Marty Kaplan

Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message -- plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve -- was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction -- 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic -- the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don't, you're doomed.

Back then, the "it" was violence -- the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change -- greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

"Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears," ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday's New York Times, with this sub-head: "CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes."

A headline like that -- millions of years? really? -- normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.

In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.

What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie's waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN's wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren't Nielsen enough.

It's not that people who know our planet's hair is on fire aren't trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and -- in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.'s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment -- "hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died.... [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands... [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

If graphs and quotes aren't sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project's website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. "Do the Math," the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.org movement, has a dramatic narrative that's compelling but not preachy. The Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime's climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There's plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it's hard to imagine a path back from the brink.

In the U.S., the same dysfunctions preventing anything else useful from happening -- the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system -- also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.

Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D -- R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to

"awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, 'Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?' What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, 'God won't allow us to ruin our planet.'... [That] statement... is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking."

Learn more about the Lear Center's Climate Change Initiative.

This column is cross-posted from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

Johanna Blakley

Yesterday, the Lear Center launched the Media Impact Project, which aspires to be a global hub for the best research on measuring the impact of media. Supported by $3.25 million in initial funding from the Gates and Knight Foundations, I'm optimistic that this project can help make media more accountable to audiences and contribute to a better understanding of the role that media plays in people's lives.

The New York Times picked up the story and I was thrilled to see reporter Michael Cieply focus on this aspect of the program:

to provide tools on an "open-source" basis, putting socially minded nonprofit groups on a more equal footing with corporate advertisers, who use sophisticated, but expensive, measurements.

The entertainment industry is notorious for adjusting its numbers to service an often inscrutable bottom line. And all of us - including everyone who variously produces or consumes media content - have been ill-served by cookie-cutter audience segmentation techniques and panel-based research methods that cannot account for what's happening in the "long tail" of our global cultural economy. The insidious audience segmentation techniques that valorize age, race, gender and income over every other facet of human identity have contributed to a media system rife with stereotypes about how humans tick. (You can find out more about my thoughts on this in this TED talk.) The awe-inspiring data sets emerging from social media networks offer us the opportunity to understand ourselves, and our engagement with media, in a far more nuanced way.

My vision here? Ultimately, I want media makers to have the resources to make data-driven decisions. Rather than depending on their "gut" and random comments from their kids and colleagues, I want them to grapple with meaningful feedback information that demonstrates how real people have engaged with their work and what effects that interaction has produced.

I also want media makers to have a far more sophisticated and detailed understanding of their audience's needs, values and taste. For me, it's an issue of respect. I want our media environment to be respectful and responsive to the needs of global audiences, not just a few prized, but deeply misunderstood, demographic groups.

Interested in media impact? Follow the Media Impact Project on Twitter at @mediametrics and find us on Facebook.

Looking for a job? The Media Impact Project is hiring! Find out more.

Johanna Blakley

I had the tremendous pleasure of attending TED 2013 and, as always, I felt compelled to figure out the overarching themes of this vastly interdisciplinary conference. The T, E and D stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but, as anyone who toils in these fields knows, that kinda covers everything under the sun. You have to wonder, how on earth do the TED curators figure out what fits and what doesn't?

I wrote a blog about TED 2011 and, rereading it today, I see that much of the same soul searching that was put on display then is still very much at play now. I had argued then that several key talks had addressed the necessity of, on the one hand, recognizing and celebrating your own unique and often imperfect perspective on the world, and accepting the fact that not only are other perspectives out there, but they are probably more valid than you would care to think.

For TED 2013, I saw a similar interest in trying to encourage the audience (and the millions of viewers who will devour these videos online) to want to know what they don't know. If I had to propose a title, it might be

It's the Data, Stupid

Big data was an obvious theme throughout the conference, handled well in two talks by co-authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAffee (who also gamely appeared in an intellectual lucha libre-inspired "cage fight" at a nearby bar). Brynjolfsson mentioned the AI winter we've long weathered, in which advances that several futurists had expected just didn't happen. But Brynjolfsson argued that we're entering a renaissance for artificial intelligence because of the amazing repositories of big data that we now have access to and the powerful tools that are being developed to make sense of them.

Sergey Brin attended the conference and he has long been a proponent of turning academic science on its head: why start from a hypothesis when you can just sort through unfathomable piles of data and see what comes out?

Continue reading "TED 2013: It's the Data, Stupid" »

Scott McGibbon
Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Lear Center.

Last year the Lear Center invited acclaimed digital remix artist Joe Sabia to produce an entertaining video that would summarize the findings laid out in a Lear Center research report on television's depiction of the "War on Terror."

Joe pored over the results of the study, sifted through 30 episodes from eight top primetime network dramas that depicted the WoT, and ripped hundreds of clips from DVDs to sort and edit into a video narrated by Steve Zirnkilton, the resonant voice behind Law & Order. Joe used all his artistry on the project, looking at the video "as a more succinct alternative recap for ADD audiences...or anyone who doesn't like reading."

The seven-minute video, Primetime Terror, was released in September 2011 and made a splash, including getting a shout out from BoingBoing. Not only did it provide a precis of the findings; it demonstrated that social science research can be conveyed in a compelling, creative format.

And then something unexpected happened: reaction to the video came in an email from Rebecca Tushnet, a DC-based lawyer specializing in intellectual property and first amendment law, and an advocate for the safe harbor provisions for digital artists in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Some essential background: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 made it a crime to break digital locks on DVDs and other online media. This prohibited filmmakers from making fair use of a wealth of current and historical digital material. In July 2010, the United States Copyright Office approved an exemption that allowed filmmakers to break digital locks to extract clips from DVDs and use them in their own projects.

Rebecca was intrigued by Primetime Terror because it was a perfect example of how fair use of copyrighted content can provide educational benefits to society. Joe was ripping DVDs, converting them into digital files a few seconds long, and combining them in a transformative way to create new content. And there was a fight on the horizon: copyright lobbyists were pushing for term limits on the exemptions so that, once they expired, it would again be a crime to break a digital lock.

Rebecca and her team at Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) joined forces with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Clinic, headed by USC Law professor Jack Lerner, to draft comments and organize filmmakers. As Lerner noted, "Without this exemption, filmmakers who want to use a movie clip on a DVD can still be sued for going around the locks - even if the use itself is perfectly legal."

In December 2011 the team submitted a proposal to renew and expand the DMCA exemption for Noncommercial Remixers with the United States Copyright Office. The proposal used Primetime Terror as a highlight of its argument, noting that it is "a work that is physically and functionally different from the originals. Some of the

Continue reading "Primetime Terror Fights Another War" »

Johanna Blakley

Monday is sort of a ramp-up day at TED, but this year the highlight for me was Inside TED, a glimpse into the machinations of a unique organization that's trying to figure out how to spread ideas that are stalled or stuck in some way - perhaps they're trapped in impenetrable jargon; maybe they're stuck in a disciplinary silo . . . or a Nairobi slum. Regardless of the impediments, or perhaps due to them, TED aspires to create a media platform for awesome and sexy ideas to propagate.

Despite this expansive mission - based primarily on the notion that exposure and transparency are tools for solving the world's problems - I think most TEDsters feel like there's a tantalizing shroud of secrecy and sanctity enveloping the TED organization: exactly how many people work there? And how much money do they make from these hyper-expensive conferences (7,500 bucks a pop)? Who decides which videos are posted and featured?

Well, Inside TED was Chris Anderson's way of opening up the ledgers and introducing the TED community to the brave (and wacky) souls who make this crazy ship run.

Some highlights:

• Revenues? About $45 million last year, with $27 million coming from TED, TED Global, and TED Active. Anderson estimates that there are about 500 core attendees who have spent around $30,000 supporting TED over the years.


• There are 1,400 talks on TED.com, with more than 50 million views per month. Only 200 are from TEDx events (and, so for, there have been 5,000 TEDx events with 8-10 more taking place per day.)


• 25% of their traffic is mobile, and they also distribute their talks through radio and TV channels (they've even put TED talks in taxis in Mumbai). Anderson suggested that TED speakers simply multiply their TED.com views by two in order to figure out about how many times their videos have been seen (that puts my two TED.com talks at 2.2 million views. Yowza.)


• Their brilliant open translation project involves 11,000 translators and 35,000 translations in 97 languages. (I was thrilled to hear that the Gates Foundation was a key funder for this. Go Bill!)

Johanna Blakley

Not only do I get to go to TED this year (hooray!) but I also had the great pleasure of participating in a truly brain-tingling workshop whose goal was to help TED figure out how to better facilitate the spread of breakthrough ideas.

Of course everybody (and their mother) is obsessed with web analytics these days: how many hits did I get? How many likes? But media engagement pros (and the workshop was chock full of them) realize that counting clicks doesn't really begin to tell the full story. Who's clicking and why? Did they talk to their dad about that TED talk over breakfast? Did they laugh or cry? Did they feel empowered to do something? Did they make a donation? It can be really difficult to accurately measure the impact of any piece of media (including a TED video) without finding a way to bridge that daunting divide between online click trails and offline actions. One way to do it? Surveys!
I'm a big believer in supplementing rigorous web and social media analytics with survey research. And I'm an even bigger fan now that my team at the Lear Center has developed some innovative new methods for taking into account self-selection bias in media consumption (i.e., only certain people decide to see certain TED videos - there's nothing random about it - which makes it tough to accurately measure impact).

So, imagine my delight when I heard that the Knight Foundation is partnering with TED to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of their content as it "ripples through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action."

One key theme that emerged at the workshop this weekend was the importance of sharing the discoveries that TED will make when they develop their cool new website and state of the art dashboards for tracking engagement. Information is power and nothing is more empowering to an engaged audience than access to information about how their beloved TED talks, along with all the content and actions that they themselves have generated, are moving the needle.

I'm looking forward to what comes of this . . . stay tuned!

If you're at TED2013, be sure to check out the Knight-sponsored pavilion centered on Tech for Engagement.