This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. I'd never seen the reef here before. There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. They were trying to catch fish. No one realized that this was a very bad idea. The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. I turned around to check on my friend's house. Then someone on the tracks screamed. Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running.
コロンボのウェラワッタという高級住宅地で 友人宅とビーチの間を走る 線路に私たちは立っていた その線路は普段 水面から2.5メートル程かさ上げされているが そのときは1メートル程 潮位が下がっていた 初めてそこのサンゴを目にし 引潮による潮だまりには魚が取り残されていた 子供たちはそこに飛び込んで 袋に魚を獲ろうとしていた それが災いを招くことは誰も知らずに・・ 線路に立つ人々はただ彼らを眺めていた 私は友人宅に引き返そうとしたその時 誰かが叫んだ すると 一目散に誰もが叫び逃げ出した
The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. It continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around -- all of this was from the houses in the slum. When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed.
サンゴに激しくぶつかりながら 潮が戻ってきたのだ 子供たちはなんとか線路まで戻ったが 波はどんどん押し寄せてくる 2分後には線路にまで達し さらにそれを超えてきた この時点で私たちは100メートルは走ったが 波はまだ押し寄せる 老人がひざ丈まで水に浸かりながらも逃げずにいる 彼は「今までここで生きてきた 逃げるなら死んだほうがましだ!」と叫び 少年は母親を振りほどき 恐怖におびえる自分の犬を助けに走り 老女は息子に抱えられ家から逃げる 海と線路の間にあったスラム街は 完全に波にさらわれた 危険地帯の住民には警報が出されており 逃げ遅れた者はいなかったが 荷物を持って逃げる時間はなかった 数時間後にはスラム街からのがれきが 海水とともにあたり中に散らばり 水が引いたときには 跡形もなくなっていた
This may seem hard to believe -- unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports -- but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats -- mercilessly, without warning -- and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. We don't think another wave is coming right away.
たくさんのニュースを目にしていなければ 信じ難いかもしれないが 津波の後も 多くの場所で 住民はまだ恐れていた 穏やかだった海は 突然 無慈悲にも 人々や家々 ボートまでをも飲み込み 次の津波が来るのかどうか 誰もわからない それを知ってどうなるかもわからないが あの津波の恐ろしさは 情報がまるでなかったということであろう 些細なことのようだが 次の津波は午後1時ぴったりに いや 今夜かも いやいや たぶん・・と、 噂が噂を呼ぶのは 実際かなりの恐怖を煽る 病院へ向かうため ボートに乗ることが 安全かどうかさえわからない ファイファイ病院は波でやられただろう このボートはプーケット病院に向かうが 波止場につけるのが危険すぎるなら 代わりにもっと安全なクラビに向かうだろう 次の津波がすぐに来ることはないだろうから
At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well.
ファイファイ・ヒル・リゾートで 私はテレビから遠くの部屋の隅に押し込まれたが テレビからの情報に耳をそばだてていた その情報によると スマトラでM8.5の地震が起き それがあの巨大津波を引き起こした ニュースから私たちは一体何が起きたのか知り 少しは安心することができた しかし その内容は何が起こったのか そればかりで 今後何が起こるのかはわからなかった すべては単なる噂にすぎず 私が36時間以上 人に訊ねまわっても 誰も確かなことは知らなかった アジアの津波の後に急増したブログから 津波の様子を紹介しました ブログでも紹介されていた 津波の映像を2本お見せします かなり衝撃的です タイの映像 そして 同じくプーケットの映像です
(Screaming)
(叫び声)
Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again.
声1: 来る!また来るぞ!
Voice 2: It's coming again?
声2: またか?!
Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again.
声1: ああ また来てる!
Voice 2: Come get inside here.
声2: 中に入ろう!
Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! [Unclear]
声1: また波来たぞ! 声2: またか! 声1: そうだ!次の波が来てる!
(Screaming)
(叫び声)
They called me out here.
まだあそこに人がいるぞ!
James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially -- that is, in that first day -- there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. They said, "The blogsters let us down." What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us.
このサイトに載っていた動画でした waveofdestruction.org ブログの世界は 津波の前後で大きく変わりました 津波に引き続いて起こったことは何かと言えば 最初こそ -- 初日こそブログには 実況の報告もビデオもまったくありませんでしたが そのために 「ブログにはがっかりした」と 不満を漏らす人もいたほどです その後2, 3 日もすると 膨大な情報が溢れかえり 起きたことの全てが 迫力をもって描き出されていることが はっきりしたのです これまでにはなかったことでした それを行ったのは ばらばらで 実質的に組織されていない ライターやビデオ・ブロガーなどで 情報の集積によって この災害の現場の様子を描き出しました それは主流のメディアの情報よりも ずっと分かりやすかったのです
And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of -- the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying -- to the somewhat more mundane. Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them?
故に あの津波は ブログが本領を発揮し始めた 歴史的なの瞬間だったとも言えるでしょう さて このような高尚で いうなれば荘厳で恐ろしい話題から もっと身近なことへと話を進めましょう ブログについて考えるとき ほとんどの人が まず 政治やテクノロジーなどを 思い浮かべるでしょう そこで私は残り10分で ブログ界についての 3つの疑問を挙げたいと思います ひとつ目は 人を行動に駆り立てるものについて ブログから分かることは何か 二つ目に これまで未開拓だった集団的知性に ブログが本当に到達する可能性はあるのか 三つ目に ブログの潜在的な問題
OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally -- and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about -- is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. And this is -- at least, to a traditional economist -- somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. But instead, what we're finding on the Internet -- and one of the great geniuses of it -- is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity.
ブログの抱える問題点とは何か という問いです では 第一の質問 人々を行動させる理由について ブログから何がわかるか 特にブログ界で さらに広く言えばインターネットで 魅力的なことは ―あたりまえと思われるかもしれませんが 私は重要と考えていることで― ネットサイトの構築や リンクを張り コメントを残し これほど多量のコンテンツを毎日載せる人たちが 基本的に報酬なしで行っているという点です 良い仕事に対して 注目を集め 高い評価を獲得するということ以外には 人々は何の報酬も得ていません これは 少なくとも伝統的な経済学者から見れば 驚くべきことです 伝統的な見方では 基本的に 人間は経済的には 明確な報酬 つまりお金のために働くものでした しかし インターネットを見ると 素晴らしいことに お金とは関係なく人々が協働する方法が 見出されたことが わかります
The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "Coase's Penguin," talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road.
活動を組織化するための 新しい方法が創り出されています エール法科大のヨーカイ・ベンクラーは 『ロナルド・コースのペンギン』という論文で リナックスで良く知られた オープンソースモデルについて あらゆる状況に適用可能だと述べています あの津波を思いだしてください ジャーナリストが各地に多数いて 自分の話を伝えたいということだけを理由に 大量の記事を書きました その意義は大きく 迫力のある真実です このことは いずれ将来
So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. There are a few bloggers -- somewhere maybe around 20, now -- who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about.
この大量の活動を組織すると 面白い可能性があることを示します つまり ブログ界が示していることは 私たちが理性的だとされていた考えを 拡張して 「モノの価値=カネ」という方程式を拡張するか あるいは ずっとカネを払い続けるかということです しかし実際にはカネが動くことなく 集合的に 本当に素晴らしいモノを創り出せるのです ごく少数 ―20人ほどでしょう― の人は ある意味 お金を稼いでいて それで生計を立てようとする者も少しいます しかし大部分はただ好きでやっていたり 注目されたいなどの理由からでしょう ハワード・ラインゴールドはこの点について 多く言及していますが 自発的な協力というものは
The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." And the premise of "The Wisdom of Crowds" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations.
信じ難いほど強力で 考察すべきものだとしています 二つ目の質問は 集合的知能にアクセスすることに関して ブログ界は実際にどんな役割を担っているのかです クリスに紹介された私の本 『「みんなの意見」は案外正しい』では 前提として 正しい条件下では グループは目覚ましい知性を発揮しうるとしています しばしば グループで一番賢い人よりも 賢くなれるのです 簡単な例では あるグループに ビンにジェリービーンズがいくつ入っているか 推測させるとしましょう 私がそのビンを持っていて みなさんにいくつ入っているか聞いてみると その平均値はかなり正解に近くなるのです おそらく正答の3~5%の範囲内でしょう そしてその平均値は 90から95パーセントの回答より優れているのです ひとりふたりはかなり優れた値を 出してくるかもしれません しかし グループで導き出した答えは あなた方の答えより正答に近くなるでしょう そして素晴らしいことに もっと複雑な場面でも
For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information -- we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the "World Wide Web" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere.
この現象は機能するのです たとえば 競馬でのオッズを見ると ほぼ完璧に勝敗予測が立っている 予想屋のグループが可能性という面で ある意味未来を予測しているのです グーグルなどは 本質的にウェブの集合的知能に依拠し それにより最も有用なサイトを探し出しています グーグルはありえないほどにうまく行っています それは集合的に”ワールド-ワイド-ウェブ"という 無秩序なものに 実は優れた秩序 もしくは 優れた知能が含まれているからです そしてブログ界にはこんな見込みがあると思います
Dan Gillmor -- whose book "We the Media" is included in the gift pack -- has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. So, that's the positive side of it. That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. -- that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped.
ダン・ギルモアは 著書『ブログ 世界を変える個人メディア』の中で こう語っています 「自分より読み手のほうが博識である」 これはとても挑戦的な考えです 主流のメディアにとって また 膨大な時間と専門知識に身を奉げる人や 自分の専門に 多くのエネルギーを費やしてきた人にとって 非常に挑戦的な考えです しかし ブログ界がもたらすものは 集合的で広く行き渡る知能を得る可能性です そしてそこにアクセスすることができれば 私たちの知能はすべての人に利用可能なのです 個々のブログやコメントは 私たちが求めるものとは少し違うかもしれないが それらの総合的な見識は 多くの場合 非常に興味深く 価値のある内容である これがブログ界の魅力的な点です ときにこれは参加型ジャーナリズム 市民ジャーナリズムなどと呼ばれています そして実際に それまで黙っていた人たちが声を上げるようになり 私たちは以前から存在するが使われなかった情報に いつでもアクセスできる状態になります
But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things -- that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact -- and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.
しかしこれには問題もあります 残りの時間をかけてお話しましょう インターネットに多くの時間を費やすようになり ネット上のことで頭がいっぱいになると インターネットそのものに恋に落ちてしまうことがある そのボトムアップで分散型の性質そのものに 簡単に惚れてしまう それが必然的に素晴らしいものだと考える 次から次へと繋がっていき グループを形成することが心地よく思えてくる 多くの場合でそうであるが これこそが ブログ界の問題なのです より強く結びついていけばいくほど 独立性を保つのが難しくなる
One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values.
ネットワークの基本的な性質のひとつに 一度繋がりを持つと それがあなたの見解を作り出し 他の人との関係を形作ってしまうのです ネットワークとは そう定義されたものでもあります 単なる部分パーツの寄せ集めではなく それ以上の意味を持ってしまう スティーブ・ジョンソンはこれを 創発現象と呼んでいます こんな風に役立ちます 情報交換の効率面に貢献して 多数の人と連絡をとることができます また人々が協力して活動することも助けます 問題は グループが賢い決定をするには 個々の独立性が 保たれなければならないということです これは「みんなの意見」や 集合的知能の逆説になってしまいますが まさに必要なのは 独立した思考なのです ネットワークはそれを難しくさせてしまいます 思考が影響を受けてしまうからです
So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions.
ここでブログ界で顕著な現象は 一度ミーム ―アイデアが動き始めると とても簡単にそれを集積できるのです それは他の人からのリンクが理由です 誰かがリンクを張ると 他の人がさらにそこにリンクする そしてこの 積み重なるリンクこそが ブログ界の性質なのです 特に政治的なものでは 顕著です 正しい状況下でブログが示しうる この素晴らしい 分散型でボトムアップの知能を 必然的に排除してしまうのです
The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, they're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule -- just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear -- is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die.
私はよくウォーキングミルの例えを使いますが 多くの人は蟻を例に挙げます ボトムアップ式で 分散型の現象を考えるとき 蟻の巣は典型的な例になります 個々の蟻は無意識でも 集団としては賢い選択にたどり着くからです 食べ物にできるだけ早く到達できるよう 素早く交通整理をすることが出来る ゆえに 蟻の巣は良いモデルとなっている 三人寄れば文殊の知恵 ということです しかし 道に迷ってしまうこともある さらには 兵隊蟻が迷ってしまうと 蟻たちは 基本のルールに従って 目の前の蟻をただ真似てしまうのです すると 蟻たちは徐々に円を描き始める 2日間 360メートル 円の中を 行進し続けたという例もある ただ死ぬまで そして これこそ私たちが注意し 気をつけなければならないことなのです 蟻のように 死ぬまで行進し続けないように
Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami -- in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself -- is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for.
これを踏まえて 津波に話を戻すと 津波の話で驚異的な点は 津波そのものではなく ブログ界の影響力に関してですが ボトムアップの現象を強く描き出しました それまで存在しなかったサイトに アクセスが集中したり 今まで表すことのなかった独自の考えを これまでにない方法で表現できるなど ウェブが示す知能をあなたは確かに目にしたのです これは素晴らしい点です 無限ループは良くない例です 素晴らしいことに我々は注力すべきだと考えます
Thank you very much. (Applause)
ありがとうございました