TED Talk Summary

During this TED talk, Clay Shirky describes how the social media is effecting our day to day lives and how politically and socially it is changing from the way it used to be. He describes that before there used to be professionals giving the information out to the amateurs. Now there are more amateurs interacting and providing the information to each other without any sort of restriction. People now can talk to other people about things that are effecting the world before the professional media can get its hands on it. He describes how that people got word of China’s earthquake while it was happening because the people that were being affected by it were tweeting about it live. He also says that the Chinese government shut down twitter because of the overabundance of raw information. Shirky states that this type of explosion of information is inevitable today because of the fact that everyone can communicate and produce whatever they want with each other. He describes to the audience that we are living in this movement right now. He shows the audience that we now have a bigger voice then we ever did before because now we can communicate with anyone we want about anything. He also says that we can affect the political and social things that are happening in this world because we now are a huge force of voices. Towards the last part of his lecture, he talks about how Obama was going to sign a bill granting the big companies the ability to obtain any information about their clients. On the forum, the community signed a petition against the signing of this document. And Obama decided to sign it anyway but he had to write a formal statement that he heard and understood the reasons behind the argument. Social media is now a force that will be able to effect the whole world. We can now use this to our advantage to change the world as we know it, one tweet at a time.