How social media can make history...

...is a TED-Talk video that i can really recommend.
Go ahead and watch it here.

Clay Shirky, the guy talking in the video, has a good point there. Furthermore he's a good speaker. Which makes you listen and really soak up the message, i think.

If you still didn't watch it, i still recommend you do so. You could really spend these 15 Minutes worse.

So he's starting out by explaining the biggest revolution in our media landscape so far. The Internet of course. Sure, every new form of publishing media sort of revolutionised the way we percieved information, but this for sure is the greatest. For the first time in history people are able to take part in the publishing process. They can put out their own content, or react to someone elses.
Quoting Shirky here, it's as if have a book with a printing press built in, or you get a radio that incloudes your own radio station. If you put it that way it really makes it clear what he means.

But people from my generation tend to oversee this revolution and take what we have for granted. We grew up with all these possibilities already existing or just coming up with us, so it doesn't appear to be that new to us. I guess it doesn't hurt to take some time to think about these things, and maybe even put them to better use than some of us are doing today.

I personally think the most interesting part of the video is the second half, where he goes into how people today are able to publish and spread news faster via Twitter than any newsreporter will ever be. These storys are the raw and unfiltered truth, spreading news in a way we didn't dream of just a couple of years ago. But this type of rawness and the lack to censor information is what got twitter banned from china. What sounds unbelievable to us is everyday life for the chinese.

I've been to china during my practical semester and it's true. It's a own world, seperated from others through the government. I really hope that the public pressure through social media can enter a new chapter of history making by giving these people their freedom of speech rather sooner than later.