HOW CAN SOCIAL MEDIA MAKE HISTORY
Clay Shirkey
PRE-VIEWING TASKS
1. Discuss the following:
- In what ways do you think social media are different from traditional ones?
- Do you think they stand a chance of completely substituting for the traditional media?
- In his talk, the speaker mentions the Great Firewall of China. Search the definition on the Internet. What does this term allude to?
2. Do the vocabulary task. Match a word and its definition.
| to ensure the sanctity of voting | a. to hear about smth secret or private | |
| to permeate smth | b. to get data from another computer or from the Internet | |
| to beat someone to the punch | c. to make sure that elections are very important and worth protecting | |
| to upload smth | d. to affect every part of smth | |
| to download smth | e. to accept bad things that happen to. You without complaining | |
| to take your lumps on smth | f. to send data onto another computer or a website | |
| to get wind of smth | g. to get or do smth before someone else can |
WHILE-VIEWING TASKS
Watch the video and complete the table:
| 4 periods when media changed enough to qualify for the label revolution | 1. 2. 3. 4. |
| 2 types of media good at creating conversations | 1. 2. |
| 2 types of media good at creating groups | 1. 2. |
| 3 big changes in the media of the 21st century | 1. 2. 3. |
| 4 features of media in the 21st century | 1. 2. 3. 4. |
POST-VIEWING TASKS
- The Speaker claims that the media landscape has transformed. How does he prove/illustrate this? Give an extended answer using the following expressions:
voter suppression
on the lookout for voter suppression techniques
to ensure the sanctity of the vote
social capital vs technological capital
beat them to the punch
the BBC got their first wind from Twitter
- The Speaker makes a ‘big claim’: “The moment we’re living through is the largest increase in expressive capability”. How does he back it up?
- With this shift from professional media to amateur ones, when the former audience largely become participants in the process of crafting messages, is it likely that the world will see the demise of journalism as a profession?
Notes:
Bill Cheswick – computer security and networking researcher, started the Internet Mapping Project in 1997 and since 1998 has collected processed and visualized the Internet data to illustrate and map corporate and government networks.