TED Community » Luca De Biase

More About Me

I'm passionate about

civic media

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• TEDCred score: +1725.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Conversation: Are citizens "ALWAYS" good?

  Jul 19 2011: Rebecca MacKinnon (funny fake lapsus, Klinton) was making another point, too, as you know: what can be done to have big companies that influence the internet's freedom work for citizens and not against them? You are right that this means also discussing about what censorship really is. But its point is focused also on companies. And I ask myself: with companies so much more powerful than they were in front of the states, don't we need a more global government to make a balance? I guess that the universal declaration of human rights has long been the starting point for this kind of discussion. But different context have different feelings about the matter. Thus, are we viewing a sort of globalization that is in fact a subtle division? Sorry for using this place for asking more questions...

• A comment on Conversation: Is the media driving our celebrity-obsessed culture or is society driving the media?

  Mar 4 2011: Celebrities are synthesis, models, and persons. The notion of "synthetic news" is about both "artificial news" and also "fast to be absorbed news". News about models are the way models are built. News about persons make them celebrities. Clearly, there are different answers to the question. Information overload generates needs: filtering, framing, fast news. Icons and myths are solutions to the need for fast context. But the whole information overload problem comes from a failure of the previous media system. New media have yet to generate really quality solutions. (Ted's online success comes also from being one of the few quality content providers). We are in the middle of a change and we don't interpret well the transition. Thus, the failure of old media makes the iconic solution the easy way ahead, while the substance solution will come as new media become more mature.

• A comment on Conversation: Is happiness an emergent property?

  Mar 4 2011: Can one be happy if other people are not happy? I don't think so, at least if one is connected to those other unhappy people. If one cannot really be the only happy person in the place, that means that happiness is a social feeling. It is not a state of the individual: it is a state of the social network. If what I've just written were right, then it wouldn't make much sense to ask whether it can be under one's control. What makes a lot of sense is asking what can I do to help other people that are not happy, in order to feel free to search for my own happiness. It makes sense to contribute to the happiness of my social network, in order erase a cause of my own impossibility to be happy.