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First of all, I'd say that my first question to you would be:
"What is the question that I should be asking?"
Of course.
So, what is it, what do you think is the most important thing you've been doing lately?
"What is the question that I should be asking?" is my motto and
has been my motto for several decades. It is a good way to start, in my opinion,
because it opens up opportunities for inquiry, it switches the roles of the predefined
interviewer or the conversation that somebody's having,
and it really allows you to take a step back.
And as you say, ask yourself, "Am I doing the right thing, things,
am I exploring the right opportunities?"
Also, when you ask yourself what you are doing,
whether you're asking yourself the right questions, it enables you to segment your ignorance.
There are several types of ignorance.
These days, for the past ten years or so, we have been realizing how privileged we are,
because there is a certain type of ignorance, of factual information,
that can be almost totally discarded or it can be looked upon as something
that is going to go away immediately, as soon as you realize there is a fact that you don't know
because you will google it, you will look it up in Wikipedia,
and the ignorance will be gone.
There is another type of unknown, that is of processes and best practices.
And one of the benefits of the social web is that on top of the factual,
encyclopedic information that has become widely available and accessible for
everybody who has an Internet connection, the social networks and the social web,
the web of relationships enables us to look at other people and how they do what they do
and learn from them very, very quickly.
And if we feel that they are doing the right things, emulate them in what they do.
And to raise the bar in our collective expectations on what is the right way of doing things.
And this has incredible benefits. In people who want to experiment with new ways
of achieving their goals, whether it is a technological startup,
whether it is educating their children, in all kinds of respects.
It is also one of the reasons why people who have been able to hide behind excuses or
very traditional ways of pretending that they are doing a good job while they are
not doing a good job, now they are feeling that they are back in a corner,
because these excuses don't hold anymore.
And I think the most evident sector where this is becoming clear to everybody
is in the political sector, where, whether you are a good politician or a bad politician
is something that people can realize rather well.
A third segment of unknowns that has always been very evident to me and I don't
have a universal solution for, is things you don't know you don't know.
Those are the most dangerous ones, because that is where you might end up not asking
the right questions in order to arrive to the solution, in order to arrive what you
need to achieve.
So, back to your question, what are the most important things that I'm doing, well,
I have been appointed CEO of dotsub.com, a startup in New York City,
I'm actually talking from New York right now, where I'm spending most of my time these days,
and I'm having a lot of fun in making sure that the company can meet its challenges,
and go to the next level.
Dotsub.com is, I think, one of the most handy tools to translate TED videos.
I am a TED translator, and I've been using it to translate videos,
and it's really really easy to use and easy to understand.
Probably it is worth for the viewers of this interview to tell a little bit about Dotsub.
Our tagline is "Any video, any language."
On the Internet it is evident that information flows very freely,
we have an enormous amount of information: a lot of it textual,
but more and more in terms of video. One of the reasons is because computers are great
in digesting and prioritizing textual information, but we humans want to feel
the emotional connection to the other person. And the best way to feel
this emotional connection is through video.
That is the reason why conferences like TED, but also broad movements like
the movement of barcamps, have been so successful: because they have
given the opportunity to people to tell their stories in a format and
with the help of web based online video and tools that could travel everywhere.
In order for it to actually reach the broadest possible audience,
these videos have to be understood. And in order for them to be understood,
they have to overcome the language barrier. And this is what dotsub is for,
where anybody can upload a video they created, caption it in the original source language,
let's say English, and then themselves, or their friends, or the passionate followers
of the specific field that they are covering, or using the professional services
of professional translators from Dotsub itself, these captions can be
translated in any language. So in case of TED, for example, over 900 TED videos have
been translated in over 80 languages by over 6.000 volunteers, which has
created an incredible amount of interest and spreading of knowledge and excitement,
and was actually the basis for what has become TEDx, which is the organization
of independent, local, TED licensed, TED authorized events,
that give a platform for non-English speakers,
or speakers who are not in the main TED event to tell their stories.
And for the first time a few weeks ago, TED actually featured a non-English speaker
on TED.com. He's a Mexican speaker and you can hear him in Spanish,
but you can understand him because his words are translated in English for the
English speakers, in Italian for Italian speakers and so on everywhere.
I think that is one of the most - the greatest challenges, actually, you know,
overcoming the cultural, the language barrier, so knowledge can be available
for anybody, anywhere. That's one of the things that fascinates me most.
The opportunity is to make sure that whether you are on the level of an individual
or you want to educate or learn, or you are a brand, a business that has a product
or a service that you want to tell the world about, you now not only can reach
theoretically everybody, but you can reach very very practically everybody
with an activity that is extremely accesible, extremely easy to whoever is ready
to take advantage of these tools.
You know, this is a very positive note of what social media and the Internet
and online communities can do, the good things online communities can do.
There has been a lot of talk about social media during the last weeks and months,
especially in Italy and especially in the UK, unfortunately, during the last couple of weeks,
about the negative parts of social media.
What's your view about it? Do you think it is right to stigmatize social media
for the use people make of them, such as David Cameron said?
It has been extremely hypocritical, and totally blind, to what a technology platform means.
for the Prime Minister of the UK to pretend that by censoring social media
he can solve the problems that caused the riots in London.
The hypocrisy comes from the fact that just six months or eight months before,
the same people were hailing the benefit of social media
and decrying the censorship of social media in Egypt and in the other countries
of the Arab Spring, and regardless of the judgement, of whether you are an Egyptian
politician belonging to the traditional hierarchies, and so you decry the uprising
as a revolt and a riot, and you want to crush it, and whether this is right or wrong,
or whether you are a politician in the ruling party in the UK,
and you are decrying the distruction of property and the violence in the streets,
and speak out against it.
Those are moral, political and value judgements that are independent from the tool,
the technological platform.
However, when the same person says the tool is positive because other people
are using it, but the tool is negative because people locally are using it,
that is hypocritical. It has been blind because there can be very very many examples
of the use of social media, Twitter or Facebook, that helped people to escape danger,
helped people to save property, helped people work with the police to restore order
in the UK. And if the recommendations of the Prime Minister were followed,
these positive uses would disappear as well.
So I very very strongly disagree with his remarks.
After the London riots and the Manchester riots, a new Twitter account was opened,
it was called Riotcleanup and it was used to organize common citizens to clean up
the mess rioters have been producing throughout London and Manchester.
And I thought that was an absolutely brilliant idea to demonstrate exactly what you said,
that the platform is neutral. It's the use you make of it that makes the difference.
That's correct. That's a great example.