it also entails a type of humility a very very welcome humility which is certainly characteristic of how Ethan approaches this very rich and diverse world and the third assumption is that we are as a people and as a species we are creatures that care that we are interested because if we weren't then the question of why we have not flocked so to speak to information from around the world to the cultures of the world then that question would be very easily answered we're selfish bastards and we don't care we're just all wrapped up so for all the homophily the challenge of the book which is profound it which is as important a question as has been raised about the internet is rooted in the sense that in fact we do care so I want to talk just a little bit about one of the issues and it's one that you and I have because I'm struggling I'm a different comment yeah I'm trying to find something I disagree with and I'm not really having tough time so serendipity something that please yes we definitely differ on this one well we do but if we did you won I think you're basically right but I'm going to try to find a shade of difference okay so in the chapter on serendipity which is one of the really wonderful chapters in the book um uh Ethan's question is that um we it's actually an assumption that we would be interested if in the rest of the world if dot dot dot and so that's subjunctive that conditional that would I think really powers most of of the book and in many ways it's it's a political would it's a political imperative it's a moral imperative it has to do with empathy as well so we would be interested in all the sorts of things that we're not at rate if if only want and so in the serendipity chapter which is a rich chapter I can't possibly summarize it but part of what Ethan says is he salutes Jane Jacobs um and points to a city is a place in which serendipity happens at its best it happens and points to her idea of designing to minimize isolation or designing to uh engineer encounters and engagement um to which Ethan then adds Robert Merton on on the topic and says it's not enough just to run into people at at the crossroads at the social holes you also have to have an open mind which is a really important point as well and so that's obviously a big part of the solution and the book has other large themes about how we can make progress here but I so I'm certainly in favor of structuring serendipity but I'm not as convinced that it's going to do the job or that it's actually addressing the root of it so you've talked tonight and certainly in the book a great deal about the importance of bridge figures people who help us see find what's of value in another culture and tonight you actually and in the book you talked talked about it in terms of desire which actually helped crystallize for me what my maybe difference is because that's certainly it's certainly important that we cultivate our desires and that education is a way of doing that a good education cultivates your desires but desire is only at most it's half of the equation the other half is that interest is something that doesn't happen in us desire is something that we do or is in us but interest is something that calls out from the world we get interested in things that we had no idea we were interested in I had no idea I was interested in sumo I couldn't be less I had no interest in sports and within those hierarchy of sports I'm going to say sumo pretty much at the bottom so I had no idea that I had no desire to know about sumo until I heard Ethan unexpectedly as thrown into a room Ethan's giving a talk on sumo he cares a great deal about sumo and made it interesting so here you were the bridge as you've been for so many of us in so many different ways you were the bridge to sumo which I have to say I don't have that much interest in but I had more than before I heard you talk this was the world calling out to me it was not a desire and so it's not in addition to structuring serendipity structured serendipity will look like noise will look like a distraction why is face why is google giving me all these results I don't care about why is facebook larding up my page with things I don't care about I don't care about the sumo results I don't care about the Brazilian you know what will just look like noise unless there is something in it that is interesting one of the things is empathy but we don't get to empathy until somebody writes really really well or is Anthony Bourdain and is doing the TV show where he's not an expert in the many cultures he goes to but he is a fantastic he does a fantastic job of getting us interested in cultures we did not know were interesting of course is cultivating desire but part of it also and part of it is structuring serendipity but the serendipity won't work unless the thing that we stumble across has the certain artistic I didn't know what to say the quality of great journalism the quality of a fantastic New Yorker article or a wonderful Anthony Bourdain show or your book or most of what you talk about and educate us on because we need so we need more Anthony Bourdain's we need more Paul Simons and we need many many more Ethan's and the problem is that we can't have many more Ethan's because there's really only one you combine such a unique set of talents and desires and interests and loves so thank you so much for your for your 10 to 15 hour gift if I had not already turned several shades of red I would have moved into new depths of crimson let me fill you in on let me fill you in on on on the argument here because it I think it is actually an interesting argument by the end of the book I end up saying look we can try to get you more perspectives from the rest of the world we can translate for you we can introduce you to bridge figures but ultimately what we don't have a lot of control over is desire if you want to hear only about the Green Bay Packers the internet makes it really easy to hear about the Green Bay Packers and the worry is that we don't always want to know what we want to know we sometimes need to know something that we didn't know we needed to know and the fact that that's such a convoluted sentence you know helps explain it's an extremely tough concept to get around but we need to encounter information that's unfamiliar that's challenging sometimes we need it because it's critical information about the world sometimes we need it because it has that hidden inspiration which allows us to move in a different direction and so I end up proposing that we've gone from a world where most media is very heavily curated and this is sort of the tendency of mainstream media of saying let me give you a very diverse view of what's out there to a world of search where we choose what we want to a world of social where we choose and are informed by our circle of friends and I'm wondering whether the next step in all of this is serendipity and my hope is that we could get very very good at looking at what you know and what you've encountered and then taking you somewhere out of those ruts and David I think is sympathetic up to the point where I start saying now I'm going to start giving you an article on sumo because you don't know much about sumo but it's close enough to your profile that I'm going to push you a little bit out of your comfort zone and maybe you'll have this unexpected discovery and David as an artist a brilliant writer someone who quite literally taught me how to write not in the sense that if you don't like the book that it's his fault but that if it comes off well I have learned an enormous amount from this man on how to write a book David takes very seriously the craft aspect of all of this and I think that's right and I think in some ways the word engineering may be where we're getting tripped up on all of this when someone writes a beautiful article in the Atlantic or the Utney reader or the New Yorker pick whatever outlet you want for beautiful writing I think that can be a form of engineering serendipity it's a way of saying I want to pull you onto a topic or onto a subject that you otherwise wouldn't explore but I think we can go in other directions as well I think one of the amazing things about this participatory moment in time is that so much is being created and so much is being generated that we may be able to do as much with guiding people in different directions as we are in creating new directions to go in but it's wonderful to have these arguments and this is why you have to keep friends in your life who you can always argue with I completely agree with that so this is the weakest argument that this is the weakest argument I've ever seen but so with those fabulous comments to kick us off we just have a few minutes left we want to be out of here by 7 30 because one of these walls is going to magically rise and reveal drinks and snacks for y'all but I want to open it up to the audience for questions or comments there's been a really rich twitter stream we have a couple of mics here I will invite you to be short in your comments because we don't have much time Danny have a mic to be super brief super brief we're going to take three or three or four at once and then when we went up here in front and as Ethan likes to say remember that your question ends with an interrogative perhaps a rising voice or a question mark if it's written so sir let me try questions not statements quick when we tough oh come on all right Ethan just a this is a question for you you said something you said if we didn't like the way the internet is we could change it and you specifically use the example of google glasses who would we be how do we decide what we were doing and how on earth would you possibly change it but let's take it we'll take a couple of these and we'll and then we'll come in Laura I'll hold up my sticker from Stanford D school that says empathy happens does empathy happen from the process of people creating the interaction or from the audience sir one where's the other mic Marcelo are you're not being very american centric I am from brazil professor sorry about that but I just downloaded the book I didn't read it yet but I feel from the debate that this is a very american perspective what social media and all this has done in other countries that is not us has bring a diverse view much more diverse view and not a contracting view one more carry you have it I'm kind of curious about power it seems that some of the serendipity engineering kind of assumes a sort of uh a forehand knowledge about what's good for us or when a new connection needs to be made so how do we get a gatekeeper that can be trusted with that power and is benevolent and not going to lead us down a bad place also cognitive tracking scares the hell out of me there you go Ethan uh for for little questions that that'll be quick look on on google glass let me give you two answers to how we could go after it if we didn't like where it was going there's an engineering way and there's a political way right so some of the book is written for an engineering week that sort of says if you don't like the biases in these tools if you don't like the idea that we're being pushed towards find out what your neighbor's like try to figure out how you push towards people who are very different from you and try to build systems that push you in very different ways but I would say on google glass specifically that the more powerful we is probably the we that sort of says maybe we don't like the the policy implications of this maybe we don't like having this out in the public in the US we've done a very poor job of defending privacy rights this is what we're bumping into with the NSA at the moment europeans have reacted to google maps very differently than we have and they've gone and sued google in germany and essentially said you have to have the right to blur it out there are different reactions in different reverse today in germany that didn't didn't know that uh there are certainly stronger protections for privacy in the EU than there are in the in the US I would say legal protection within France and Germany is significantly stronger for privacy than in the US not an expert on international law but there there are probably a few folks in the room who might be able to back me up on this one uh you know generally speaking when you have debates about privacy you have people trying to come from an EU perspective because they have a different legislative point on it my only point on this is that it doesn't have to be inevitable different societies react to technologies in different ways and some have gone after and tried to said just because you can do this technologically doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to do this politically I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm going to leave Laura's question which is awesome but there's no way that I can go after it I'm going to go after Marcella's question and basically say um look I hope not I mean I hope I have not written a miserably americentric book what I end up finding in a lot of the research that I quote on this is that actually everyone's pretty parochial and that I suspect that if you do a deep dive you may find that this tendency to connect to the local is pretty strong in brazil as well and I say that with a reasonable amount of confidence because I I did do the research on what brazilians are reading when they're reading news and discovered the same sort of domestic biases that we saw in other places and also in looking at the work that we did with facebook at what percentage of the ties are made locally and generally speaking what we've seen a huge amount of in brazilian social media is actually what we see in the US which is basically as people who are moving and going to university they're keeping those ties at home so they're starting to have that sort of secondary or tertiary set of ties and in fact in many ways there's a lot of brazil in the book and I hope you read it because one of the things that comes out is the sense in which what goes on and some of those other conversations can be sort of incomprehensible if you're not within it so actually a lot of the book wrestles with Calaboco Galvão and suddenly the rest of the world looking in at a brazilian only conversation and then the brazilians responding by basically saying let us make fun of the fact that you're monolingual americans so I I hope when you actually get into it it may be slightly less americentric than we are at this point the question of power is a phenomenal question and look my my thinking behind building systems to track is that it's a really big difference between me tracking the steps that I take during the day and my health insurance company tracking the steps that I take during the day and when I'm tracking the number of steps that I take during the day it's a helpful thing for me to sort of say I'm going to walk back to my hotel this evening because it has not been a very physical day whereas if my insurance company is doing it and jacking up my premium after the fact that's a very different thing and I think part of what's gone on is that we've had this huge tendency to build sort of centralized services and centralized databases that I do think we want to reconsider and sort of ask questions about cognitive tracking is already going on you're being tracked by Google in a very real way trying to figure out who you are and the question for me becomes are there extents to which it makes sense to track yourself and try to figure out your own behavior is that something that we only want to give over to the advertisers so it freaks me out too but it freaks me out less if I can figure out how to take the tools and use them for myself but you're absolutely right that there's an enormous amount of power with the maker of the algorithms and that's in many ways sort of who I'm writing the book for is to sort of say look you have more power in making algorithms than you think here's a blind spot that I think a lot of us have when we consider the internet I think we assume that it tends to put us in this global direction although I think in many cases the research puts us in a different direction can we examine how our algorithms end up reinforcing that in one fashion or another it's three for four Laura knows that I'll actually have that conversation with her face to face so I want to invite you all if you have any final thought last last word last question of reflection good no obligation um can I just stop by thanking you all again just for coming and for listening and to thank everyone at the Birkman Center for putting this together to thank my friends for taking the time to read closely and react to thank Amar Asher and everybody else who helped put this together this is just an enormous privilege for me and thank you all for being here I really appreciate it