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A Surprisingly Effective Way to Fight Misinformation | Dave Jorgenson | TED
Subtitles (290 segments)
I'm Dave.
I've spent pretty much my entire adult life
working in video journalism and media.
But what is media, and what forms does it take?
Let me show you an example.
This is quipu.
It was used by the Incas in South America.
It’s a system of knots and strings.
And every knot, the shapes, the colors, dimensions, numbers,
all of it works together to tell a story.
I can't make heads or tails of that.
I don't know if you can imagine something like that today on social media,
but just to put that as an image, this is what it might look like.
This is actually the first chapter of "Twilight."
But while you and I may not understand quipu or how it works,
this is a form of media.
And let me give you another example of media, from across the pond,
in around 370 BC.
So Plato wrote this story where he was imagining a conversation
with his real-life teacher, Socrates, and a student, Phaedrus.
Sorry, this is kind of hard to read, let me fix.
That's better.
(Laughter)
Can everyone understand it now?
Just to translate it for you,
eventually, the conversation veers into a debate about speech-giving,
or whether or not you should do it.
Kind of like TED moderators deciding whether or not I should be at this event.
(Laughter)
Spoiler alert -- I'm here.
So I think I'm supposed to be.
The conversation eventually veers into another part,
where Plato, as Socrates,
says that the written word is actually bad,
that it could be misinterpreted and taken out of context.
So, in other words, people have always been afraid of media
and how it could be manipulated.
(Laughter)
So hundreds of years later,
one of the first films ever come out, black and white, it’s a train platform.
This is a French film, so these are French people and a French train.
That train is coming really fast.
Duck.
(Laughter)
Do you guys see ...?
Oh, OK. It was coming right at us.
Anyway, rumor has it that's how people reacted to it
when they first saw it in theaters.
They jumped out of the way.
(Laughter)
Very scary.
We just weren't ready for that type of media yet.
Decades later, in 1938,
there was a radio broadcast that scared a lot of Americans.
Here's a snippet of it.
(Recording) Ladies and gentlemen,
we interrupt our program ... to bring you a special bulletin
from the Intercontinental Radio News.
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