Columbia University psychologist and business professor Sheena Iyengar promises to take us around the world in her 18 TED minutes. She begins in Kyoto, Japan where she was doing her dissertation research. She tells a funny story about trying to order green tea with sugar and being politely told, “One does not put sugar in green tea.” Escalating the conflict, the manager got involved and told her “We have no sugar.” So she ordered coffee… and was served a cup promptly… with sugar.
From the American perspective, the diner has the right to have it your way because, as Starbucks says, “happiness is in your choices”. In the Japanese perspective, the job is to correct the customer’s mistake and help her save face – hence, they prevented her from sweetening her green tea.
Cultures shape how we make choices, and we need to consider the assumptions behind the ways we make choices. One cultural assumption is that choice is the individual’s and that we might fight hard to defend these choices.
She tells us about an experiment conducted in Japantown in San Francisco. Three groups of children were asked to do a basic task – solving anagrams with markers. One group chose the anagrams and the markers. Another group had tasks chosen by an experimenter, and another had tasks chosen by their mothers. Anglo-American children performed best when they chose for themselves… Asian-American children did best when they were told their mothers had chosen the task, and least well when the arbitrary other chose the task.
First generation immigrants showed a deference to parental authority. Success in the experiment was as much about satisfying the parent’s preference as personal preference. The assumption of choice as individual makes sense only if there’s an isolated individual – it’s possible that in some cultures, there’s an assumption of interdependence, where the idea of choice as private and self-defining isn’t as powerful. It’s a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone.
A second assumption: the more choices you have, the better choices you’re likely to make. Think of WalMart, Amazon, online dating sites. In Eastern Europe, Iyengar interviewed people who’d lived through the transition between controlled and market economies. She offered a group of Russian speakers a set of seven different sodas – her respondents consistently said, “That isn’t a choice – they’re all soda”. When she added juice and water to the set, they perceived it as a set of three choices. Compare this to Americans’ devotion to soda brands – research tells us that we can’t reliably tell between two brands of cola.
For Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of consumer products was “a deluge before people knew how to swim.” Choice led to fear – people felt like there was too much to cope with: “The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them,” “In reality, many choices are between things that are not much different.”
More choices can be confusing and frustrating, sometimes terrifying. Choice isn’t always a marker of freedom, but it can suffocate us with meaningless minutia.
Americans train all their lives to “spot the difference”. And yet, we’re often pretty bad at this.
The third, and perhaps most problematic assumption: “You must never say no to choice”.
Iyengar tells us a story about a couple who gave birth to a child. Unfortunately the baby, Barbara, suffered hypooxia, and could only survive on life support. The parents and doctor had an impossible choice – remove the child from life support, or allow her to survive, but as a vegetable, likely to die in the future.
A study interviewed parents who’d suffered this tragedy. In France, the doctors made the decision when to remove life support; in the US, the parents made the decision. How does this affect how the parents heal from the trauma? A year later, the US parents were more likely to express negative emotions than the French ones. American parents were more likely to say “What if?” and to say, “I feel like I’ve played a role in an execution.” When American parents were asked if the doctors should have made the decision, they all said no… despite the fact that making the choice had, in some cases, made them clinically depressed.
American parents couldn’t have given up the choice – it would be contrary to everything they’d learned and been taught about choice.
The story the American dream depends on is the story of limitless choice. It promises freedom, success, happiness and says, “You can have everything.” When you take a close look, you start to see the wholes and many other ways to tell the story. Americans expect to be received with open hearts and minds when they spread their message of choice… but it doesn’t always work that way.
“No single narrative serves the needs of everyone, everywhere. Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating other perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long.”
We’re invited to engage in translation of these different narratives, to learn from these different accounts. “No matter where you’re from and what the narrative is, we’ve all got the responsibility to open ourselves to what choice can do and what it represents.” This isn’t about moral relativism – it’s about learning what choice can and can’t deliver.
I enjoy blogging conferences, and I especially enjoy blogging TED. And while I’m pretty good at conferenceblogging, blogging my own talk is beyond me. So here are my notes – I can’t promise that what I say on stage will bear any resemblance to this, but this is what I’d planned to say. The slides are available at Slideshare, and if all goes well, I hope we’ll see video of the talk online in the next weeks or months – I’ll keep you posted.
As an American, I try to avoid forms of football that don’t involve men larger than me tackling each other, but it’s been hard to avoid the 2010 World Cup – when I go on Twitter, there’s been lots of unfamiliar terms in the trending topics list: “Vuvuzela”, “Furia Roja”, “Octopus”…
For a couple of weeks, the leading topic on Twitter was “Cala Boca Galvao”. Being a monolingual American, I obviously didn’t know what this meant. Fortunately, a number of helpful Brazilian twitterers were happy to enlighten me. They explained that “Cala Boca Galvao” actually means “Save the Galvao” and was the rallying cry for an international campaign to save the rare Galvao bird…
which is in grave danger of extinction. (This video helps explain the bird’s plight – it’s very much worth your time. :-)
Actually, it’s a very sad situation – the Galvao bird isn’t just very beautiful, it’s evidently got narcotic properties, which have led some troubled individuals to engage in shocking acts of Galvao abuse.
Fortunately, people are stepping up to help. Lady Gaga has evidently released a new single – actually, several new singles – titled “Cala Boca Galvao”.
And as it turns out that the reason so many people were twittering “Cala Boca Galvao” – and the reason I should tweet it as well – is that ten cents would be given to the foundation to save the Galvao if I did so.
This was, of course, a prank - a very successful one. There’s no Galvao bird, no donations, no new Lady Gaga single, and I can’t speak to what Diego Maradona may or may not be snorting. Galvao Bueno is the football commentator on Rede Global, and his commentary evidently annoyed the Brazilian twitter users enough that they organized a campaign to tell him to shut up: “cala a boca” means “shut your mouth”.
There’s a couple of lessons to take from this story. One is that the Brazilians are threatening to take the lead from the Americans and the Japanese in terms of engineering new internet memes, which might mean more inexplicable capoeira jokes and fewer Pokemon references, which can only be a good thing.
And it’s a reminder that you can’t go wrong online asking people to join your protest – no matter how silly it is – so long as all they have to do is cut and paste a phrase.
But the lesson I’d like to point out is that the world is much wider than we generally perceive it to be.
About 170 million people visit Twitter each month, and 19m (11.2%) are Brazilian. More than one in ten Brazilian internet users visits Twitter each month, which is a higher proportion than in most nations – of the big internet using nations, the only one with a higher percent of people using the tool is Japan.
There are millions of Japanese and Brazilian people on Twitter. If that seems surprising to you, it’s because most of your friends online aren’t Japanese or Brazilian. Twitter conducted a phone survey that revealed a quarter of their US users are African American… which was pretty surprising to most American users, who assumed that Twitter was just used by nerdy white guys.
What’s so surprising about this is that a picture of African-American twitter is just a click away – Twitter’s trending topics usually aren’t about the world cup – they’re often conversations led by African-American twitter users. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg – a pair of visualization experts who created IBM’s ManyEyes software – examined a set of Twitter tags over a weekend in May and discovered that there’s a heavy degree of racial segregation in Twitter use… and not just in ways you’d expect – “cookout” was a term mostly used black twitterers, and “oil spill” was a predominantly white topic.
Tools like twitter – tools that give us a view of the world through our friends – can trap us within what my friend Eli Pariser calls “filter bubbles” – the internet is too big to understand as a whole, so we get a picture of it’s that’s similar to what our friends see. If our friends are Brazilian, or know some Brazilians, perhaps we got the joke about Cala Boca Galvao very quickly – if not, we miss it. The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we’re usually filtering it out.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte, then the director of MIT’s Media Lab, began his book “Being Digital” with a story of how atoms are different than bits. He’s attending a meeting on the future of the US technology industry, and he can’t get his head around the idea that the water on the table in Florida is from Evian, France – someone’s gone through great trouble to move these heavy glass bottles filled with heavy French water all the way to the US. The future isn’t about moving, selling and trading these heavy atoms – it’s about the movement of weightless, speedy bits.
On this point, it turns out that Negroponte was wrong. In 2010, it’s frequently the case that atoms are more mobile than bits.
Fiji Water is now challenging Evian for leadership in the American “imported bottled water” category – and I’ll spare you the rant about the absurdity of that particular category – and simply mention that you’re a hell of a lot more likely to encounter water from Fiji on any given day in the US than you are to encounter news from Fiji, never mind film or music from Fiji, despite acute political injustice taking place in the country.
The infrastructures of a globalized world lead us to believe that we’re living in a flat, Friedmanesque world. From London, Bangalore’s just one hop away, and Suva’s just a hop further.
Once we stop looking at the infrastructure – the roads, the air routes, the shipping lanes, the cables – and start looking at the flows of traffic, it becomes very clear that some parts of the world are far more connected than others. Globalization is unequally distributed. London and New York are a whole lot closer than Johannesburg and Rio.
I’ve spent much of the last decade studying how news media pays attention to the world, because there’s a phenomenon I find deeply unsettling.
When I was growing up in the US the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories. The percentage of international news in an average newscast now 12-15%.
As Alisa Miller, the president of Public Radio International, pointed out in a TED talk in 2008, this can lead to a rather distorted picture of the world. The image her talk centers on is a cartogram – it’s a map that’s been distorted to display a variable, scaling a nation in terms of the media attention it’s received.The attention to the US, and to a very small set of other nations, creates a few bulges of interest and vast areas of no coverage at all.
Before you dismiss this as being merely a problem of American television news – which I agree is dreadful – let me tell you that I’m seeing the same phenomenon in top quality American newspapers like the New York Times, which pays far closer attention to wealthy nations than to poor ones, which means that you’re more than 8 times as likely to find a story on Japan in the Times as you are one on Nigeria, despite the fact that the countries have comparable populations
Most media I’ve mapped show this GDP bias. The BBC shows a different bias – the coverage of poor countries that used to be part of the British Empire is excellent, while the coverage of those that weren’t formerly pink on the map tends to be weak.
My hope was that the rise of the internet and digital media would mean we’d see a wider picture of the world because it’s so much easier to report from overseas than it was three decades ago – instead of shipping film footage from a war zone to the UK to have it developed and then broadcast, you can post video to youtube.
There are notable exceptions – bloggers paid very close attention to the green movement in Iran, for example – but my research suggests that the most popular bloggers are at least as tighly focused on these wealthy, high attention countries as mainstream media. There’s lots of bloggers from the developing world online – infrastructure – but very little attention – flow – going to their sites.
And the media we’re collectively creating on sites like Wikipedia shows these sorts of biases as well – this is a study done by Mark Graham at the Oxford Internet Institute down the road, showing articles on wikipedia that have geocoding information. It gives a sense for some of the geographic biases we see on wikipedia as a whole, and the strength and weakness of the project in covering different parts of the world, though it’s not the same as a map of all articles by geography in Wikipedia and may overstate the disparities I’m trying to point out here.
The promise of the internet – the idea that everything is just a click a way – is that, here in Britain I can read newspapers from Australia, India, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, at no cost and end up with a wider view of the world. The truth is that – on average – I won’t. I analyzed data from Doubleclick Ad Planner, looking at the top 50 news sites in each of thirty countries – in the UK, over 95% of traffic to the most popular news sites is to domestic sites. It’s one of those rare cases where the US can accuse the UK of being more parochial than we are – we like the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and as much as 6% of our news readership is of British media. But it’s not just the US or the UK – you’ll see that 94% of news read by Indian internet users – who are on average a lot wealthier, worldlier and English-literate than the average Indian citizen – spend 94% of their time on domestic news sites.
It’s data like this that’s leading me to conclude that the internet isn’t flattening the world the way Nicholas Negroponte thought it would. Instead, my fear is that it’s making us “imaginary cosmopolitans”. We think we’re getting a broad view of the world because it’s possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents. When we look at what’s actually happening, our worldview might actually be narrowing.
Having this wider picture of the world is critical for global survival. In the course of four days at TED, we’re going to hear about problems like global warming, pandemic, collective security that can’t be solved by individuals or by nations acting alone – they’re global problems and they’re going to require global solutions. And because the theme of the conference is “The Good News”, it’s worth pointing out that the most exciting opportunities – to make a difference, to make something beautiful or to make a profit – are global in scale. We need to build solutions based on massive, transnational cooperation, which needs to begin with dialog that crosses linguistic, social, national lines
So here’s the good news – we’ve got the tools we need to do this, the infrastructure that could make the world a wider place. And we’re starting to figure out what we’d need to do to build connections around the world that are real, not theoretical.
For the last six years, one of the central joys of my life has been being part of the Global Voices community. This group of bloggers from around the world has been focused on reforming the world’s media by amplifying voices we don’t hear very often – the voices of people in the developing world who are expressing themselves online. You’ll be surprised, I’m sure, to learn that we haven’t yet reformed all of global media – it’s going to take a few more years, I suspect. But what we’ve learned is that there’s a couple of techniques that are critically important if you want to get a picture of a wider world – and more importantly, if you want to build tools, systems and institutions that help people experience a wider world – these turn out to be helpful tools
Cast a wider net: Raising Voices
First, it’s worth remembering that the world wide web is hardly worldwide. This composite picture of the earth at night is now a decade old, but it still serves as a pretty good portrait of the 1.8 billion people who are online and the 4.8 billion who aren’t. (This image, by the way, appears to be a mandatory part of each TED conference – I just hope I’ll be the first to show it this year…)
Those dark spots on the map aren’t silent – they just tend not to be well represented in the world’s media. Through Global Voices, I have a lot of friends in Madagascar, and I can tell you that one of the central annoyances in their lives is being better known for the Dreamworks film than for the natural wonders of their nation
Foko Club didn’t start as a project to change international perceptions of Madagascar – it began as a club for high school students to learn English. That turned into a club for people interested in the internet, which became a blogger’s club, which spread nationwide.
Foko became something else in early 2009, when Malagasy politics descended into chaos as the mayor of the largest city, Antananarivo, overthrew the president with the backing of the military. The new government silenced most independent media, the online space was one of the few places where people could report on the demonstrations and suddenly the high school students associated with Foko were reporting breaking news with their blogs and cellphone cameras. If we want a wider world, we’d find ways to raise voices in places we don’t often hear from, like Madagascar
Here’s the trick – you probably don’t speak Malagasy. Even if you do, the internet is becoming a profoundly polyglot space, which means that, while there’s more content online every day, there’s a smaller percent of the internet that each of us, personally, has access to because more is in languages we don’t speak.
When we encounter words we don’t understand – either in the real world or the online world – we tend to ignore them. And the internet is wired to ignore them as well – search Google for “apple” and you might get Spanish language pages with the word “apple” in them, but you won’t get ones with the word “manzana” or “ringo”.
In their new web browser, Chrome, Google did something very smart and subtle – they detect the language of the page you’re looking at and offer to translate it for you. You can set the browser so that it always translates Chinese for you… which means that if you follow a link to a Chinese-language site, you don’t automatically hit the back button as soon as you see incomprehensible characters
The problem is that Google’s using machine translation, which is pretty impressive between English and French, and pretty painful between English and Chinese. What I want is a button that lets me request a human translation of a page I’m interested in and either pay someone via Mechanical Turk to publish that translation, or let a volunteer know that there’s someone who wants to read that page in translation.
It turns out that volunteers are capable of translating far more than you might imagine. This is Zhang Lei, who was living in the US during the run up to the Beijing olympics, when there was a lot of US media scrutiny focused on China’s human rights record in Tibet. Lei felt like the language barrier between Chinese and English speakers was leading to a lot of conflicts that were unnecessary, so he started organizing friends to take on the task of translating influential English-language media into English
Yeeyan’s got 150,000 registered volunteers, and they publish 50-100 articles each day, featuring content from The New York Times and sites like Read Write Web. Before they were briefly shut down by the Chinese government, they had a partnership with the Guardian to provide the official edition of that newspaper. So here’s my question: where’s the English-language version that’s giving us insights into what’s being said in Chinese media? If we want a wider world, we’ll take translation seriously, and work to make it routine, transparent and by default
Filter failure: How curators overcome the flock
So we can imagine a future where projects like Foko help us hear voices from all corners of the world, and where Yeeyan translates into languages we understand. How do we decide what to read?
The world’s far too big for any of us to experience personally, and the internet’s at least as overwhelming. YouTube recently announced that people are posting 24 hours of video each minute of each day – if you wanted to watch a day’s worth of videos, it would take you almost four years, and that’s without stopping to sleep, use the bathroom or get the psychotherapy you’d desperately need. We need filters so we can cope with all this information.
We tend to use two types of filters to manage the internet – search, which is great at telling us what we want to know, and social, which promises to tell us things that we don’t know we want to know. There’s a lot of people trying to engineer serendipity by taking advantage of the fact that not only are you on the internet, your friends are also on the internet. And if your friends – or just someone with similar interests – finds something that’s interesting, it might be a serendipitous discovery for you as well.
There’s just one problem with this method. Human beings are herd animals. Like birds of a feather, we flock together. And so what you see on a site like Reddit or Digg – or what links you get from your friends on Facebook or Twitter – is what the flock is seeing. The flock might help you find something that’s unexpected and helpful, but it’s not likely to find you something from halfway around the world.
Meet Amira Al-Hussaini. She’s the editor for the Middle East and North Africa for Global Voices, and she’s got one of the hardest jobs I know of, which is helping distill the chaos that is the middle eastern blogosphere into a couple stories we publish on the site. Oh, and she’s got to do it a way that makes the people she’s representing – Israelis and Palestinians, Syrians and Iraqis – feel represented fairly. But her toughest challenge is finding the story that’s going to capture your attention, either because it’s funny, or surreal, or moving or just beautifully told.
Helping you find things that are fascinating, but outside of your normal orbit is what a good DJ does, or a museum curator, or an editor. The people who are good at it are experts – they’ve got a deep understanding of what you know, what you don’t know and what you might like to know. It’s hard to automate – I think it might actually be impossible to automate – and that’s okay – the internet can superempower curators, letting them help much larger audiences stumble on serendipity. For a wider web, we need this third form of filtering – we need search, social, but we also need these shepherds to help us break out of our flocks and find different voices.
Putting it into context: Bridge figures
When we hear voices from undercovered parts of the world, when we’re able to read voices in other languages, when skilled curators push us outside our comfort zones, we find can find ourselves in some unfamiliar territory.
This image is from of one of the internet’s best technology blogs, Afrigadget. The blog features a wide range of hackers on the African continent, from software developers to blacksmiths. The message of the blog isn’t to teach us how to make a cold chisel out of the drive shaft of a land rover – it’s to teach us something about how reuse can lead to creativity and how people innovate from constraint.
To get that sort of message, we need context for an image like this one. And for context, we need a guide.
Erik Hersman is the founder of the Afrigadget blog. He’s an American geek, who’s the COO of an award-winning and influential software company. He’s also an African. He was born in Southern Sudan, went to high school in Kenya, speaks fluent Swahili. He’s a guy who’s got one foot in each of two worlds, and he’s passionate about explaining each of those worlds to the other. Erik is a bridge figure, and he’s the rare individual who can get American geeks interested in Kenyan blacksmiths and vice versa, because he understands both worlds and can build links between the two.
If we want a wider world, we need to celebrate, recognize and amplify the influence of these bridge figures.
And we need people to walk across these bridges.
If I played linebacker in the NFL, I think I’d probably spend my offseason nursing my wounds and spending my money. Dhani Jones spends his time traveling to different countries and finding different athletes to train with and learn from. He’s got a show on the Travel Channel that’s pretty remarkable – not just because it’s fascinating to watch a professional athlete learn the skills required to play water polo or fight muy thai. It’s fascinating because Dhani is somehow able to project a sense of openness, good humor and approachability that lets people connect with him in whatever country he’s visiting.
Dhani’s a xenophile – a person who puts in the hard work needed to cross bridges and interact with a wider world. I watch him because he’s an inspiration as well as a teacher as I learn how to experience the world in all its diversity and complexity.
My challenge to you in this room isn’t just to be a xenophile or to be a bridge – most of you already are, or you wouldn’t be at a conference focused on ideas from around the globe. My challenge is this – help me figure out how we build the new tools, reform the educational systems, immigration systems and government as a whole so that we empower the people who want to make the world wider. How do we cultivate xenophiles, celebrate bridge builders and rewire the media so we’re experiencing a wide world and not just our flock? That’s what I’m working on and I’d love your help.
Peter Molyneux apologizes that his talk might be a bit of inside baseball. But since he’s a legendary game designer, everyone is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Up to a point. Specifically, Molyneux is legendary for promising massive innovation through games like Black and White, and for building games that are not always popular successes.)
Molyneux tells us that he wants to recreate storytelling, for two reasons. The personal reason is pretty simple: he remembers the experience of sitting on his father’s knee, having him tell a story about a robot. The story changed shape as he reacted, and Molyneaux tells us that he was engaged with his father “as I’ve never engaged with a story again.”
The other reason is also pretty simple. “Entertainment, films, TV, even hallowed books ARE JUST RUBBISH, because they don’t involve me, the audience. I get washed over with a sea of blandness. I hate that.”
His solution is a novel technology platform – the Connect Camera. He tells us it will be a few hundred dollars. This, combined with some AI that was “sitting in a dusty vault in Microsoft” leads to a very different type of game, one that lets you interact with “a real, living being in a computer.” Molyneux tells us that “most of it is just a trick… but it’s a trick that actually works.”
The demo involves his associate, Dmitri, who sits in a chair without any controllers and managed the progress through the game using hand gestures, body movement and his voice. We see a live demo of moving a cursor-like ball onto four corners of the screen, and a “click” from pushing forward. Molyneaux narrates the story of Milo, a boy who’s just moved house from England to New England in America… and he’s conjured you up as someone to talk with. Your
interactions with Milo shape him over time – they change the course of his life.
To demonstrate video response, Milo asks us whether or not he should squash a snail. We’re able to tell him yes or no – Dmitri says “go ahead, Milo, squash it” and gets the right response. And we get a signal in the game that Milo has changed.
We move to an interior and to Milo being chewed out by his parents. And we’re encouraged to cheer him up, which is designed to build a bond with the on-screen character. Milo recognizes us and thanks us for the encouragement and for cleaning his room.
Molyneux tells us that “Milo’s mind is based in the cloud – it will get smarter” as more of us interact with him. We’re freed, he tells us, from the blandness of entertainment that doesn’t learn from us or interact with us. “I love the future that Milo brings.”
In questions with Chris Anderson, Molyneux is careful not to promise a release date for the technology, though mentions the camera should be available later this year.
Chris Wild modestly tells us that he’s created the best chat-up line in history: would you like to see my time machine? He’s happily married, so not in a position to use it, but he can show it to us.
The retroscope is an online portal made from hundreds of thousands of pieces of online content assembled into a timeline and structure for us to curate and explore.
He shows us a wormhole which begins from an image of the Oxford playhouse theatre. We can peer through the wormhole and see it in 1935, 1907… going down the street, we watch the change of Oxford College. And around the corner, we can go back and see the palace that existed on the corner through etchings from the 1600s.
We flip backwards and forwards in time, through the physical geography of Oxford and the underlying timeline.
Why do this? Wild tells us that, as a child, he wanted to go back in time. He told his career advisor this, and the man – wisely – encouraged him to work in libraries. And he did, but it wasn’t enough. Wild didn’t just want to learn about the past – he wanted to be there, to see what was lost and could be retrieved.
Most of us think about time as a moving pavement, taking us into the future, with our eyes fixed forward. Looking backward can be uncomfortable as you move forward. You can hear it in the dusty, sepia-tinged name: the past. So what if we tried another model of time? The sun radiates light, further and further. The first light is now the furthest away. Instead of looking back, we could look out at the timescape, as an index of creative possibilities – drafts of ways of being in the world.
Wild invites us to join him in investigating this set of possibilities. He reminds us that Joyce said, “I’ve created nothing… but I’ve forgot nothing as well.”
Steve Johnson opens his talk telling us about a cafe in Oxford. The Grand Cafe, about ten blocks away, is the first coffee house to open in England in the 1650s. The coffeehouse was a critical technology in creating the Englightenment. What people were drinking did, indeed, matter – prior to coffee, people drank alcohol all through the day, because the water wasn’t safe to drink. Effectively, there was a population that was drunk all day long.
Think of this in personal terms – if you switched from a depressant to a stimulant all day long, you’d probably have better ideas. But the architecture matters to. The coffeehouse was a place where ideas could get together and have sex – it was the conjugal bed.
Johnson has been thinking about coffeehouses because he’s interested in the question, Where Do Good Ideas Come From? (This is, more or less, the talk of his new book.) He tells us that we have shortcomings in our language in discussing ideas. Our language – flash of insight, stroke of genius, epiphany – focus on ideas as atomic and disconnected. But an idea is a network – it’s a new configuation within your brain. How do you get your brain into new places where ideas can form?
We have terrible problems with infant mortality in the developing world. We know we can halve infant mortality rates by keeping babies warm. But it turns out that we generally can’t send $40,000 incubators to rural Africa – they work well for a year or two, and then they break, at which point no network exists to repair them. An innovative design group started to think about what technologies work in African villages – they discovered that it’s pretty easy to keep cars running in Africa. So they built an incubator that’s made from spare auto parts – it warms using headlights and an auto fan. If people can repair cars locally, they can repair and maintain the incubator.
Great ideas aren’t flashes of insights – they’re the cobbling together of diverse ideas into a new configuation. So we need to let go of the image of Netwon, the apple and the discovery of gravity. It’s rarely about individual contemplation – it’s more about the sort of chaotic, free-flowing ideas that happen in the coffeehouse or around the dinner table. We need to build spaces like this, including in their offices.
Researcher Kevin Dunbar was interested in how scientists innovate. He videotaped scientists in every aspect of their work and tried to figure out where the most important ideas happened. What he discovered is that almost all the important, breakthrough ideas happened at the weekly lab meeting, particularly as people shared the errors and frustrations in their work. Johnson terms this “the liquid network”, referencing both the coffeehouse and the fluid nature of discussion.
People tend to compress their stories of discovery into a Eureka moment. In truth, most great ideas a “slow hunches”. Darwin is a great example of this. He says that, while reading Malthus, the idea of natural selection simply popped into his head. But a historian of Darwin disputes his autobiographical account – there are passages in Darwin’s notebook that clearly prefigure the theory. Darwin had the concept, but it took a while for it to fade into view.
Most companies can’t cultivate ideas that might be important in 20 years – some, like Google, try to, but it’s challenging. Many worry about protecting these ideas – they’d be better focusing on connecting them and helping them come to fruition much earlier.
In October 1957, Sputnik has just launched. In the APL lab in Maryland, two twenty-something scientists are chatting over lunch, and wonder if anyone is listening for this satellite. So the two go back to an office, hack together a receiver that, within a few hours, is able to track the satellite. They record the satellite on audiotape, and start considering the sounds they’re getting – they’re quickly able to calculate the speed, based on the doppler effect. Eventually, they get permission to use the new UNIVAC computer for this strange experiment, and within a few weeks, they’re able to map the satellite’s orbit.
A couple weeks later, their boss pulled them aside and asked, “Could you figure out the location on the ground where a satellite was launched, based on how the satellite orbits?” The reason – we have these new nuclear submarines, and it’s really hard to throw a missle at Moscow if you don’t know where we are. And this was what led to Global Positioning satellites… which Reagan finally opened up in the 1980s.
And now that GPS is open, Johnson guarantees that at least one of us in the audience has used GPS to identify a coffeehouse in Oxford in the last day or so. From finding a satellite to fighting a cold war, to finding a soy latte, chance favors the connected mind.
Matt Ridley tells us that, when he was a student at Oxford (not all that long ago), the future was bleak. None of the bleak scenarios – nuclear winter, oil shortage, mass starvation – happened. In his lifetime, child mortality is down two thirds. Food production per capita is massively up despite a population doubling. How did we become the only species that is more prosperous as we become more populous?
We need ideas to meet, recombine and mate… and we need to understand how ideas have sex. How do we get from a prehistoric hand axe to a computer mouse – both are the same size, both designed to fit the human hand? The hand axe didn’t vary in design for 30,000 generations – tools changed slower than skeletons in that moment of human evolution. Computer mice go obsolete in a few years. The hand axe is made from one substance – the mouse is from different substances, different ideas – lasers, plastics, microcircutry – combined into a single entity.
The body is an accumulation of ideas as well – skin cells, liver cells, bones. They come together through sexual reproduction. Sex allows the individual to draw upon genetic innovations of the whole species, not just one’s own mutations.
Exchange serves this function in society. You can teach animals to do a bit of exchange, and some animals have reciprocity… but as Adam Smith observed, we’ve never seen dogs exchange bones in fair exchange. You can have culture in other species, but without exchange, they never expand, never grow culturally or become combinatorial.
David Ricardo explained comparative advantage in the 1800s – a skilled craftsman has benefits from trade, even with a less skilled craftsman, because it allows him to save time. Saving time is one definition of prosperity, and this sort of saving leads to specialization.
How long do you have to work to pay for an hour of reading light? It’s a fraction of a second these days. But in 1800, a candle cost 6 hours wages, putting it outside the reach of most people. The hand axe was created by an individual for his own labors. But the mouse was made my tens of thousands of people, once we consider the guy who made the coffee for the guy running the oil rig to make the plastic to make the mouse…
Louis XIV had hundreds of people sewing his clothes, getting him dressed, serving his food. But you can have hundreds of people at your beck and call by going to a restaurant and a clothing store.
Other species have division of labor – in bee colonies, bees take on different tasks. The queen is responsible, solely, for reproduction. As humans, he observes, this seems to be the one function we’re not willing to delegate… not even in England.
Specialization might have started with sexual division of labor. Looking at a hunter-gatherer community, he notes that a woman knows she can get protein by digging more roots and trading them with a man who’s hunted for a warthog. We don’t believe that Neanderthals do this – they probably had language, they were advanced in many ways, but there’s no evidence of division of labor. Neanderthal women appeared to hunt with men, and there appears there was no exchange between bands. We can distinguish neanderthal and human burial sites by the appearance of materials like obsidian, brought from places far away.
Trade is vastly older than farming – at least 100,000 years old. We see Nassarius sea shells brought many miles inland, perhaps as exchange for other materials. This suggests exchange of labor – we see groups who appeared to specialize in making certain types of tools and exchanging with neighbors for their own reasons.
If a group is cut off from others, the culture can regress. Tasmania is an example of this – the population of about 4000 wasn’t large enough to keep up skills like making stone tools after the island was separated from the mainland. How many of the things in your pocket could you make if you were relocated to a desert island?
Who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody. Literally, there’s no one in the world. The president of the company doesn’t know – he knows how to manage the company. The assembly line worker doesn’t know how to get the oil to make the plastic. Through exchange and specialization, we’ve created the ability to do things we don’t understand.
What’s relevant to a society is not IQ – how intelligent people are – it’s how well people communicate and share their ideas. That’s also why central planning doesn’t work – you can’t have a single individual or small team do the planning and gain the benefits from the diversity of ideas.
Going forward, we know terrible things will happen this century. But because we’ve got the ability for ideas to meet and mate like never before, because everyone, not just the elites, can share and exchange ideas, we know we will accelerate innovation.
Editorial cartoonist Patrick Chappatte is a true global citizen – Lebanese/Swiss by birth, born in Pakistan, he publishes in the International Heritage Tribune and other global newspapers. Introducing him, Bruno Giussani explains that a session on global power is best closed with a person who mocks powerful people.
Chappatte starts by asking if we’ve heard of the newspaper, a revoluitonary technology that weighs less than an iPad and costs slightly less. He asks whether there are any computer designers in the audience: “You guys are ruining my life. Trackballs were easy to draw – how do I draw a trackpad?”
His talk features his cartoons, many of which look at the rise of technology and the ways it’s changing the world. We see a cybercafe in the midst of rural Africa, with a sign that says, “No coffee”. Another points out that the developing world now has email, and shows a screen with incoming mail saying, “I’m hungry”. A cartoon drawn in Vietnam – while he was under surveillance – shows the monitor as a telescope allowing the authorities to watch the user.
The wifi hotspot has liberated us from our desk, but shackled us to our laptops. They shape our desires, as in the iPad cartoon above. Technology even changes our relationship to God – a man confesses, “I’ve sinned”, and his priest, using Google, says, “I know.”
Referencing the Danish cartoons controversy, he turns serious and says, “This is sickening – people died because of cartoons.” 24 Danish cartoonists received the assignment to draw the Prophet – 12 refused – “did you know that?” The cartoons didn’t cause controversy at first – they did so once they became politically useful to another group.
Chappatte doesn’t just work from his home – he traveled to Cote d’Ivoire to document the civil conflict in the country. He led a workshop that brought together cartoonists from around the country and asked them to work together for three days. They ended up producing a book that looked at 30 years of political crisis in the country. Other projects have worked on the same ideas in Kenya and Lebanon. In Lebanon, eight cartoonists from different ideologies published cartoons together in a wide range of papers – pro and anti-government, Christian, Islamist. In Kenya, cartoonists produced video clips that cross lines of ethnicity.
What can a cartoonist do to lead to peace? At least, he can do a cartoon that doesn’t support hatred. We need to support responsible, critical voices – in Africa, in Lebanon and even in your local newspaper. And we need to take on power, even if it’s technology companies, not dictators.
Nic Marks founded the Center for Well-Being, a consultancy that tries to expand definitions of social and governmental progress to include broader quantitative and qualitative measures of well-being.
Martin Luther King didn’t say, “I have a nightmare.” Marks’s dream, he tells us, is that we’ll focus less on the nightmare and more on the dream. Modern filmmaking is almost always about catastrophe – he references The Road, a bleak, post-apocalyptic film.
The environmental movement has gotten very good at using fear. But fear leads to a flight reaction, and scares people away. We need a better way to get people to engage.
When we think about positive visions of the future, we have a tendency to keep score in economic terms. But this is a vision based around greed. We’ve got enough, at least in developed societies. Our accounting systems track what we produce, but they don’t track what’s really important.
In 1968, Robert Kennedy began his ill-fated presidential campaign with a talk that closed with the phrase, “The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” If RFK were alive now, Marks believes, he’d be asking economists to design measures that are broader, fairer and more indicative about what people really want and value. People think money is important, but that it’s not nearly as important as happiness, health and love.
Marks has spent his adult life figuring out how we measure happiness. He’s created the Happy Planet Index (I’ve written about the index here) to measure these factors. The goal is to measure how much well-being we get from the use of planetary resources – it’s an efficiency index.
He shows a graph that measures resource use and happiness – the top right shows some very happy countries that use a whole lot of resources – the US, Western Europe, some gulf states. The bottom left uses very few resources and is deeply unhappy. But there are a few nations – mostly Latin American – that are very happy and use few resources. Costa Rica leads the graph, with a life expectancy higher than that of the US, and has – according to the Gallup poll – the happiest people in the world. And they do this with a quarter of the resources used in the western world.
What’s Costa Rica doing right? The government has committed to carbon neutrality by 2021. 99% of their electricity comes from renewable sources. They abolished their army and put resources towards education and health. “And they’ve got that Latin vibe, don’t they?”
There’s no guarantee that the US is the future. It might be Latin America. We need to pull countries from the bottom (poor and unhappy) and right (rich and environmentally wasteful) towards Costa Rica.
We’re becoming less efficient in turning natural resources into the desired outcome – happiness. We’d all like to get to 2050 without some sort of apocalypse happening. There’s an incredible challenge – we need to massively cut down our carbon emissions while figuring out how to raise national well-being and happiness.
To do this, we need to create feedback loops. Human beings are deeply motivated by the now – put a smart meter on your house, and you (and your kids) will get very good about turning off the lights. Why do we hear the stock market close on the news every day and not our energy usage – we need to monitor the targets we want to reach. We need both positive and negative feedback, and reminders of what we should be doing to be happier and healthier.
What are the five things you should do every day to be happier? Marks and his colleagues did a study for the UK government to try to determine this. The first “secret to happiness” is connection to other people. Second, be active – go for a walk or turn on the radio and dance. Third, take notice of what’s around you – the seasons changing, the world around you. Fourth, keep learning – lifetime learning has a strong link to health in the elderly. This doesn’t need to be formal learning – it can be cooking a new dish or playing an instrument. Finally, give – we feel good when we give. Give two groups $100 – the people who spend money on others, rather than on themselves, feel much better at the end of the day.
These actions don’t need a lot of material goods to succeed. Happiness does not cost the earth.
Marks closes by quoting King again: “I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land.” Environmentalists and the business community need to go to the mountaintop and see a vision of the world we all want. We need a great transition to get there, and we need signposts, something like the Happy Planet index which leads us to happiness with doesn’t cost the earth.
Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is creating one of the world’s most interesting comic books, The 99. (I had the chance to see him at Pop!Tech last year, and my wife Rachel blogged his talk.) He tells us that, in 2010, the Islamic heroes of the 99 will be teaming up with the Justice League.
This isn’t as weird as you think. The Justice League were superheroes fighting against totalitarianism, created mostly by Jewish authors. And these superheroes have something in common with the prophets – they were orphans, and they were given inspiration from above (think of the spider descending to bite Peter Parker.)
The ultimate heroes of The 99 are a group of librarians, who tried to save the knowledge of the Muslim world, and manage to encapsulate some of the power into a set of 99 stones. Those stones spread across the world in the medieval ages. And now there are 99 stones and 99 heroes located throughout the world. The wisdom wasn’t just Arab wisdom – they were the wisest texts from all lands.
The 99 Noor stones have special, mystical powers. You don’t choose them – they choose you. When you discover and start using the stones, you inevitably start abusing it – it’s about the challenge of managing the power you have. The stones have a self-updating mechanism – this is a vision of the Quaran as a living, breathing document. The enemy in the series is determined to prevent the stones from updating themselves, and is trying to create a conformist, consistent army.
The 99 work in teams of three. Why three? In Islam, you don’t leave a boy and a girl alone together, because the third person then is the devil. So the teams are boy-boy-girl, girl-girl-boy, etc. Al-Mutawa has gotten criticized for having subtle trinitarian theory in his work – you can’t please everyone.
Each superhero is from a different country and has different powers. The Yemeni character has his Saudi/Yemeni wife’s eyes – her special power is hiding and invisibility.
Al-Mutawa tells us that he was determined that “this wouldn’t be a fifth-world quality” production. The people drawing the comic are some of the top inkers and colorists in the American comics world.
It was a struggle to get media attention for The 99… up until the Danish cartoons controversy, which helped turn Al-Mutawa into a trending topic. The comics are now licensed in eight languages, and there’s now a theme park in Kuwait based on the characters. The biggest thing done to date is a cartoon series, done with 3D CGI, written by the writers of Spiderman and the recent Star Wars films (oh no!).
Al-Mutawa is trained as a psychologist and worked with survivors of torture. The terrible thing about torture, he tells us, is that your hero is who is hurting you. We need heroes from Islam who don’t embody extremism. He tells us a story about putting two stories of religious extremism in front of a Kuwaiti audience, and asks the audience where these stories came from. They assume the stories are from Islamic nations. One was about Hindu extremists, the other about Orthodox jews in upstate New York, but the Kuwaiti’s saw the behavior as “Talibanization”. We need a vision of Islam, a set of positive linkages to the Quaran that change kids from being proud of suicide bombers and be proud of comic book heroes.
We see the cover of the upcoming DC comics crossover, which shows Batman, Superman and “a fully clothed Wonder Woman” and heroes from the 99. This sort of crossover prompted Barack Obama to recognize Al-Mutawa as an innovator where the Muslim world is crossing over and talking back to the West.
Sheryl WuDunn is an author, lecturer and the first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize. She leads the social investing consultancy TripleEdge. Her new book, “Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” focuses on the challenges of women around the world.
WuDunn starts her talk with images from rural China in the 1990s. She tells us the story of a young woman who was pulled from school at age 13 because the school fees were too high. As it happens, the young woman was the best pupil in the school, and she continued traveling to the school and learning by sitting outside the door.
WuDunn wrote about the young woman in the New York Times and started getting donations from New York Times readers, including a $10,000 dollar donation which paid for her middle school and vocational school… and provided scholarships for all the other girls in schools. She went on to vocation school in accountancy, and now supports her family with the money she sends home. She describes this as a controlled experiment in the power of resources applied to women’s lives.
If the central challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and of the 20th century was totalitarianism, the challenge of the 21st century, WuDunn tells is, is achieving gender equity. Demographers tell us that there are 100 million missing women in the global population. “More girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on battlefields in the 20th century.” In India, girls from ages 1 through 5 die at a 50% higher rate than boys – there’s less discrimination when they’re being breast fed, but when parents feed them solid food, they get far less than boys.
Poverty isn’t just about income, WuDunn tells us: it’s about spending. People living on under $2 a day spend, on average 2% on education. The same people spend 20% towards tobacco, beer, and prostitutes.
When Bill Gates visited Saudi Arabia, he was asked if the country could become one of the top 10 in global technology. Looking at the mandatory gender split in the audience, he said, “If you’re not fully utilizing the talent in the country, you’re not going to be in the top ten.”
Of obstacles to gender equality, WuDunn sees sex trafficking as the most serious. In the 19th century, slaves were worth about $40,000 in today’s dollars. Girls trafficked for sex are sold for a few hundred dollars. They’re more disposeable than African slaves were.
Women aren’t just sold into slavery – they’re victims of diseases that are deadly and debilitating. She tells us the story of an Ethiopian woman who experienced an obstetric fistula as the result of a pregnancy when she was 13. The village she lived with concluded that she was cursed, and put her into a hut without a door to be killed by hyenas. She fought them off with a stick, and crawled 30 miles to a village where a foreign missionary lived. The missionary brought her to a hospital in Addis Ababa where the fistula was repaired. She’s now a nurse – she’s part of the solution, not part of the problem.
When girls are educated, they marry later, have fewer kids, and educate them better. WuDunn recommends microlending, telling the story of a $65 loan to a Pakistani woman to open an embroidery business. The woman ended up hiring her husband to transport goods to market. They’re educating all three of their daughters, because education is what’s really important. Referencing Heifer International, she tells about a Ugandan girl who was able to go to school because a donated goat gave the family extra income. She was eventually about to come to the US on scholarship and recently graduated from UConn. At her graduation, she declared, “I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat.”
WuDunn acknowledges critics of development aid like Bill Easterly and Dambisa Moyo, but urges us not to “throw the baby out with the bath water.” Instead, she tells us that, once you’ve taken care of your basic needs, one of the few things that can elevate your happiness is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.” In other words, giving money is a way to make ourselves happier.
She closes with the story of an American aid worker in Darfur, who witnessed horrible atrocities. She finally broke down when she came home and saw a birdfeeder, realizing that Americans can care not only for ourselves but for wild birds. With great fortune comes great responsibility – we’ve won the birth lottery, and it’s our job to use the blessings we’ve received to help the world.
