much I don’t have hula hoops so I met
some of you outside and I and I noticed
that when we meet each other we
introduced ourselves with our unique
perspectives on the world like hi I’m
Unger this is what i meant to this is
what i like but the question I want to
ask us today is how unique are we let me
show you something cool about 9,000
people expressed interest in coming to
the dead event of those 9,000 people we
randomly selected about five hundred or
a thousand and we started looking at the
entire online footprint all the groups
they had joined all the posts that they
had publicly shared all the pages they
had liked and we began to cluster all of
these sort of data points into some
patterns we notice that the out of the
9,000 people who had expressed an
interest and coming to the dead event
for distinct patterns emerged the first
one was people who were into independent
networks you know groups like flats
without brokers buy and sell on Facebook
up selling stuff like that the second
group was the hustlers the guys who
wanted to make stuff happen the guys who
joined startups who following the
startup scene in Delhi Gurgaon annoyed
are the people who had small companies
of their own the third group were the
creativity people some of you here are
recognized from our feeds they were
photographers poets writers they bought
cameras they curated the Instagram feeds
really sweet the fourth group was the
Explorers the explorers were a fun bunch
because they’d walked through the city
and they’d talk about the beauty of the
dawn and you know the wonderful streets
of some Johnny junk and very often
they’d be the same guys who’d share tips
about new restaurants and
new places to eat so what we did is okay
these are the guys who were interested
in coming to TEDx gorg ow let’s look at
their friends but let’s put a filter on
it let’s look at their friends who had
no interest of coming to TEDx gurgaon
had never watched a TED video in their
lives so a very small sample but we went
after it and what did we discover we
were a completely different animal they
were into fitness biking some of them
were obsessed with the alumni’s you know
the college’s the school’s a lot of them
were first-time father’s a small bunch
was what we call wanna pruners you know
people talking about starting up
something but never starting something
up what I want to really make you think
about when you see this graph is that at
scale and the internet is about scale
everyone is actually quite boring all
your individuality all your trades all
you’re really clever quips about the
government they’re all pretty much
boring someone else is doing them you’re
also doing them these are all traits at
scale your passions your interests
actually become clouds they become
clouds and you disappear in the noise
however and this is what I like doing is
when you look at people’s documentation
not at their interests not at their
passion but if you look at people’s
documentation things start getting
interesting very fast one of the biases
a lot of us have is we believe that the
stuff we see on our mobile phones are
the fades the you know the feeds of
photographs of food videos that we share
are pretty much the same globally apart
from a few cultural and a few political
differences the entire worlds feed
pretty much looks the same when you look
at the phone and when I look at the
phone when he looks at the phone and
when she looks at the phone barring a
few differences they’re all going to see
the same stuff this is a very healthy
bias to have because if you actually
experienced the
extent in the magnitude of information
being uploaded right now we would all
freaked out and I want to take you on a
little bit of this freak out journey
this is gorg ow let’s go northwest of
here to a town called jaja it’s a small
town you never hear about it in your
digital marketing planning you never
hear about it when someone wants to do a
Facebook campaign it’s a small town with
a small population very little digital
footprint ignored by most people let’s
look at what this town is documenting
first we go to youtube immediately we
see videos of kids wrestling we see a
man obsessively peeling off labels from
pepsi cola bottles and documenting the
registration number we see the funeral
of a major in an army he was a man from
judger who went and joined the indian
army got killed came back was burnt in
public and the videos were uploaded we
see a very strange man finding old
photographs in trash cans and charger
scanning them and uploading them on
YouTube let’s look at Instagram now from
10 sure Instagram is the home of the
food blogger on the fashion blogger
pictures of what you ate blessed
inspirational memes let’s see what
others on Instagram so when we go to
Instagram we go to judge around
Instagram you see some pretty strange
stuff you see a man working out
obsessively we see a lot of
documentation of faded posters we see
lonely dogs then we go into homes and we
see a man lying on a bed with a puppet
singh shirt and we see another man
[Applause]
now all of this is life right this is
life it’s not exciting it’s kind of
messy and it’s happening all around us
how do we make sense of all of this data
how do we make sense of all these
selfies all of these images all of these
videos being uploaded the first thing we
do is we understand that we develop a
principle for why something has been
uploaded in the first place the winning
image is not the only image that was
taken it’s a photograph or a video that
has won over many other photographs and
videos it’s an image that frames the
life of the viewer for the audience it
says this is who I am this is what I
believe in look how well I’ve controlled
the filters the message in uploading is
you the audience will see exactly what I
want you to see it’s an act of
aggressive framing it’s an act of
control you will see what I want you to
see so we look we look at context we
look at framing we attempt to develop
classifications on this volume of life
data that is emerging let’s go to
Gurgaon and attempt this classification
we uploaded about 10,000 images onto our
servers and said what’s going on in
gurgaon computationally the first
cluster was men working out men posing
with guns meant showcasing their cars
not the real cars the cars they were
posing next to the second cluster was
traffic and we saw the speak in the
morning and we saw it peak in the
evening and there’s a lot of frustration
and anger when people upload in traffic
they hate the government they talk about
the fellow sort of other people trapped
around them they complain about bikers
it’s a very toxic conversation the third
cluster is consumption bears malls
buying shopping selling so these are
three immediate clusters we see in
gurgaon now I want you to do a quick
thought experiment
its twenty forty five or twenty fifty
and general purpose artificial
intelligence has taken over it is doing
an audit of the various cities in India
and it goes to gurgle and does the same
exercise we just did it looks at all of
the uploads trying to develop a sense of
what’s going on culturally in gurgaon it
seized guns its ease traffic and it sees
alcohol drinking consumption what would
general purpose a i conclude they’re
building an army be wasting resources
and they just shopping might as well
destroy them inefficient i’m glad you
laughed because we see an entire
industry globally dedicated doing this
kind of analysis where they reduce the
magnitude of the world’s data to pie
charts twelve percent positive sentiment
six percent food pictures and a lot of
investment whether it’s in machine
visioning or or text analysis is based
on reducing the world into this it makes
it more manageable but we’re losing
something and to me this model seems
criminal we do it but it’s criminal
today i want to share a slightly
alternative sensibility with you the
sensibility that’s emerged of my
experiences as a anthropologist a crime
researcher it’s based on a very simple
idea do you remember when I told you
that images are frames and acts of
control what I’d like to share with you
now is a slight sub point to that the
more you control the more aggressively
you control the most slips through in
psychoanalysis this is called the slip
of the tongue where a where a phrase
betrays a lot more than was intended
about the patient in this context let’s
call it the slip of the image and in an
image dense environment like the one we
live in today where there are thousands
of images
there are also thousands of slips and if
you focus on the slips and the gaps and
the extra information that slipped out
of the control of the photographer you
can see things you can ask questions
that you never thought were possible I
know this sounds a little abstract let’s
go back to the gurgle data and see how
this would work there let’s look at our
thugs are really macho man in the
beginning with their guns with their
biceps with their pecs and let’s do a
deep scan of everything else they upload
we notice a very curious pattern every
time they’re not flexing they’re
sticking their hands in their pockets
what does this mean is it an act of
showcasing are they too cool for gloves
what does it mean either way the next
time you meet someone on the road who is
from this region stick your hands in
your pockets he might mistake you for
one of his own and you might start an
interesting conversation the second of
the 100 million photographs around
traffic about ten percent have something
very curious going on in them we find
these really dense and congested
environments these photographs of people
really frustrated in cars and suddenly
we’ll see someone write a couple it
under it someone write a little poem sky
looking so forlorn it’s like I don’t
even want to read it but yeah and what’s
interesting about this is that imagine
being in a traffic jam imagine looking
at that one guy screaming and then
looking over his shoulder and seeing
that other guy on his mobile phone is he
on the verge of discovering his inner
gullet so question worth asking the next
time you’re in traffic because the data
suggests that ten percent of us are
finally the shoppers the ones who are
eating consuming the ones we all
eight right if you do a deeper scan of
their timeline what you’ll notice is
that they extremely lonely and the mall
is the only place where they can express
friendship where they can meet their
friends where they can hang out after a
long day of work imagine the world we
have created where the only space left
to exercise and express friendship is in
a mall and we wonder why we have
problems stuff like this is happening
all the time there are thousands and
thousands of such slips of an image
thousands and thousands of such story
trails being uploaded every second every
second and we risk losing them all we
risk losing them all because we are so
obsessed with reducing it to numbers and
Excel sheets and making them manageable
take a look at this guy he’s a young
English boy started looking at him about
this is him training to join the army
this is him in a simulated war
environment this is him deployed in
Afghanistan and this is him in a life
there’s a lot of story trails there’s a
lot of stories being uploaded we’re
losing them all and I think we’re at a
unique point in our history where future
historians would not have to rely on
manuscripts newspapers legal documents
faded diary entries crumbling archives
we are writing the first draft of
everything right now it’s happening
right now and what we do is going to
echo through eternity
let’s make our uploads count thank you
[Applause] [Music]