Jeff's TED Talk: This Is Bullshit

Fellow TED fans ...

Another one of our favorites, "What Would Google Do?" author Jeff Jarvis, just made his debut talk to TED. (He said the video will be posted in a week or so.)

Based on Jarvis' notes posted on BuzzMachine, it's an interesting speech on education, media, innovation, Google, collaboration ... and it starts by saying, "This is bullshit."

Here's a couple excerpts from the rest:

I tell media that they must become collaborative, because the public knows much, because people want to create, not just consume, because collaboration is a way to expand news, because it is a way to save expenses. I argue that news is a process, not a product. Indeed, I say that communities can now share information freely – the marginal cost of their news is zero. We in journalism should ask where we can add value. But note that that in this new ecosystem, the news doesn’t start with us. It starts with the community.

And...

We must stop our culture of standardized testing and standardized teaching. ... In the Google age, what is the point of teaching memorization?

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

It's a good speech that picks up on many of the concepts Jarvis continues to tout on BuzzMachine, his various talks and, of course, "WWGD?"

I'm looking forward to adding the video version to my media curriculum at LBCC.

p.s. The BuzzMachine comments are interesting too...

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(Photo credit: "Jeff Jarvis" by Robert Scoble, courtesy of Flickr.com/Creative Commons)

Revolution in the Twittersphere

Fascinated by what's going on in Iran? BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times offer a pair of useful commentaries on social networking vs. despotism.

In "The Virtual Mosque," Friedman writes:

What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.

For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.

Adds Jarvis:

Of course, Twitter - and Facebook and blogs and camera phones - alone cannot win a revolution. They cannot protect their users from government’s bullets and jails, as we have seen all to tragically in Iran. ... Fighting for freedom requires courage and risk we must not underestimate. But at least these tools allow allies to find each other and to let the world know of their plight. For thanks to the fact that anyone in the world - outside of North Korea - now has a printing press and a broadcast tower, they can be assured that the whole world is watching.

Also see:

• "How Twitter Creates Social Bonds with the Iranian Protesters" on Reportr.net.
• New York Times slide show
• Twitter Lessons on Revolution
• MediaShift on Iran's Citizen Journalists
  
• Twitter and Personal Branding
  

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(Photo credit: "Iran Protests for 5th Straight Day" by .faramarz, courtesy of Flickr.com)

Jarvis to Newspapers: You Blew It!

New media advocate and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has three words for the newspaper industry: You blew it.

In one of the better rants laying out the ineptitude of the industry to adapt in the new millennium, Jarvis comments on the state of newspapers in this BuzzMachine missive in connection with the Newspaper Association of America meeting in San Diego last week:

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

You blew it.

Jarvis, author of the book "What Would Google Do?" and a professor at City University of New York, chronicles all the opportunities missed by the newspaper industry, which was too busy protecting its own turf, ignoring customers and resisting change while Google and others recognized the digital revolution and ate their lunch.

Jarvis has little sympathy for newspaper publishers who have only themselves to blame for their industry's demise. He concludes:

So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late. The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there, for them.

Take that!

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(Photo credit: "Jeff Jarvis" by eirikso, courtesy of Flickr.com)

Jeff Jarvis: The Great Restructuring

It's a sobering glimpse of reality and what may be in our future, but it's also a compelling new post on Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine.

As the author of "What Would Google Do?" points out:

I try to argue in my book that what we’re living through is instead a great restructuring of the economy and society, starting with a fundamental change in our relationships - how we are linked and intertwined and how we act, nothing less than that. ... Yes, entire swaths and even sectors of the economy will disappear or will change so much they might as well disappear.

Jarvis isn't very optimistic about industries that once produced what seemed like limitless quantities of cars, newspapers, advertising, business travel...

Some pretty bleak stuff. But that doesn't mean Jarvis isn't optimistic about the future. He sees big-time opportunities for entrepreneurs, new services and education. I've got his book on my list of things to do over spring break.

Along the same line, check out Eric Ulken's column: "Newspapers' Supply-and-demand Problem (Why You Should Quit Doing What Everyone Else Is)" on the Knight Digital Media Center.

(Note: YouTube video is Jarvis speaking at a conference earlier this year.)

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Free Speech and the Internet

Jeff Jarvis, the one behind BuzzMachine, makes a compelling case for free speech on the Internet in this interview. As you'll see, he's an eloquent advocate of the First Amendment and why those who want to censor the Internet need to rethink their position.

Watch and appreciate.

Note: This video, an interview on the CBS program "Eye to Eye," is kind of dated, but you never know where or when you are going to stumble upon a gem.