Hello, everyone.
My name is indeed Zeynep Tufekci,
and it was pronounced correctly for which I'm very grateful.
It happens about one out of 100 times or so.
(Laughter)
I am originally from Turkey, and I want to talk about these talks.
I want to talk about how ideas take flight in this world,
and I want to talk about
how to think about things, and how to question things,
and how to use all these ways of information that we have
to go deeper.
I want to start by talking about Kony 2012.
I can't see you, so if this were a classroom, I'd say,
"How many of you heard of it?"
and everybody'd raise their hands almost because almost everybody had heard of it.
This happened two years ago when a video,
- as you can see about a 100 million views already,
many of which were racked up in the first few weeks.
It was a video about Joseph Kony -
and indicted war criminal
who was in Uganda,
and it was this very moving, compelling 30-minute video
that told a story of good and bad
in very stark, moving terms.
In fact, many of us watched it,
people were moved by it,
celebrities tweeted abut it.
It just went crazy viral.
It seemed like such an obvious, simple story.
It was told by these people talking about it.
In this chart, you can see
that tens of millions of people were talking about Joseph Kony,
and "Let's stop it,"
all these resources should go into this problem.
This is Jason Russell who is the person through whom we hear this story.
That's Gavin.
He's telling the story to his son.
It's very easy for us to identify:
Jason looks like just a regular guy,
and his son is very cute.
They obviously - if you're wondering who the good guys are in this movie
- it's like a movie -
likely candidates.
Who are the bad guys? There you go.
Joseph Kony, in case you missed the point,
Hitler's right there.
It's the most evil guy ever;
probably it was the sense of the video.
Now, it's true:
Joseph Kony is an indicted war criminal.
And it is a problem.
There is nothing to belittle the real issue
and the real problems in Uganda
that came from that civil war in that conflict.
So there are very many problems and issues,
but the story that was told to us
in such a slick moving, pull-out-our-heart string way
was too simple.
It wasn't even fully true.
It was too simplified and made into this digestible saccharine for us.
In fact, if you went on YouTube,
and just started looking,
if you went on Twitter, if you went on social media,
you would find Rosebell Kagumire
who is a Ugandan journalist and blogger.
And it's really an amazing world,
because all she did was she opened her laptop,
she used her webcam,
there is no slick production [values.]
"Stop Kony," the original video,
was 30 minutes of great production and great narrative;
this is bad lighting - look at the background -
she's just in her office or study, and she's just talking.
But if you listen to her
- and I encourage you to go follow her on Twitter,
she's awesome -
She tells a complex story of conflict
that was caused by resources and lack of resources,
and marginalization of people,
and how the Kony story is six, seven years out of date,
and it's not the problem facing Uganda right now,
and while, of course, if that man was caught,
it wouldn't really be on top of anybody's list on Uganda
to send all their resources to catch this man,
and the complexities of moving in a post-conflict world,
and how do you make peace and how do you... I'm stopping there.
The point is it wasn't the simple story that you would've thought
if you were one of the 100 million people who watched the video.
If you were one of the 600,000 people who watched Rosebell,
then you were digging deeper, and you could go one more step.
That really was a very interesting moment for me,
because, you see, I grew up in Turkey.
I grew up without speaking English.
So I didn't have this, which is Turkish Wikipedia.
I thought you guys should learn some Turkish.
It's a good thing to do, very useful.
It actually is a complicated language, but it's nothing like English.
But "Vikipedi."
There you go. You now know a Turkish word.
(Laughter)
We didn't have it.
Is a professor telling us to use Wikipedia?
Well, yes, "Don't cite it,"
It's a great place to start.
You can quote me on that.
We've all been there, right?
Wiki-drift; you start some place,
and then, three hours later, you're reading.
"Why am I reading about slugs and their digestive system?"
(Laughter)
So I love it.
But I didn't have it!
I did not have Wikipedia, but I had this.
That is my 92-year-old grandma.
If 3D printers are finally invented and they can print grandmothers,
this is probably what they'll print.
She is like prototype grandma.
(Laughter)
She's perfect.
She had grown up in Turkey
under conditions when girls did not go to school.
She was 12 when she was pulled from school,
and was told, "That's it. That's enough for you.
You're now about to get married."
A miracle happened: the teacher intervened,
and said, "There's an exam for scholarships for girls.
So they can go to the top high school in Turkey."
And the teacher, secretly from the family,
entered her and my grandmother won.
And there was a lot of conflict,
but stuff came together, and a miracle happened,
and she was allowed to go Istanbul, to this big, new city
and in a boarding school this elite top boarding school.
And that thing she's holding is a trophy they gave her
at the 75th anniversary of her graduation.
She graduated from high school, then college,
probably the first person in her town, let alone her family.
And she became a teacher.
And because she had grown up wanting to go to school and pulled,
and just by some miracle, managed to go,
she appreciated the opportunity books and education gave.
So when ever somebody came to the school she worked at,
which I also attended as an elementary school student,
when somebody came to sell encyclopedias
- Do you know those things? No. -
(Laughter)
Those book things?
Well, there used to be people who went around selling them door-to-door;
we had them in Turkey, too.
And they all had my name in their phone book
- which, of course, wasn't digital then -
"Buy Zeynep, sucker grandma"
which meant if I took them to my grandma, she would buy whatever they were selling.
I loved reading, and I loved encyclopedias.
So when the encyclopedia sales person would come and say,
"We heard there's a Zeynep in this school,"
I would pipe up and they would say, "Take us to your grandma."
and my grandma would buy me whatever I could buy:
every single Turkish children's encyclopedia I had.
(Laughter)
It was awesome.
And I would just read them.
Do you read books? Comic books or other books?
I would read them like that.
I would say, "I'm going to read the Ps today."
I would just read the Ps.
Or some of the encyclopedias were thematic, and I would say,
"I'm going to read transportation today."
I read them cover to cover. I knew what was in every one of them.
Remember, Turkish, so it's not an unlimited collection, either.
And I would end up having questions; that I hit limits.
They weren't in any of my encyclopedias.
I knew I just couldn't get at them.
Now you don't live in that world anymore.
You can go deeper and deeper and deeper.
You can look, and ask, and question,
and I don't live in that world anymore.
Everyday, I pull out my phone, and I'm always,
"I can look up anything I want."
and if there's some public record of it, I'll probably find it.
Or I can ask people, experts.
When I have a question that puzzles me,
I can look up someone, I can email them.
This is just amazing.
And what I want to say is
when you hear a talk like this,
there is Bill Gates';
you know, a very successful TED talk.
When you hear his talk,
the thing to probably take away from it
is not what he said in his talk,
but to look at a world in which what made him successful,
how much of it was him,
what was the structure, what were the opportunities he had,
where were some of the stumbling blocks?
He, for example, had many opportunities,
because his family was well off,
so he went to a private school which had computers
when even colleges didn't have one,
so he became a programmer early,
and he was programming and doing things very early on
which gave him the opportunity to be first
when software was being commercialized;
complicated story.
My point isn't one thing.
My point is look at these talks as a question mark.
It's not a world where you can just lean back
and be one of the people who does something.
In software, in gadgets, people who design them have a word:
lean forward gadgets and lean back gadgets.
Lean back gadgets are the ones
that allow you to lean back and not participate much,
whereas the lean forward ones
are the ones where you're doing stuff and participating.
And these talks, while they can be great,
if you don't look at them as a question mark,
they can seem like lean-back talks.
They can seem like, "Oh, great story,"
because they're simplified in 12 minutes, in 15 minutes.
We're going to simplify something.
So when you hear something, pull out your phone.
Is there an alternative explanation to the extinction?
Is there more to the story?
What else could the CIA have done?
What is the NSA doing?
What's the best balance between security and surveillance?
What are other questions we can ask?
Very good questions.
Do not just listen to us, because it's always complicated.
(Laughter)
It's always complicated.
Any question worth solving, any problem worth tackling,
will be complicated by human factors,
social factors, political factors.
And it's those people who don't just watch the hundred million viewed video,
but then go watch Rosebell, the 600, 000;
and some of those people who will then go read,
and some of those people will maybe become activists for life,
maybe some of them will become policy makers,
maybe some of them will become
the people who then run for office, run an organization, who knows?
It's not a world in which you can just watch from afar
and have these nicely-packaged talks do the work for you.
If there's a problem you want to solve,
if there's a mark you want to leave in this world,
just don't just look at it as a period,
look at it as a question mark; always.
But don't take my word for it. Dig deep, dig deep.
Thank you.
(Applause)