Social media ‘will be what we want it to be’
Toronto author will give keynote address during social media week
Toronto author and educator Don Tapscott, an expert on the digital revolution, is the global curator for Social Media Week 2012 in New York. He will give the keynote address Monday to kick off the event that runs through Friday and expects to draw 60,000 people and more than 500,000 online viewers.
Tapscott was reached Friday at his Florida residence in Miami. Q: What is a global curator? A: To achieve successful (social media) communities, they need to be curated. It’s not true that all of these self-organizing phenomena, from Wikipedia to something like Social Media Week, kind of just happened. There is leadership and an inherent structure (and) rather than telling people what to do, (leadership) curates. It guides things, helps ensure the power and the benefit of a community can come forward. Q. You are 64 years old. Are you on the older end of the geezer spectrum to be headlining such a forum? A: (Tapscott laughs) One thing about the new (social media) communities is they are very much a meritocracy. I’ve learned a lot from young people and it turns out I have something to contribute to the relationship as well. Q: What hope can boomers see in you? A: What a wonderful opportunity to reinvent your whole knowledge base. Previous generations didn’t get a chance to do that. I find it very sad when I hear people say: “I’m five years from retirement, I can just wait this thing out, so I don’t have to change the way I teach in my school or the way that I manage my business or the way I do research in my lab.” Q: How are the “net generation” brains different from ours? A: There are two critical periods of brain development in early childhood. Zero to two and extended adolescence, about 8 to 18. During these periods, the No.1 variable that determines what your brain is like, after DNA, is how you spend your time. So the baby boomers during adolescence spent 24 hours a week watching TV. (Net generation) kids spend an equivalent amount of time with media but they’re not the recipients, they’re the actors (with video games, Facebook, texting, twitter accounts, laptops, etc.)
This is actually changing the way their brains are wired. I’ve spent time talking to neuroscientists and we’ve surveyed 11,000 young people in 10 countries and from what I can figure (kids) aren’t multi-tasking. They’ve got better active working memory and better switching abilities than their parents. Q: Do you really believe the Arab uprising would have happened without social media? A: Who knows? But we do know that social media was critical to the speed and the scale and the power of this thing. Q: Is there a downside to social media? A: The old media was centralized. It was one way. It was one-to-many and it was controllable. It carried the values of its owners or advertisers.
The new media is the antithesis of that. It’s one-to-one and it’s many-to-many.
It’s not centralized, it’s highly distributed and it’s not controllable. As such, it has this awesome neutrality.
And it will be what we want it to be. If we want it to be a platform to bring down a tyrant or to map the galaxy (or) to collaborate to find a cure for AIDS, it will be that.