Godin/Shirky Compare and Contrast

Lauren Flatt
COMP 106
9/22/09
Assignment 1

Compare and Contrast

Clay Shirky and Seth Godin are two people that believe in people coming together. They both take on different aspects of unity and have similar yet also different ideas that they bring forth in their speeches.
The first speech that I would like to talk about from Ted.com is Clay Shirky’s speech titled: “How Social Media Can Make History.” In this speech, Clay Shirky introduces his topic by mentioning the transformed media landscape and explaining that this is how to get a message out to the public and he gives a few examples. His first example that he discusses is about the last election and the concern for there to be voter suppression. We learn how social media was able to influence this by “Video the Vote” and that that idea was actually taken from the Nigerian election campaign a few years ago called “SMS the Vote.” Shirky’s next example is the tech transfer. He discusses how we went from one to one to one to many and then finally native support for the many to many pattern which could not be done until the Internet hit and how there could finally be a medium for all other medium. He brings upon the example of everyone staying connected during the earthquake in China being reported as it happened via Twitter to show how this news was so instant to us and then Obama campaign website to show the mature use of mass media .
Seth Godin’s speech titled, “The Tribes We Lead” focuses on creating ideas and getting those ideas to spread out. Average ideas and plenty of ads is what he defines as mass marketing. He talks about tribes- leading and connecting people and ideas and thanks the internet and mass media by helping everyone connect with eachother.
Seth Godin does not talk about the technological aspect of the Internet like Shirky does. Shirky brought about three specific examples in great detail while Godin focused in general on the power to create movements and the phenomena of the tribe rather and only gave short and brief examples. These two people have similar themes but different takes on the messages that they try to get across.