It's a new day. It's a new right in the edge. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. But with bills to pay and a family to feed, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. Come along as I follow my passion trying to create art that shows the essence of nature in a photograph. I'll be sharing my successes and my failures in hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Right in the Edge. It's the week of November 13th, 2022. Today we start a new chapter. A new Right in the Edge. Before we get into what all that means, let's talk a little bit about the photography. Today we're out just kind of poking around a lake near where I live. It's a bit of a chilly morning. I'm trying to find some frost leaves on the ground with frost on them. I would like a little more frost, so I'll be back here as the winter goes on. I just thought I'd come out here today and take a look and see how fall is progressing. It's been kind of a weird fall this year. The leaves have been kind of drying up and falling off. There's a few colorful patches, but I'm doing black and white, so that really doesn't matter that much. And what we're doing photography-wise is I'm also testing like I was in the last video. I'm trying to find camera settings on my digital camera that work well for black and white. And last time I shot high ISO, and I'm going to continue with that. But what I did last time was I had shot RAW and JPEG. Well, I forgot that my camera, my Nikon D810 and probably all my Nikon cameras, have a default setting of noise reduction on high ISO, or at least I think it's a default setting. It's possible I actually set that, but I think it's a default setting. And it kind of smeared the JPEG images, and I really didn't want that. I wanted the texture. I wanted to see how much it looked like grain, and I addressed that in the last video. But today we're looking at how the JPEGs look, because what that allows me to do is use the internal filters in this camera. It allows me to take the picture and see it on the back of the screen, which is a nice feature. I've got the camera set up to shoot Monochrome, JPEG, and RAW. But I'm hoping that, and I have a feeling that the JPEGs will probably 80% of the time, suffice or actually be what I'm looking for. And I've done this before. It's been quite a while where I shot JPEG for black and white. But I've not done it in high ISO. I'm not sure what I'll find, but as you'll hear in this video, why it's not that big a deal if I don't find something today because I've got the rest of the week. Well, that's right. We're changing right now to photography. It's actually a pretty big change. We're turning this channel into a time-based presentation. So it's more like a video journal. So the video will be what happens over a period of a week. At least that's what we're starting with right now. Today is Sunday. So I'm hoping to have a video for you by Saturday or her next Sunday. I'll have to work out the kinks. And in this video, that's what the subject is going to be. We're going to talk a little bit about why I'm changing the format and what you can expect to see on this right in this photography channel in the future. I do see a tree off in the distance that stands out against the darker trees. Nice subject for black and white. Maybe we'll see if we can get a photo of that. What I'm going for here is a shot across the lake of this maple tree. Nice bright yellow. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to isolate the tree against the background of the fir trees. There should be an interesting contrast and texture. And I'm hoping that with the yellow filter on in this camera that it lightens the yellow and kind of separates it a little bit from the darker background. Why? Why the big change? Let's get into that. About a month ago, I did a five-year retrospective of this channel. That's right, this channel has been active for five years. It's kind of hard to believe it just flew by. And after putting that video together and looking back at the last five years and all the video clips and photos and footage, I decided it's time to change. It's time to do something a little different. It's time to simplify things. I think this new format will be true to what I had envisioned for this channel in the first place. It's really just sharing my journey to become the best artist I can be. This channel was really meant to be my journey from photojournalism, something I did for 25 years, to becoming an artist. And I think I may have ventured off of that a little bit once you get into YouTube. There's always something that distracts you. Squirrel, you know? And I think I may have ventured off of that a little bit. I think this new format will kind of bring that back. It'll focus more on the art. I'm going to share my thoughts. I'm going to share what I've learned. We're going to weave that into the week's episode. That's what we're doing here today, explaining why we're changing. This episode really is for the subscribers that are my long-time followers of this channel, just to let them know what's coming and why I'm changing it. I'm actually pretty excited about this. What I'll be doing less of is one long day of photography, trying to cram in a bunch of shots, and it'll be more bite-size outings, more bite-size photography outings, something a little bit more to my true everyday life. Taking a camera on a walk, going out on a couple of hours on a morning and seeing if I can find something. I may not go out every day of the week, but the timeframe is what will keep an episode, the boundaries of it, kind of defined. I think this format will work well for my friends and family. They can kind of tune in every once in a while and see what I'm up to, see where I've been that week when I photographed. I think my mom will like this. It may be a little less technical. I'll share how I make the images and that kind of thing. It probably won't look a whole lot different than my regular videos. It's just going to be spread out over a period of time. The light's a little harsh right now. It's the last hour or so of the day. I had a little time. I thought I'd just come out and take a look around. I don't really have high hopes of making an image, but I've got my camera with me. No, he's itching to walk a little bit on this trail. So I think we'll just kind of explore a little bit. I think my style of photography lends itself well to this new format. I don't rely heavily on the iconic locations and that's okay. My photography is about trying to capture the essence of nature in a photograph. And nature's everywhere. Sure, I'd like to go to some of those really cool places around the world. But when it comes down to it, I'm just as happy by a quiet little pond or a creek or a stream or just walking out through the woods. Just seeing what nature has to offer. Each little outing, there's some potential there for some artistic expression. This tree's kind of got my attention here. I don't know if I can make a photo out of this, but it's with the light.  Look at this. I don't know if I even have a lens that would work for this. It looks like a detail shot from pretty good distance. Let me see what I can do with this. I'm at an age now where time is my most valuable asset. So I don't really want to waste a lot of time doing things that I'm not passionate about. Taking photos of the graphs of stuff I don't really care that much about. I think that's another reason I really wanted to change through this format to really try to keep things photography forward, art forward. Try to make sure that art is what this channel is about. It's so easy to get sucked into the numbers and how many subscribers you have. That ship has sailed on me. I don't concern myself that much anymore about that. But if I did, I wouldn't switch to this format. This is definitely not going to be great for subscribers. Well, that's the tree from underneath. That's that tree I was just shooting. And now I'm right underneath it. Sometimes I forget to look up. But all those branches poking out make kind of a cool abstract. I don't know. This is playing with the camera. This is one of those that I have no idea if this is going to be interesting or not. This is one I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what it looks like on the computer. But it's getting really dark out here. I'm shooting at 6400 ISO. And I shot one with 85mm and I've shot one with a 50mm. I'm not sure if I want the tighter crop or not. It's just a really interesting look from down here. The sky behind it is going to be kind of white. So I don't know if that's going to work or not. But we'll see. Wish the light was better. There's a tree growing out of a stump over here. Maybe I'll have to revisit. The background is kind of light. I'm still going to go take a closer look though. Well, it's a dead tree on a dead tree. I might just take a quick shot of the roots here. The light is really low. I doubt this is going to even work. I'll take a quick photo. Well, the background is pretty bright. I'm shooting really tight. I don't know. It's just more of a detailed shot. It might be kind of cool though. It's an interesting texture. I'm not going to get back to the trail. I'm going to get back to this stuff. Let's see if we can get down here. Here we go. There's the trail. If my channel only got people to look at nature. A little closer in a different way. I think it would be successful. Because really, it's about nature. This is why I'm doing my photography. For the love of nature. The temperature is risen, but in the shadows the frost hasn't melted yet. It's always hard to walk past that and not take a photograph. Today we've got the Nikon D810 with a manual focus. A 55mm macro lens. Very lightweight, very compact. It's really a good lens for this type of photography. It's a nice walk around lens. I've been doing a series called The Daily Walk on my personal channel. Something I started not that long ago. That's something I'm probably going to have to give up. Or at least for my personal channel. I can't continue to do that, but I'm going to do it here. It's going to be kind of wrapped into what I'm doing throughout the week in my photography. The idea on The Daily Walk was take one camera, one lens. And usually it was just one photo. And make a short little short out of that. I don't have to keep that to one photo. My goal isn't to do a whole lot of photography on The Daily Walk. I just bring my camera. If I see something that strikes me as an image, something I want to photograph, that's what I do. So those will be on this channel now. It's just part of my week. And that's where you find Nori and I this morning. We're on The Daily Walk. One lens, one camera. This section we walk, it's something we walk almost every day. And it's just like a mile stretch out in the woods. Just a real, I think it's reclaimed the railroad line. That they've made a trail out of. And we walked it every day, but it's amazing how often we find something that we might want to photograph. I photograph this in the spring. It looks a whole lot different now. If I can find that photo, I'll pop it up. You'll see what I mean. It actually made a pretty cool image in black and white. I think it would look better in spring. Now, I wouldn't say this trail is the most scenic or photogenic. It really isn't probably all that attractive as far as nature goes. But for detail shots, there's a lot to be had here. I feel like I'm trying to make art from the ordinary when I'm out here. Which is kind of a fun challenge. Today, we've got D810 and an 85mm. Nori and I on the daily walk. Before I end this video, I should probably talk a little bit about what I'm seeing in these JPEG files at high ISO. For subjects and scenes in even light, I have no problem going with the JPEG. Actually, I don't really see a compelling reason to even go to the RAW. I'm getting everything I want out of the JPEG files. I'm getting the look I want. When it comes to scenes with a high dynamic range, then you have to be more careful. That's when it does make sense to have a RAW file as a backup. All these images in this video were made on JPEG. I'm using the JPEG file. For this contrasty scene of backlit trees, I thought I would want to go with the RAW file. But I went ahead and edited the JPEG file first. After editing the JPEG files, I was actually liking what I was seeing. I didn't mind that it had some of the highlights kind of pushed to the extreme a little bit. I think it fit the scene really well. I started working on the RAW and I kept going back and forth and looking. I kept thinking, well, I'm trying to make the RAW look like this. Why not just go with this? In this case, I think the JPEG worked just fine. I'm not saying I'm willing to ditch the RAW file just yet. But there's a lot of potential in these JPEGs. When I shoot JPEG, I'm not shooting with the goal of having it completely ready to go out of camera. That's not my goal. It's kind of like when I'm shooting film. My goal is to have a good starting point. It doesn't take me very long to get these JPEGs to be how I like them. There seems to be this misconception that you can't edit JPEG files. You don't have as much latitude to make a lot of edits with the JPEG file. But if your exposure is correct, if your exposure is good, there's a lot you can do with the JPEG file. I'm not trying to copy film. What I'm trying to do is just find a recipe that the image is our film like. In my last video, I said I couldn't really draw any conclusions by what I was seeing just yet. Now that we're getting a couple weeks into this, I'm actually quite intrigued by what I'm getting. I'm liking these images. I'm liking the tonal range. I'm liking the dynamics that I'm getting when I'm shooting at a higher ISO. And I'm seeing that in the JPEG files. And I think it helps because I'm seeing something similar, something close to what I'm going to get on the back of the camera. I have to still tweak them a little bit, do a little editing. But they're really getting close to kind of what I want to see in my files or in my images. If you've made it to the end of this video, thank you very much. Hopefully future videos won't have so much talking. We just had a lot of ground to cover this week. Just wanted to get it all out of the way. I think this is a good time to end this video. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.


So here at the Lunara Connect, you have the new Ultra 96 development board and who are you? Hi, I'm Glenn Steiner. I'm with Silencs. And yes, I'd like to introduce the new Ultra 96 development platform. We have integrated ARM Cortex A53 processors, RFI processors, and then our magic sauce, which is the ProgrammaLogic. ProgrammaLogic allows you to take your C code and move it over to hardware and dramatically accelerate that code. And we have a couple demonstrations for you today. The first of which is our tiny yellow demonstration. As you can see in this particular demonstration, we are doing person recognition as well as other object type of recognition. And this again was taken as C code, moved over to hardware using our CDHDL tools, SDSOC, and demonstrates dramatic software acceleration. In this case, hundreds to thousands of times faster. Hundreds to thousands of times faster than running on the A53. Than running on an ARM. Yes. So up to thousands of times faster. Yes. And what is this hybrid Q&N? Is it one way of doing machine learning? We're actually demonstrating here different techniques for machine learning algorithms. The first which is the tiny yellow, which means you only look once. The second demonstration that we have for machine learning is a CNN neural network. And in this particular case, neural networks, you can go and you can have floating point, 32-bit, 16-bit, 8-bit. We've actually, in our research labs, have moved from down to 4-bits, 2-bits. And in this particular implementation, we're doing a 1-bit neural network. What is a 1-bit? Which means that rather than using, let's say, 8-bits of precision, you're down to 1-bit of precision. And you would think you would lose accuracy. And that is true. You do lose accuracy when you're talking about the same number of neurons. But with a modest increase in the number of neurons, you're able to get the same amount of accuracy, but a dramatic reduction in the amount of logic and the amount of power that is consumed. In this particular demonstration, we're showing a recognition of traffic signs. And as you can see, we went out in the field and had 300 different signs collected. The database was trained on a German traffic sign database. And if you look, you will see that we are actually looking at images. And here, you're seeing 13,000 images that are being recognized per second compared to if you're doing it in software, it would be 2.17 images per second, which means that our overall acceleration is 6,200 times faster than if you were doing it in software on an A53. So there's going to be lots of FPGA in the AI of the future? We certainly believe that. And that's one of the ways you are releasing your A6 boards. Do you want to get the open source community to embrace more FPGAs with the Linux and all that stuff? Absolutely. We developed the Ultra96 board. It was actually an internal development. We fielded about 1,000 of these boards to our engineers within the organization. People got excited about it, said, you know what? Let's go ahead and roll this out publicly, make it available to everyone so that they can start doing their own development. And then finally, I'd like to introduce our last demonstration, which is the package that you can receive. Initially, when you do the purchase, you do receive just the board, as you saw earlier. And under this black part here, is it for cooling of the FPGA? Yes. Under the black part, we do have a small fan. It blows air directly onto the MPSOC device. Because it runs very fast? It runs very fast, but it only consumes a few watts, depends on what you're doing. And for our demonstration, we have added the Grove Starter Kit, which plugs directly on top of the board. And then in order to provide an exciting out-of-box experience, we actually boot up to Linux. We have the Enlightenment Desktop. We bring up a HTML-based window where you can go... Kind of like a Chrome browser? Or many Firefox? Yeah. You honestly don't switch browser. But probably, you're correct, probably something like Firefox. And from the browser window, you're able to select particular applications that you might want to go and work with. And then you can see the design. You can quickly click Run Project. Which will then run the code. In this particular case, you can see it's just cycling through very quickly with different colors and descriptions on the board. And then you're actually able to then open up an HTML editor, see the code, modify the code, and create your own software applications. So you have a very nice out-of-box experience. Get you quickly started with the Zinc Ultra Scale Plus MPSOC and the Ultra 96 development platform. So with the Ultra 96, hopefully, you hope that there's going to be a lot more developers working on your FPGAs? That is the objective. And they will learn how to develop on FPGAs, how to optimize code and all that. And you can use your tools. Yes. With the kit, you have access to our Vavado design tools. So initially, you'll want to get out, get started with the quick introduction we have to our developing code. That code is actually run natively and compiled natively on the development platform. As you move on, you then progress into our Vavado development tools using our software development kit, which includes the Eclipse environment. And from there, once you identify some code that might not be running fast enough because you've profiled it, you then use our SDSOC tools, which is included as a coupon, free coupon upgrade. And using the SDSOC tools, you can take the code, convert it over to a hardware description language, automatically replaces your software function with a call to the hardware, and you can accelerate your software. So you can just program in C or C++ or something like that. That is correct. And then it just translated into FPGA language. That is correct. You develop your code in C or C++, and then the SDSOC tool will translate it over to HDL. And the board is $249, available very soon. The cost for the board is $249, available about a month from now. So that's a great deal, right, to have access to your FPGA, which is very cutting-edge technology, right, which is stuff that goes into, maybe, I don't know, rockets or something. Yes, you actually are right. We have been on a variety of different technologies. Our products go into all market segments. We help power the internet infrastructure. We go into automotive applications, medical applications, industrial applications. You're talking about rockets. We were on the Mars lander. Nice. And it's been running on Mars for, like, seven years now or something. Yes. So that means you have high, low-temperature support, all that kind of stuff. Well, we have parts that are designed to go into space applications. Nice. And there's a new announcement with the 7nm, so there's a big future with silings with all these very advanced FPGAs that are coming soon. So if you start working on this, you should be ready for your next stuff, too. That's true. We're fully committed to the ARM ecosystem and the Lonaro ecosystem. We've moved through our ARM Cortex A9 generation. We're now at the A53 generation, and then with our 7nm announcement, we will be moving to another generation of ARM technology.


Hello, everybody, welcome back to another AI video. In this one, we're in ChatGPT4. I'm going to show you how to turn ChatGPT into your own personal and private tutor, professor, teacher, you name it. And not only that, I'm going to show you how to use two different prompts that can help you learn anything you want to learn. Any topic, any subject, big claim, let me back it up. And not only that, I'm going to do it in a couple of minutes as opposed to 15 minute videos about things that just take two minutes to explain. So here we go. So the first step, I've got a ChatGPT open here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just copy in this prompt. And I'm going to make that prompt available in the description so you can just copy and paste it directly. But what it is, is it says, I want to learn about insert topic. Insert topic is in square brackets. Tell me the most critical 20% that will help me understand 80%. This is very simply the Pareto principle in action. Now notice that, that when I have the insert topic in brackets, underneath that I have in brackets how to draw. This is an example that I'm going with. But this can be anything. This can be, maybe you want it to be Photoshop. Sure, you want to learn Photoshop? This is how you can learn it. Just this is basically a variable. So in here, put in the topic that you want to learn. Hit Enter. Now watch this. It's going to basically say that, yes, this is the 80-20 rule, often referred to as the Pareto principle. Yeah, just like I said, there you go, perfect. So that is step one. Now let me show you step two. All right, so let's look at step two. So real quickly here, you'll see here that it basically broke it down into all the different parts. Canvas, Toolbox, Options, Bar, Panels. I know quite a bit about Photoshop, so I can tell you right now that these are quite good. And this is, in fact, the things that you would want to focus on if you were teaching yourself Photoshop. That said, you want to drill in a little further. I'm going to give you a second prompt. This is kind of like a multi-step prompt. So you get your prompt and then you ask it to clarify a few things and give you examples. So here we go. I say, great, give me the best learning resources, books, videos, podcasts, interactive exercises for Insert Topic. Make sure they cater to different learning styles, especially visual learners. Now I'm going to hit Enter. And again, notice that Insert Topic is in square brackets. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make a square bracket. And then again, I'm going to put in Photoshop. But you can put in anything that you want, any topic that you're going for. Just use this as a variable. It's a very basic, it's like you're coding, so to speak, but very simply. So I'm going to hit Enter. And now watch this. It's going to cook up and give me the best resources in its opinion. So let me go ahead and run this. When I come back, I'll show you the final step. All right, welcome back. So here we go. So here are the books that it suggested. They're good books. I have the top one. I don't know this. I have seen the second one, but I've never purchased it. And then in terms of videos, it talks about Flern. That's a rough name, but they're a great channel. Adobe Photoshop tutorials, they're official channel. Yes, it's very, very good. Going to Udemy or Udemy and doing specific training based on their particular class, Christian Doru, I believe, is one of the better Photoshop teachers as is Daniel, geez, what the hell is his last name? Daniel Stewart or something like that. But anyways, there's some really great suggestions there. And again, you can go through it here and see that, hey, this is pretty cool. I can go to Reddit and jump into one of their subreddits.  So this is really, this is how you do it. Now, if you wanted more information, great. Provide, oops, you can just now just go in and ask for more, bribe me, more YouTube channels that are great, that teach, and then you can go Photoshop. And then you just go ahead and do things like that and just add to it, because it will go into greater detail. But literally, those are the only two prompts you need to practically learn anything.


And this is gonna be a Mac this one should already have been a case. This is gonna be a premium ink of Yanis Six out of 15 with the big on card auto. Let's go six spot is mr. Oran, let's go Warren Warren W there six out of 15 on the Yanis on tetacumpo isn't signed a lot That is from 1920 flawless. That's a little throwback there Let's go get a Mac on that sir premium ink of Yanis. I think that was the year he won the MVP 2


Let me first introduce members of the panel. I'm meeting them myself for the first time, so tell me if I'm not pronouncing names correctly, such as yours, Marvin. Marvin Amoury, as a council and head of the Amoury Group of Law Firm, specializing in advising Silicon Valley companies on public policy issues. Dana Fisher is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, focuses on political decision making, grassroots activism, and civic participation. She's the author of Activism, Inc. Eric Tyler is with the Global Assets Project of the New America Foundation, is conducting research and advocacy at the intersection of technology, globalization, and economic development. And Colin Nagy is executive director of the Barbarian Group, previously a partner at Attention, a social media marketing organization. And I was struck by the fact that your bio said that you helped Tina Brown set up the Daily Beast. We're all very grateful for that. Some people would be grateful, some people would be angry. Well, we have a wide range of expertise here. And I'm not sure it all fits together so neatly.  But you're here, I think, to remind us that networks, IT, technology, and connecting people can be disruptive in very different ways. Social media is not really your space, if I understand it. You're principally interested in mobile banking and in development. Just tell us, give us a couple of minutes on what you're up to in that space. Absolutely. I think one of the things that I've tried to keep in mind and as we have this conversation is that this is a global phenomenon, meaning that the rapid spread of technology and the growth of social media is happening all over the world. You look at 900 million or more Facebook users, 80% of these are outside of the United States and Canada. When you look at the 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions that are around the world, 2 thirds of these are in the developing markets. And so when you start to talk about the conversation that's going on in the global scale, you realize that not only companies have a new found and unprecedented opportunity to connect with new markets and new customers, but you also have to see individuals being able to connect with a diversity of different opinions, a diversity of different insights. And I think this is something that I've really started to touch on, not only when it comes to what's going on in the United States, with social media, but as well with mobile phone technology, which is exploding in the developing world. But what do you think about mobile phones and banking? Yes. Which is a sort of particular, very hot aspect of what's going on in the development space right now. Do you make a connection between that and social media? I mean, because you're talking about a specific product, aren't you, the ability of countries to leapfrog a stage in technology, go directly, I mean, not have wired telephone networks at all. Just go to and not have branch banking, but through technology, go directly to a new form of banking. What's the connection, if any, with social media? I think it speaks to the level of integration that technology has in our everyday lives. And so in that respect, there is a lot of parallels. So I was conducting research in Kenya, and I was taxing from a meeting, and I was leaving the taxi and fumbling for cash. And I remember the taxi app driver leaned over me, and he said, it'd be much easier if you could empace and use money. Right. And empace it for all of you that don't know is a mobile money transfer system that seamlessly and in real time transfers funds from one mobile phone to another. And the way that he said it was the same way that we would talk about Googling information about a colleague or something along those lines. And I think when you talk about social media and when you talk about communication technologies or mobile money, a lot of these same conversations are increasingly happen where we can learn from other markets. And when you can look at leapfrogging technologies in Kenya that are happening and that have a real place to learn from, I think it's a really interesting story. And I think increasingly we're gonna see this in the social media space as well. Yeah, it's very interesting. Okay. Well, listen, I wondered if we could perhaps explore some lines of skepticism concerning what we've just heard. I mean, we've heard from two leading practitioners in social media. And I think they did give a very optimistic take on this development. Now, I am instinctively optimistic about a technology that eliminates, I'm an economist by background, instinctively optimistic about a technology that eliminates the costs almost entirely of a critical communications function of broadcasting. But there are some problems, I think. There are a variety of issues raised. I wondered if we could focus on those. One distinction I'd just like to make at the beginning is between commerce and politics. Let's get those, let's get that distinction clear. There's, as it were, the commercial interest in social media and there's what social media can do for our politics, for our political system and for political engagement. Think we need to keep those two things on separate tracks. But just to get the ball rolling here, I wonder if I actually, just to give an overall take of how optimistic or pessimistic are you, that these technologies, that this, you know, tidal wave of innovation is actually going to make us better off, is gonna raise our welfare. Where do you stand on that spectrum? Is this a great thing or actually not such a great thing? Marvin. So I think it's a great thing. And one of the reasons I think I'm here is because I worked on the SOPA and PIPA campaign which involves a lot of social media, a lot of outreach through Twitter and Facebook. Partly in order to save Twitter and Facebook was our argument. And one of the reasons why I'm optimistic is because I don't think of social media as media or as broadcast. So like 15 years ago when people started using the internet, they'd talk about cyberspace. Like it was a different space and totally different. And a few years later, it was just a network for connecting all of us. And when I think of Facebook and Twitter and other social media, to me they're not broadcast media or like your TV screen. They're more applications that connect all of us. They're more like your dinner conversation than the TV screen. And so when you try to think about how do I engage people on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest? But you realize that they have their own conversations and you want to be part of that conversation rather than to broadcast at them. So that's where the main reason I'm actually optimistic about them. I think they're here to stay. I think the entire web is social. Even when you go to cnn.com, there's a Facebook button, a tweet button. When I read stories on NPR on my phone, I just press tweet, I share. And so I think it's a sort of a way of connecting people and not a different medium or a different cyberspace. So that's why I'm optimistic. Okay, Diana, what do you think? Well, I would say I'm also optimistic but for different reasons. I think that social media in total is a wonderful channel that is connecting people in new and innovative ways. However, at least what my research and a lot of other research has found is that it's a great way of getting connected, but it's not a great way of staying involved. And it's not, as Matt was saying before, it's not a great way of affecting change, but rather it's a way of beginning the conversation. And so I think that it will continue to diffuse and inundate people with information and allow them access and channels to make change and to get politically involved. I mean, one wonderful example would be the My Barack Obama campaign website, the Mybo website from the last campaign because it did a wonderful job of getting people on, many of whom had not been involved before, many of whom were young people. And then it channeled them into a lot of different face-to-face activities. And it was the face-to-face activities that made long-lasting campaign supporters, activists, and potentially people who will cause trouble in the next election. So you're thinking of it as an enabler of that kind of interaction rather than a substitute for that kind of interaction? Oh, most definitely. I mean, it's a channel. It's a channel that perhaps there are too many voices that are coming into the channel so that people are inundated with information, but it's a channel that can be used and harnessed in many ways, but most of them end up being about real face-to-face communication, not just about what's happening with people that you never talk to in person. I think, Colin, I just reread a wonderful book, The Powers That Be, about the rise of radio and television, how ridiculously disruptive they were at the time. And it's something that provides a lot of necessary context as you're thinking about the evolution of social media and everything that's going on right now. I do think any pessimism that I would have is likely rooted in the fact that we are in this kind of gawky adolescent phase where things are kind of like working themselves out. I do get a little frustrated in seeing how, you know, misinformation and intentional kind of, intentionally disingenuous things can actually travel pretty quickly. And I think that's a little scary because with the role of the Financial Times and the Atlantic and the New York Times, like typically there's a lot of editorial oversight and there's a lot of institutional professionalism. And I think that that's one of the pessimistic things. Overall, I do think that this is just natural evolution of media. It's very interesting. It's like a coral reef. It's like changing every day. But we are in this very transitional adolescent phase and sometimes it's not very pretty. Okay, and you're open-minded about where it might go. I was just trying to make sense of it and I'm also trying to look at the kind of historical analogs to make sense of it because when you look at the rise of radio, when you look at the rise of television, there's a lot of kind of correlations into how disruptive and how the world didn't know what to make of it. And I think that we're in that really interesting phase right now, so as an interested observer of this, I think it's important to keep an open mind.  Okay, okay. Do you have anything to add on this? Yeah, I was just... On the optimism scale. I would just say I'm a cautious optimist, in many respects, so meaning that there's a great leveling and there's a tremendous increase in the number of different players from a wide range of backgrounds that are accessing new technologies. However, as the panel before discussed, access, just because you're connected, doesn't actually necessarily lead to change. And making that next step is something that we're still seeing and it still remains to be seen. I think it's gonna be the opportunities there, but it's still early on and we'll just see how it goes. Let me see if I can sort of, just for the sake of argument, push us in a more pessimistic direction. I mean, let's start with the commerce side. I was struck by the episode that we had described in the previous session over the response through social media to that product, the KitKat ad that was subverted by Greenpeace, successful social media campaign, the company changed its sourcing of the product. The thought that went through my head when I heard that story and knowing nothing about the details was, well, I wonder how the farmers producing the palm oil in the country in question thought about that. I mean, there are cases where pressure, before the age of social media, as it were, grassroots pressure has forced companies to make changes which arguably don't serve a wider public interest. It brings, what I'm raising here is the question of what, to what extent can we assume that information is knowledge and knowledge is wisdom, right? Mere activity, mere engagement is not necessarily a good thing. It has to be intelligent. That's a great point. I think that the scary thing too is a level of superficial engagement where sometimes these platforms allow for very kind of like light touch engagement and it can kind of come together and be the digital equivalent of a bunch of people with like pitchforks storming a house without actually those people necessarily knowing a lot of the context and background to it. So I think that there's gonna be two sides to all of this. I mean, for every one of those kind of scary examples, there's probably three or four examples of a grassroots community or a community or an activist group that has kind of come together and coalesce to like do something interesting. So I do agree with the point that very superficial advocacy is kind of scary. And also, I remember like four or five years ago I was talking to Financial Times about this and my question was like, as a presidential candidate, would you rather have like 10,000 followers or friends where all they had to do is click like or would you have like five hardcore organizers? So there's varying levels of this, you know. Of this participation. Well, I would just add that there's nothing really new about the phenomenon you're talking about. I mean, if you read about or remember the time that during the World Bank protests and protests against globalization, Seattle in 1999, there was all this discussion of the people who took to the streets because they really wanted to just throw a rock through Starbucks window. Were they educated people about international financial institutions? Did they really understand global processes and how the economy was shifting? No, many of them did not. No, but there's a scale issue here, right? I mean, whether the Seattle protest is right or wrong, it was a remarkable event because it was such an outlier. It was so unusual to have that gathering, that intensity, people paid attention. Social media sort of scaling that up so that politicians on one side and companies on the other exposed that kind of pressure constantly. Well, the protest movement around globalization actually consistently brought out very large groups of people around the world, I mean, including the World Economic Forum protests that happened in New York City in February after 9-11. So it's actually not that Seattle was an outlier. Seattle was part of a wave of contention that happened around the world. It is true that there are more people who are engaged on social media than they were taking to the streets, although there's a very big difference as was being discussed already between people who are just retweeting something and people actually getting off their butts and going downstairs and actually outside or even having to take public transit or get to a protest event.  I'm gonna defend superficial activism and unintelligent activism as well. And for two reasons. Who's to judge what's intelligent or what's intelligent activism? Before the internet, we had curators of content, the news editors, the big TV news organizations, and now we have things like Wikipedia and Amazon reviews. And as it turns out, average Americans know a lot about everything on Wikipedia. And according to studies, the information on Wikipedia, even on scientific matters, is just as accurate or inaccurate as the information on Britannica. So as it turns out, I do think there's a lot of intelligent activism. There's no way to determine what's intelligent and unintelligent beyond a democratic discourse. It's like the Winston Churchill line, democracy is the worst of all governmental systems except all the others that could be tried. So it's sort of in an imperfect world that we have, we sort of are stuck with uneducated activism and educated activism. And the second reason I'll defend uneducated activism. Like during the SOPA and PIPA campaign, which I know better than the WTO protests, there were a lot of people who didn't know much about copyright, who didn't know much about the First Amendment, didn't know about 230 immunity, the DMCA. But the DMCA or 230 immunity, two different communities. And but we could explain to them in simple terms what the law was going to do, what the effect was and get people who were credible to the mass of slaktivists to be involved when it mattered on an issue on a particular day. And I don't think that they were misguided. I think that we informed them that there was a democratic dialogue going on and we could have, had we lost, we would have thought they were misinformed. We had our chance. Right. I only disagree with you to the, and what you said on one respect though, which is that it seems to me Wikipedia is like the paradigm instance of intelligent activism as it were. It is a social networking phenomenon and an amazingly successful one. I think a lot of people, including me ahead of time would have said, there's no way this is going to work. Can you be serious? But it's a triumph. I mean, it's an astonishing thing. So if nothing else, it shows you, there are different kinds of social media. But the problem with unintelligent activism, in other words, not Wikipedia, is that, well, one might argue that a problem is that it makes it harder to give intelligent answers to difficult questions. I mean, the classic case would be what do you think of a certain policy proposal?  Tax cuts, like. What about public spending? Does that need to be raised or lowered? High public spending on essential public services, like.  It's about balancing things. In other words, it's complicated. It's not like, is this a good novel? Does this candy bar taste good? It requires much subtler form of thinking. And the question I'm raising is whether these, whether social media actually facilitate a more sophisticated form of thinking or actually get in the way of it. I think that it's problematic to use this intelligent, unintelligent dichotomy in terms of thinking about people's engagement through social media or other ways because there have always been people who get more or less engaged and educated on issues before they get involved. That's nothing new. It's the fact that the social media provides a channel for more people and more people are using it so that they can, in some cases, bypass traditional institutions that would otherwise provide the information and diffuse it. But at the same time, what the poll shows is that people, when they're trying to educate themselves, tend to go to the same traditional places they used to before and that people, because they're learning more potentially, are less trustworthy or trust, not trustworthy, but trusting of traditional institutions. Were you surprised by that, by the way? I was a little surprised by that poll finding that their traditional institutions are still so trusted. Well, because in a lot of cases, the traditional institutions are the least trusted, right? So it was friends and family, traditional news, academic, so I was very happy about that, scientist. So I actually wasn't surprised at all. But also, there's not that big of a difference between people who use social media and people don't, which is awesome. That was also very, very striking. And again, I think surprising. The political profiles were almost identical, weren't they? I mean, to within a percentage point, use of social media no different from the population at large. Yeah. I think a helpful lens to sometimes, a more helpful lens to look at this through is different degrees of activism. So maybe on one side, on the minimalist side, you have liking on a Facebook like, and then editing a Wikipedia page, contacting your representative and then going out in protest. And when you look at formally what, or traditionally what people were doing before being connected to these digital realms and then what now they're allowed to do based on what was previously accessible to them, that's more of a helpful kind of parallel to run through. Right. And it may be partly to do with the intensity of the engagement, right? Exactly. That's the hallmark of Wikipedia. It demands a fairly intense engagement from the activists, so to speak, who are involved. But in other domains, I'm sort of conscious of those, you know, a very low signal to noise ratio. I mean, when I read the comments threads on my columns or on other people's columns, you know, nine out of 10 or maybe more make me think, why am I even bothering? And that one out of 10, you think, good point. I think that's an important distinction and it's starting to change a little bit because in the past I would be blown away by reading the Washington Post comments, which I think at one point were kind of anonymous so you could just, you know, troll 743, you know.  Sometimes I think that that's actually a net positive. There was a really hilarious thing, I remember in the early days of the Daily Beast where it was an article about like, you know, the Iranian nuclear program. And there were two or three, like there was two nuclear scientists like battling it out in the comments, being like, oh, the T-472 processor is not, it was like, wow, this is amazing, you know. Like this is actually helping move this story forward. But I would say that that's the exception and not the rule because most of the comments are like, first, you know, or like. Right, right. We also should keep in mind compared to what? And so, sure there might be nine out of 10 comments that are not very bright, but compared to what? Compared to talk radio? A lot of people think that most of it's a silence. It's really what I was comparing. Okay, sure. But if we're gonna compare it to other social media, right, compared to talk radio, there's a very high noise to signal ratio there.  Even local TV news is often not all that informative. And so is, you know, the internet or these sort of social applications, are they perfect? No, is it a Athenian democracy? Not yet, but they're better than what we had before. There's not one person who makes a great comment. There's that one person on YouTube who can actually sing and it's awesome and you share it with your friends. There's that one person who has a blog and they're actually a good, thoughtful writer. And you'd never seen them on TV commenting. That's a great point. I think the way I've been thinking about a lot of this lately is, you know, social media, it's really like nothing new. I mean, there's been like message boards and forums and things like that since like very early on in the internet. But if you think about this as like, the plumbing is just getting much, much more efficient and it's continuing to do so. And I think that, you know, relating back to the mobile example that we had earlier, it's like, that's, maybe that's not social media, but this communications infrastructure, whether it's Facebook or whether it's the democratization of kind of mobile technology in developing countries, like the network is getting a lot more efficient and with that comes a lot of really good, interesting things, but a lot of like kind of scary challenges as well. And I think what's also helpful to keep in mind is that we're very much so at the tip of the iceberg and the rate that technology changes things in the rapid rate of growth and just transforming different sectors in the rise of different players and the demise of others, it's really exciting, but we're learning constantly and we're still working out the kinks as you were saying. And I think it's gonna be a constantly evolving channels and evolving practices. One thing that struck me, in fact, it just came up again, it was in the first session as well as this issue of anonymous commenting on social media sites. In a way, that was a slightly surprising convention that very quickly got very established and it's now difficult to displace. I myself think it would be a good thing if people published their email address alongside that comment. One of the things that, well, of course, one of the results of that, this goes to the issues we're discussing, I think, is that there'd be far fewer comments, right? People would not want to just, you know, issue a stream of profanities or fewer people would want to do that if they had to have their email address on it, but query might that be a good thing? I think there's fewer better comments. There's two schools of thought with this. I mean, on one side you have Facebook really driving identity, like personal identity as being kind of your passport around the internet and then the other school of thought which is a little bit more of like the Wild West internet is like Chris Poole who started 4chan which is kind of like the weird Pandora's box of the internet where like weird things come from. But actually sometimes amazing things and sometimes terribly disturbing things. You don't know what you're gonna get. But the point is is like, he has actually a fairly interesting contrarian point is that sometimes anonymity allows people to say things, create things, do things that they would never do as like, you know, as you're signing their name to and sometimes those things are kind of like interesting and constructive. So it's a very interesting debate on the role of, because the early days of the internet, a lot of people just had like a screen name or a handle or whatever, you know. I think my, I can't even remember my first AOL screen name but it was probably a bunch of numbers and like, you know. Right. So in terms of civil discourse and in terms of things that are like constructive having identity attached to it, I think is probably a productive thing. But in terms of like the weird whimsical strange side of the internet, you know, sometimes anonymity helps push that along. And it's not always bad stuff that comes out of that, you know. If we go global, that's where the debate has been most marked. Twitter allows anonymous speakers. Facebook has a real name policy.  And so there's often been protection for anonymous speech. And even in the US, right, you probably want two different platforms or two different ways of engaging with the world. Sometimes you engage with the world, everyone knows who you are.  And that's a good thing. I think so. I'm sure you were rude to someone in the last year and you're happy that I know your name. I'm never rude, not you, but me maybe. Well, I think also though there's an important point that Marvin's rating with regard to, you know, there's a question of civic participation, political discourse, but then there's also civil disobedience for people to feel comfortable engaging, you know, hopefully a civil way of engaging in, you know, disagreeing with institutions, it makes it a lot easier when you can be, you know, nameless and faceless if you want to participate in a protest. I mean, certainly Arab Spring shows us that. And, you know, to a smaller degree, if you think back to the Republican National Convention in 2004 in New York, where the police rounded up anybody who was discussing doing civil disobedience and they basically were held because they were identified through specific chat rooms et cetera and so forth. So, I mean, there are different ways that people want to get involved and certainly the quality of the discourse is probably improved when you have to identify yourself and create an, you know, identify yourself clearly, but there are ways that people may have to get involved where if you want to speak against the powers that be, it's much better if you are anonymous or not known for who you really are. Just a quick point. That's both freedom of speech and association of gathering in different groups than doing that anonymously. Right. Marvin, you said that, you know, this isn't Athenian democracy. I mean, one question is whether in the end it could be. I mean, I'm a skeptic about this myself because, you know, I'm not sure that as it were, mere engagement is what's required. It's the point I was making earlier. Nonetheless, and also as the polls say, you know, people don't trust our political institutions and, you know, more engagement is not a solution to that problem. I mean, that may be the core of the problem. Nonetheless, there's a spectrum here between, you know, traditional representative democracy where basically you vote for somebody, let them get on with it and just sort of absent yourself from the process versus a more participatory or direct democracy where you're engaged in a more intense way all the time.  Sweden, Switzerland has a sort of direct democratic system with lots and lots of referendums and so on. You could make the case that California is the same. Switzerland seems to work. California doesn't seem to work. I wonder if, you know, if you speculate about where we might be, you know, in 10 or 20 years, do you see us moving away from, you know, a traditional, as it were, a parliamentary style of representative democracy towards a more intensely engaged, direct democracy? Is that something that you might envisage? So I'll take a crack. So when I think of the public not trusting our institutions, I, you know, it's one of those things where if you're selling garbage, no matter what your communication is, people don't wanna buy it. And so when we look at our institutions, I think a lot of people, you know, think that, you know, lobbyists run DC and it's a broken political system and the Democrats and Republicans aren't working together.  And so I think there's actually a legitimate problem that people recognize and no matter, you know, however often Barack Obama tweets, although I love his tweets, and you're not gonna solve that trust problem with the American public. And so I'm trying to predict what happens five, 10 years from now in terms of our democracy will, you know, the tools alone aren't enough people have to be, you know, we need a solid education system, et cetera. But on the other side, we have not only these decentralized tools for communicating, we have the super PACs. We have the sort of established players in the political system. And it's possible that the public will just feel less and less engaged because they can't compete with a $20 million check written by a billionaire in Las Vegas. So in terms of how I see people engaged on politics, I think there's a lot of disillusion around all the money in politics and whether or not their voice matters because they don't have a $20 million check behind their tweet. Right. I have a quick, just quick follow up on that. I think something that could have been completely a world historical event didn't happen two days ago, and it's really interesting. So some dude hacked into Mitt Romney at hotmail.com and gave Gawker the password, right? Gawker is like, okay, we're gonna get sued into oblivion so we're not gonna do this. But if they did, that could have completely altered the course of this election. Who knows what's in Mitt Romney's archive of hotmail emails from the past five years, right? So it's like, your point about, are we gonna have a more direct democracy or whatever? I think what's happening is like, there is a tremendous amount more transparency that's coming from a good side and also with things like anonymous and what potentially could have happened yesterday, like kind of a scary side too. And that full out transparency has never really been seen before. So I think that that correlates to kind of the idea that you were getting at in a way that's weird. Cause I was just surprised that that story didn't get picked up more because you look at what Gawker did with the iPhone 4 leak and things like that. Normally they're pretty punk rock about things. I mean, imagine doing a data dump of Mitt Romney's emails from his hotmail. Is that ethical? Like, totally not. Like, do I condone that? No, it's terrible, you know? But that could be a world historical event, right? And so I just think that's kind of an interesting way to think about some of this stuff. Right. Danny, you had something to add? I did. And my train of thought has been... Well, let me just, let me give you a second to think. One of the things that occurred to me when Colin was speaking was this point which we've heard before, you know, that we're at the start of an extraordinary cultural revolution here. You know, this presumption of a private domain.  You know, they post freely. They, you know, they post recklessly. This stuff is never going to go away. It's with them forever. I mean, one thing we know for sure is that 30 years from now, we'll know a lot more about the politicians we're elected. The hotmail inbox is your entire Facebook data. I remember what I was going to say. What I thought was also, excuse me, interesting about the poll was also that if there was a difference in trust between local institutions and these national institutions, national corporations, and that's very interesting if we go back to thinking about how all politics is local. Because I think that social media and the way that social media can work, if you think about some of the examples that Matt provided, it really is effective in creating much more of a participatory democracy at the local level. It's actually feasible and possible. It's feasible and possible even in a place like Sweden wherein there are so many fewer people and people are able to actually meet and discuss and communicate with one another and identify one another. Whereas in the United States, that's just not possible. But when people want to get involved, it makes a lot more sense to get involved in what's going on locally rather than trying to get involved and take on a super PAC. Right. Can I make one point about Sweden? If you follow Sweden's Twitter feed, a different Swedish person a week has the feed. So imagine if the Barack Obama Twitter feed was just a different random person in the country every week. Okay. We're gonna take some questions from the audience in a second.  Yeah. Happy to. Thanks, Clive. We have our results and we found that compared to 10 to 15 years ago, 66% of you do believe that you as a consumer have more influence in your dealings and negotiations with major corporations. 24% feel about the same and 11% of you say that you feel like you have less influence. And while we've been listening and texting our results, some of you have been tweeting in questions and we actually do have another question from Twitter for the panel. Digital Tim Grant would like to know what about the effect of social media on children? There are already a number of addiction programs. So what are your thoughts on social media and you? Facebook just announced that they wanna allow like people under 13 to join cause maybe their user growth is starting to plateau and they need to find new people. But I think that that's kind of a very interesting question because we know that behaviorally, mobile devices, a lot of these kind of like social inputs coming back at you are starting to be seen as kind of like addictive.  It's like, hmm, this is good. And I think that that's, you know, I'm not a behavioral scientist, but I would assume that like, that's something that you can probably get unhealthily addicted to. There's a certain nose lighting up. Yeah, yeah, right. So yeah, I think that that's probably something that needs to be metered or observed with kind of like younger people. What do you make of that issue?  Angela, do you have a thought on this? So this is Angela Campbell. She's a professor at Georgetown. She represents a lot of the children's groups on internet issues, including Children Now, American Academy of Pediatrics, other groups like that. Do you have, she's the woman I would ask if I had this question posed to me. Again, it's a complicated question because I think one of the problems with kids using social media is unlike the televisions that which is in the living room, maybe the kids bedroom where the parents are seeing it, they don't know what's going on. And I don't think most parents have any idea what their kids are doing online and what they're doing on Facebook, a lot of times because the parents don't understand the technologies as well as the kids do. I mean, Facebook is not, they claim they don't allow people under 13 and they kick people off, but in fact there's lots and lots of kids on Facebook. Dora the Explorer has her own Facebook site page. So I think it's, if Facebook does do it, I think there's gonna have to be some real serious thought to what protections could meaningfully, how to make sure parents are involved for one thing and also that kids aren't taken advantage of because it's just so many ways they can be manipulated and they're so much more vulnerable, not only because, I mean, because they're just so young, they don't have the life experience and then this record that gets created for the rest of their life and people have talked about an eraser button and I skeptical that that could work and I think it has other problems, but I think we just don't know the answer and it's gonna be really tough till we figure it out. Thanks, thanks very much. My friend, Noah Breyer had this idea of a social network for people that just like self-destructed after you graduate from college. That's a great idea, that's a business proposition right there. The Kaiser Family Foundation came out with a semi-recent study that looked at screen time with youth and children and what they saw is that there's an ever increasing amount of time and I forget the exact hours but there's something staggering of 12 hours per day was spent on screen and I think that these more or less are inevitable trends and you see some of these rising non-profits and initiatives like Khan Academy who are working to utilize this screen time and utilize already this integration with computers for academic and learning purposes and I think a lot of these startups and a lot of these trends are increasingly gonna happen because these trends don't seem to be stopping. Yeah, that's another possible convergence and in fact, the Atlantic had a panel on this the other day on new technologies in education and the connection with social media wasn't made very strongly but that's obviously one dimension of this thing. It's really exciting as well. Okay, let's see if we have any questions in the room. Sir, look back for that. Let's wait for the microphone. Yes, thanks, Rob Colorinam with an equity group. Question with respect to the consumer side and a little bit on infrastructure. Are you seeing that communities are pulling together their either frustrations when they don't have either broadband access or some of these latest vehicles? People are talking about it, it creates buzz but let's say their councilmen or their towns don't have that speed or those gadgets available at a fair price. I'd be curious to see your thoughts there and if you could apply that a little bit internationally as well, it'd be interesting. Digital divide, who wants to comment on that? When we were discussing mobile payments now all I could think of is, wow, Africa is many years ahead of us on mobile payments. The major carriers, AT&T and Verizon and I think T-Mobile are working together on a project called ISIS, it's joint venture, they're gonna roll it out. There was a controversy over Google Wallet which was gonna compete with this new technology that Verizon didn't let on their phones and so one of the problems is that AT&T and Verizon wanna sort of control the ecosystem and control mobile payments and that's one of the reasons Verizon is several years behind. And when we look at the digital divide, why do a lot of communities not have broadband? It's partly because it's not profitable and we don't have good policies to ensure that it would be profitable and that's sort of a government corporate problem based on lobbying and bad policy. So we have two actual broadband problems. Broadband problem one, not enough broadband in rural areas or a lot of people who just don't have access, too expensive, they need satellites which is very slow. Second broadband problem is in our cities. When you compare the kinds of networks we have in Tokyo and Paris and the prices and the speeds, you'll have versus those that you have in New York or Washington DC or San Francisco, the networks abroad are sometimes 10 times faster, far less expensive, it's possible that the best social applications, the best applications period are gonna come from abroad and be drivers for innovation, they're not here. And so we sort of have two main problems of infrastructure and it's largely a policy failure, I think. There are some communities, some local areas trying to invest in mesh networking or there's the Google Fiber Project in Kansas City and there are other sort of projects out there but this is a constant debate in the broadband community and in some of the social justice communities. All right, what's your take on this? Because it is interesting, isn't it, that so much of the innovation in one aspect of this revolution is going on in poor countries. Absolutely, and I think that this concern for the digital divide is very real. And just to touch on your point, in the developing world, I believe a lot of the new connections to the internet will happen over the mobile phone. So then you have to look at the players who are driving this forward and it's the mobile network operators but at the end of the day, these are profit-driven companies. And so when it comes to these extremely rural areas, the infrastructure is developing at a rapid rate but there's always gonna be these constituencies who aren't able to be reached but these new technologies like mobile phone technologies are bridging the gap. If we did a survey, a poll of everybody in this room and what type of mobile phone they had, I would say the majority in this room would have a smart mobile technology. In the developing world, that is different. They're dumb phones who aren't able to connect to the internet. However... And the bank is done by through text or text messaging. Exactly, and so how do you... And again, it just speaks to the fact that frugal innovations are happening but then also increasingly other more advanced developments are happening as well that are gonna kind of bridge forward and take the next step towards this ending the digital divide but again, it's gonna be time to come when we fully realize, if ever realize, the completion or the end of the digital divide. Okay, I'll take another question. Just wait for the mic, please. Tell us who you are. I'm Mitzi Worth, I'm with the Naval Postgraduate School. I wanna ask about the consequences of human interaction because a few weeks ago I was at a session with two congressmen, or actually I guess they were senators and they were talking about how they just don't talk to one another and in fact the most recent example of that is they used to talk to one another when they would go through the corridors to vote. Now they're all tweeting or getting their internet messages and so we're getting no human communication up there or just getting what I call mechanical and I think the emotional aspects of that and the knowledge aspects of that and the voting aspects of that are very serious for our country. I think that's an interesting point because one of the inventions that has catalyzed more passive aggressive behavior in the world is email. Sometimes if you have to reprimand someone it's like maybe I'll do it over email so I don't have to do it. And I think that that is kind of a scary thing. I think people have to really kind of figure out what the balanced diet of all of this is and a substantial portion of that needs to be kind of like interpersonal, like actual relationships and face-to-face conversation but I do think that on the flip side of that the strange thing is I'm now in touch with more people that probably in previous years would have kind of evaporated in my life, people that I knew when I was like five years old. How often are you permanently connected to that person? That's a good thing. That's a good thing.  This is something you stress, isn't it, Dana, in your work that there's no substitute for the face-to-face? Definitely, but I would just, to respond to Mitzi's comment though, what's interesting is there's no question that the lack of personal contact is gonna have implications, but politically what's interesting is for representatives and senators, elected officials of all sorts, some could argue that if they're spending their time communicating back to constituents rather than talking to one another within the ivory tower or the hallowed halls, maybe that's more important. I don't know, but I mean that would be the flip side, the alternative interpretation is if they're actually communicating with and looking at perhaps reading what constituents want before they get to a vote rather than talking to their neighbor while they walk over to cast their ballot, maybe that's more useful. And the ability of those constituents to talk in an unfiltered way to them, that's not through an intermediary. But you don't think that's the insight that's eroded that, too. I think the lack of face-to-face relationships is having a real impact on their ability to compromise because they don't have any relationship, they don't have anything at stake in dealing with somebody they don't know, and so it's really easy to say, I don't care about what you're after, I only want what I'm after. So I have a thought. I'm not sure the internet is to blame here, but if you were to go to a Silicon Valley company that's trying to get innovation and collaboration among everyone working there, you'd see a room that has a whole bunch of little, it's just a wide open room and there aren't offices, there aren't doors, people just jump on and collaborate with each other. And when you were talking, I thought, that's how we should have our congressmen, they should be in this big room, like the Twitter room or whatever, and they should all have desks right next to each other, they should be forced to collaborate and talk to each other. And that's taking it one step too far, but everything about Capitol Hill just feels like an old work environment that's not very innovative or collaborative. And there are lots of different things about the architecture of it that are probably getting away. I do think it's a net positive that people can tweet at their congressmen, but there's probably other ways to make sure that they see each other, they get to know each other, and I don't think it's just the internet to blame. To your point about the structure, I remember I think it was in a New Yorker article about Steve Jobs, like he intentionally designed their office. I think it might have been in the Pixar days where like in order to do anything in the office, you had to go through this kind of like area where like everyone kind of ran into each other and like that serendipity and those connections and that interpersonal kind of gathering, actually a lot of magic happened out of that. And I think that that relates to your point. So it's not necessarily an internet thing, it could just be kind of a structural thing. Office design. Yeah. Design thinking, yeah. Then we have another question over here. Get the mic over. This might be our last one I think. Thanks. Hello. Kevon Painter, I'm with the US Commerce Department and we were speaking about the future of social media. And I know that my personal first experience with social media happened to be on Myspace. And now I'm on Facebook, now I'm on Twitter, Instagram and it seems like there's so many more coming every single day. And one of the things that I kind of realized is that social media, it may be a fad, do you think in some ways when it comes to the different outlets that are coming every single day? So I just wanted to hear the panel's take on that, whether you think that social media outlets are more like what is hot for the year or what is hot for that time, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, which outlets do you think? I think the trend of just kind of a more efficient network and people being able to kind of communicate more efficiently, that's not going to go away and it's just going to get more complex. But I do agree that sometimes it's funny to go look back at the Wall Street Journal and how they were covering Myspace five years ago. It was like the biggest thing in the world and this is so important. And then it's pretty much like there's like a tumbleweed rolling through that thing now. So to your point, a lot of the new channels can be like fleeting and ephemeral. And I think that from a business perspective, it's very interesting because Instagram is really only its users and community. So when you see an M&A deal that's like a billion dollars and there's like tons of strategic reasons and blah, blah, blah with Facebook, but I mean that could evaporate tomorrow. And I think that a lot of the people on Wall Street that are evaluating the value of these companies are failing to kind of like price into their models and the fact that like this swarm of crickets or grasshoppers or whatever can like go to some new field tomorrow and it can happen like that. And so it's a very interesting dynamic. So to your point, I think some of the new channels can be like very fleeting and ephemeral. Some of them kind of can resonate and I think Facebook has done an amazing job at kind of keeping that up through like their product and like just keep running a really tight ship. But a lot of this, I think we're going to see a lot of like internet space junk of like ruined communities and like, you know. From an economics point of view it's very interesting that you've got such a sort of zero barriers to entry in one sense, right? The cost of getting this thing up and running is so low but on the other hand, a very, very large critical mass component, that the value of the network is the number of people on the network. And those two things are very, it's very surprising to find those two phenomena sitting side by side. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we were discussing this last night at dinner that it's, there's probably, many people believe that there is this integration that's happening so that social media, one particular medium like MySpace or Friendster is not really where people are going but rather it's the fact that these channels are being built and people are starting to integrate it into their daily lives and into their ways of interacting more generally. And that's not gonna change. Will Facebook exist in 50 years? I'm sure there are many people who think, you know, who definitely wanted to but social media will exist. It may just be a different company. Right, right. Okay, I think we're out of time. We'll have to wrap up at this point. We'd like to keep going. I mean, it's so interesting but we promise to let people go at 11. So please join me in thanking the channel. Great, thank you so much to Clive and the panelists and to all of our other participants today. We really enjoyed this conversation. It was a unique one for us for this 13th Heartland Monitor poll to be talking about social media. So welcome to all of you who were here with us for the first time. We hope to see you at the next briefing and we'll be following up with you on that. And thanks again to Allstate for supporting the Heartland Monitor poll in this series. Thank you, have a great day.