strategies," eddie brown with blair walker. >> you've been watching booktv, 48 hours of book programming beginning saturday morning at 8 l eastern through monday morning at 8 eastern. nonfiction books all weekend, every weekend right here on c-span2. >> here's a look at what's ahead this morning on c-span2. next, "the communicators" takes a look at the digital future and how technology is impacting business, the media and consumers. then a house subcommittee on the impact of u.s. aid to china. and later, a forum hosted by yale university on the legacy of william f. buckley on the 60th anniversary of the publication of his book, "god and man at yale." >> this week on "the communicators," new york times technology columnist nick billiton talks about the impact

of technology on business and how technology has changed the media. >> host: and from time to time on "the communicators" we like to look into the future and look at some of the technology that may be coming down the road. and joining us this week is nick billiton of "the new york times." he's a technology columnist and reporter with the times. mr. bilton, what do you write about? >> guest: oh, i write about anything to do with technology and business and the way technology is changing society and culture. and i also write about a lot of the big companies that are affecting what we're doing, including apple, microsoft, and then the smaller ones like twitter and, well, facebook which is not necessarily small anymore. but it's just a range of technology and culture. >> host: and when did you move to the san francisco area? >> guest: i am now a san francisco resident as of four months ago. so i was in new york for 15 years on the east coast, and i'm out here now enjoying the warmer weather. >> host: and why did you move out there? >> guest: um, i'd been in the

city for 15 years and, um, i'd been a reporter for the paper for a couple of years now. before that i was in the research and development labs, my job there was to look into the future. but when i became a reporter, you know, there's definitely a burgeoning tech scene in new york with a lot of start-ups, but there's also a whole different world out here with silicon valley. and we decided it would maybe be worth me trying to come out here and exploring different opportunities as far as reporting goes. and it's actually been really amazing to see, to go down to the valley and be able to meet with a lot of these larger companies, but also to see some of the things that are happening out here in san francisco, too, from a technology standpoint. >> host: two questions from your last answer. number one, what are the research and development labs of "the new york times"? >> guest: so the research and development labs were started a few years ago, and the idea was, you know, when you look at the paper, you have all these reporters reporting daily stories, and, you know, they're really embedded in whatever their beat is. and then you have the web development team that is producing the mobile web site.

and between those two they're so focused on the daily work that they a don't actually get to look at things that are going to be coming down the road 2-10 years from now. so martin who runs the times digital group decided to start this research lab kind of based off something you would find at mit or nyy with the goal of peering into the future and looking at what we can imagine the media world to look like in the next 2-10 years. so there was a very small group of us, about ten people or so, um, and we would sit around and try to figure out, okay, what happens when smartphones exist in everyone's home and televisions that can talk to you or mirrors that can track where you're going and deliver news? and we started to build a lot of prototypes around that. >> host: and are any of those prototypes in use by the new "tw york times" now? >> guest: well, there's some data visualization products that we did when we started to track how people would.com the web site. -- would come to the web

site. we tracked the day michael jackson died, and we looked at who was coming to the web site, um, and where they were coming from and how quickly the news and information spread. and it was, essentially, just a little data exercise. um, and what was fascinating about that research was that we found that, um, people around the globe discovered michael jackson had passed away in a matter of minutes. it literally spread from new york to california to japan to africa in just a matter of minutes, and we created this data map where you can actually see traffic to the site, and it almost explodes. it was actually funny because cnn wrote a story that said michael jackson dies and almost takes the internet with him because the news and information was spreading so quickly, and that was one of the projects. and now that's being used internally to track on a daily basis how stories are spreading on social media. >> host: so did you find that the business models that "the new york times" has used forever, are they all outdated?

and not just "the new york times," but other publishing companies and television stations, etc. >> guest: well, i think business models are definitely outdated across all different media platforms whether it's newspapers, radio, all these different things. and i think what you're seeing some of the innovations happen are with blogs and smaller start-ups and things like that. a perfect example is, you know, a lot of these technology blogs that have as far as far startedt have to deal with brick and mortar issues, printing presses, multimillion dollar tv studios. they approach things differently, and they don't just look at bringing in revenue based on advertising, but they look at different aspects. and one of the things we're seeing is some sites do things where they have communities, and they say, okay, you pay us x dollars a month, and you get access to our writers, or you get access to specific papers that we publish before anyone else. another thing you're seeing is conferences, for example. you know, the conference market hash around for -- has been around for many years, but take a look at tech crunch, for

example, which is a technology blog based in new york and san francisco. 90% of their revenues come from conferences that they hold where they make millions of dollars from these conferences doing interviews with people. um, and so i think that when you look at the media business models, um, it shouldn't be just -- you shouldn't just look at it as, you know, a prescription and, sorry, a subscription and advertising and classified. there could be a whole different gamut of things that people can do to give money to these organizations, and actually, television is an interesting model to look at because you have free over the air television with advertising, you have limited cable, you have premium cable, you have over the top where people can watch things on hulu and netflix, there's always these ranges of ways people can pay for this content and consume it in the way that makesceps for them. >> host: so, nick bilton, do you subscribe to pay television in any way, or do you watch television over the internet?

>> guest: i do not. i have canceled my cable about a year and a half ago, i believe. probably one of the greatest decisions i made because i tend to not, not only not consume cable television in the way i did years ago, um, but it's, it was expensive, it was really difficult to navigate with remote controls and things like that, and it was also, a lot of the content is really not that great when it comes down to it. you have hundreds of channels where a lot of these tv shows are just filling up space for the most part, and i think there's only really a few good shows. so what i do, there's two things i do. one is i have a computer hooked up to my television at home, and i have this wireless mouse that looks almost like a doughnut, and you can hold anytime the air and move it around. and i have a wireless keyboard, too, and so i'll watch things on hulu or netflix, or sometimes i'll buy things from itunes or something like that. but one of the things that really has changed is not necessarily how i watch mainstream content, but the fact

that i don't necessarily just watch mainstream content. so when friends come over for dinner and we sit around the television afterwards, we don't turn on breaking bad or cnn or something like that, we pull up youtube and pass around the remote control and the keyboard, and we pull up clips that we think are interesting or funny or whatever they are, and it becomes this social way of watching the news or watching content online, sorry. >> host: nick bilton, you also mentioned earlier you're rather amazed at seeing silicon valley and being exposed to it now on a regular basis. for somebody who hasn't been out there or hasn't seen it, what would you tell them about silicon valley? >> guest: it's funny, somebody when i first came out here, somebody from twitter sent me a message and said welcome to baghdad by the bay which i didn't actually get at first, and it actually is a reference to an old reporter at the times, but it really is, essentially, being embedded in a different country. the managing editor for "the new

york times" was ott here last week celebrating the expansion of the bits blog which i by for at the time, and we showed him all these different companies and met with all these different people, and he said it's, essentially, like the new english out here, and our job as reporters is to kind of translate what's happening. and when you see some of these things that are going on out here and really kind of what the future looks like which i think is, you know, a lot of the projects that are being built and the start-ups are a couple of years ahead of where the mainstream will be, you can really see how amazing and how much of a different language it has become when you look at technology and the way we interact with it. >> host: nick bilton is a columnist for the bits column in "the new york times", the bits section in "the new york times." he's also a reporter on technology, but he's also the author of a book from last year, "i live in the future and here's how it works" is the name of his book. mr. bilton, what is dog fooding?

>> guest: dog fooding is a term that google uses, and what it means is, um, they -- you eat your own dog food, essentially. so when google built g mail, they actually required all of their developers that work there to use g mail, and it's essentially called dog fooding. it's when you build a product, and you use it yourself. >> host: and why do you use that term, and how did that, how did, how did you eat your own dog food for "the new york times" or not eat your own dog food? >> guest: well, one of the things, you know, i really try to practice what i preach. when i came to the times as a reporter, i didn't have a traditional reporting background. i had studied at nyu some journalism and film courses, but i didn't have the background a lot of journalists have, and i approached becoming a reporter there as something almost like starting a start-up. and so i, you know, i do what i do online in the paper. so i have a conversation with readers, i'm constantly using social media, twitter, facebook,

google plus, all of these different things to reach out to readers. i ask them questions before i'm doing stories, i let them know about breaking news as i'm actually writing it, and i kind of follow the narrative and the arc all the way through no matter what the story is. and i think that's something very different than the print model where you write the story, um, and the only way anyone can actually communicate with reporters back in the day was to write a letter to the editor, and that was this little column in the back that was ed fitted and so -- edited and so on. just the narrative changes when you can actually have a conversation with your readers. it's also, you know, dog food in the way that, um, i don't just think about things in words, um, if i'm updating my twitter or facebook account, i'm not just writing words, i'm putting photos and videos and interesting links and things like that, and i do the same thing with reporting when i take photos or create graphics or shoot videos, whatever makes most sense for that story. >> host: what kind of feedback do you get from readers?

>> guest: i mean, the feedback is great. readers love being a part of the conversation, right? they can now do that. um, and, of course, you know, there's some angry readers that don't like some of the things that i write, but for the most part the feedback is always really good. and one of the things i've found that is really helpful to both the readers and myself is if i'm interviewing, you know, someone, let's just say i'm interviewing bill gates, and i ask him first if it's okay, but i will send a tweet, and i'll update my facebook, and i'll say do you have questions you'd like me to ask him, questions flow in from readers that inevitably a couple of them i will ask him and will make into it the story. so there's this arc of the narrative that follows through where the reader is not just reading, but they're also participating, and i think that's been really, really helpful. >> host: in your book "i live in the future and here's how it works," one of the opening stories you tell is how you no longer subscribe to the print edition of your paper.

>> guest: yeah. it was an interesting experience. i, when i first started at the times, i remember one of the most exciting parts of working for "the new york times" was the fact that i could get the sunday paper on saturdays. they print an early version called the bulldog which is actually printed on saturday mornings. and, um, and i used to ride my bike over to the times bureau, um, the main headquarters and wait for the prohibit edition to come -- print edition to come, and i would run home and devour it. friends found out about it, and they started asking me, and i was essentially coming back with piles and piles of newspapers. and then all of a sudden a lot of my friends stopped asking me to get the sunday paper, and i stopped getting it, and my daily newspaper started to pile up. it wasn't that i wasn't reading the times, i just wasn't reading anytime that capacity. what i had started doing was reading it on my e-reader, on my computer, my mobile phone and consuming it differently. so i decided that i no longer wanted to get the paper product, um, i wanted to consume it on

the digital devices. it's definitely preferential for me that -- [inaudible] have it follow me essentially on devices that i use. but it's still, it's still not that way for a lot of readers. a million people still subscribe to the paper on a daily basis. >> host: how did you cancel your subscription? >> guest: i had to call from the newsroom, and i remember i actually was very nervous about it. i didn't know if somebody that i knew was going to pick up the phone on the other end, and i called, and i canceled, and they tried to convince me otherwise. luckily, it wasn't someone i knew, but i disguised my voice, it was quite funny. >> host: when that news came out, that you had canceled your season description, what was the action from "the new york times"? >> guest: it wasn't good. i was being interviewed by "wired" for a feature story they were doing on some of the research in the research labs, and last -- the end of the interview the reporter said,

hey, by the way, do you still read the print paper, and i said, no, actually i don't, i read on this product called the times reader which we had developed, an application for tap let -- tablets before the ipad where it looked just like a newspaper experience but in the digital experience. and i said, no, i read on the times reader. the title was nick bilton loves the news, it's just the paper he can't stand. which got picked up all over the place, and there was definitely an interesting response, but in the end, you know, the times recognized that i was, essentially, kind of the next generation of reader. and that they, you know, they needed to listen to what i had to say and what other reporters at the taper that weren't -- paper that weren't necessarily reading the print paper had to say. that's a testament to them building the iphone apps and all these different things, and i think they're definitely aware

of that now. >> host: nick bilton, in your book and in your columns, you talk about the me generation. what do you mean by that? >> guest: well, a couple of different things to that. you know, one of the things that's happened is that digital affords this world where we get things that are, essentially, smart, and they understand what we want, right? so i may want to watch a tv show on my iphone. you may want to watch it on a 72-inch plasma television. somebody else may want to watch it on their laptop, and digital affords the ability to do that. it's whatever is preferential to you. and whether it's television content or video or news articles, um, and it really, really is summed up by the way we all consume content these days on these different devices. and that's one of the beauties of digital, i think. in the same respect, there's also a term i talk about in the book called me economics where you have a lot of kids that if they would have gone let's just say 20 years ago, if you went to

a bookstore and you purchased a book and you didn't like it, you could have returned it. same way a video or whatever it is. in the digital world, you can't do that, right? it's one to have flaws of the way we built systems. if i buy a song from itunes, i can't return it, i'm stuck with it. so what you're seeing is a lot of kids who are taking this into their own hands, and it's what i call me economics. i bought this last album, and i didn't like it n. a physical world, i would be able to return it, so in the digital world i'm going to, quote-unquote, steal the next version of this album that i get to kind of balance things out a little bit. >> host: the subtitle of your book is "why your world, work and brain are being creatively disrupted." you have a chapter in here on surgeons and video games. what is that about? >> guest: yep. well, so one of the things, one of the reasons i actually wrote the book was in response to a lot of books and articles out there that are saying that the internet is bad for us and

technology is bad for us. and i didn't agree. and one of the reasons for that is because i've had a computer since i was years -- 4 years old, i had my first atari when i was 5 years old, and i've essentially grow up in this digital world. i think i've turned out okay, some people may argue otherwise. in reality, there's no evidence that these things are bad for us. so i started to do some research into what happens with our brains when we're using devices, iphones and ipads and things like that, and i spoke to neuroscientists all across the country, and there was a couple of things i discovered. first of all, i'll talk about the video games aspect. there's an assumption that video games are bad for us, but there's a tremendous amount of research that actually says they're very good for us. there was research that was done at the rochester institute of technology that found that kids that play first person shooter video games actually have the visual acuity of someone who's deaf. they have better hand/eye coordination, better long-term and short-term working memory,

and a long list of other things. um, there was research that was done in california, um, around people that play tetris, and they found the same results where their memory was were the after playing tetris for a little while and all these different things. and so video games are a different form of story telling, um, and they're not bad, and they're not, they're not going to replace books or replace movies or something like that. they're just a new form of the way we consume content. and to say that they're bad is completely inaccurate. and as far as the surgeons, there was some research that was done at nyu where they found that surgeons that play video games, um, are actually -- laparoscopic surgeons are actually 40% fasters, and i believe 40% for accurate than those that don't the other aspect of that, too, is when you look at the argument that these digital devices are pad for us, the epiphany i had, this aha moment was when i was looking at

mary ann wolf's research, and she's also a neuroscientist that specializes in language. and at the beginning of her book she says she came to the sad realization that the human brain was never designed to read. it's something that we have to actually train our brains to do, so when you say that devices are bad for us and video games are bad for us and we should be reading books, our brains were never designed to do that either, so it's all creating this new form of story telling. >> host: you also look at the porn industry as a cutting-edge industry. >> guest: yeah. one of the things the porn industry has been at the forefront of a lot of technology since, you know, thousands and thousands of years. actually, i found from a friend who works at nature, the science magazine, that the porn industry was at the forefront of business back in the days of pompei selling statues in markets, erotic statues, of course. and, um, and the porn industry has always been an innovator when it comes to technology. and the reason for that is because a lot of, um,

governments and officials and religious leaders have always tried to suppress the porn industry, so they've actually had to figure out ways to make money and to reach consumers by going around, um, the rules of the day. and be you look at the printing press, um, you know, there was two of the most popular books in the early days of the printing press, one was, of course, the bible, and another one was, actually, essentially, erotic tales. so you can follow all the way through the porn industry when it came to dvds to cds to the internet n. the early days of the web, there were people that were using it for e-mail and science journals and then, of course, there was porn. and so knowing all this, i went out to california, and i interviewed a lot of different porn companies, and what i found was the larger organizations, the playboys, the penthouses of the world had actually kind of gone out of business, and they'd been purchased and gone bankrupt and, you know, were tens of

millions of dollars in the hole whereas you had this small group of very small start-ups, if you will, that had started to create content, um, and sell it to a very smaller audience. so it was almost esoteric to a certain degree, but the content they were creating was people were paying for it. and what i found was just like we're seeing with the media world told where you have a lot of these larger news organizations and magazines and so on, um, that are having trouble continuing the revenue growth that they've had in the past, you have these smaller blogs that are starting up and saying, well, we don't need to have a printing press or a big news studio, we can do this from our bedroom even and reach the same audience with the same kind of quality of content. >> host: nick bilton, is the occupy wall street movement a good example of how facebook and twitter are much more powerful than, say, a new york times editorial today? as far as motivating people?

>> guest: well, i don't -- yeah, as far as motivating people, i would definitely agree with that. as far as influence, i don't know if i would definitely agree with that. i think that they're both equally as powerful to a degree. um, you know, the occupy wall street movement was not started by "the new york times," it was, it was all started by'd busters which is a magazine -- ad busters which is a very liberal magazine. it was very perpetuated by people, and you can see it's just amazing to see, there's occupy wall streets in every country around america. there's up wall streets around the world. i was in madrid this week, um, and i was watching twitter, um, and i was watching youtube videos from l.a. and san francisco and all these different occupied areas, and outside my bedroom i hear all this, my hotel room, sorry, i hear all this yelling, and i look out, and there's an occupy wall street protest in front of me in many did -- madrid. and there's two aspects to it.

one is this only started in the october, um, and it is now everywhere. um, and the other aspect to it is that in the past i think that we kind of relied on the media to be the one, to be the watchdog. and that's still the role of the media, but people are now part of that too. the devices we all carry around in our pockets, these little cell phones are, essentially, everyone has a printing press, right? everyone can reach the same number of people that "the new york times" can with the right content. and we're seeing that with some of the action the police are taking when, you know, there was a veteran that was beaten by police, um n occupy oakland recently. that video went viral on the internet. you can see it with the uc davis events that took place last week where the police officer pepper sprayed a bunch of students sitting on the floor, um, which is also changing the movement. and i think what we're seeing happening is almost like this ricocheting of the news between mainstream media, um, and people involved in occupy wall street where they're helping actually perpetuate the conversation

together. >> host: you often write about personal experiences when you write your column, nick bilton, and one of them is when you moved out to the west coast, and you wrote move the books or leave them. >> guest: yeah. a difficult decision. one that definitely generated quite a bit of discussion. but i was packing up my stuff to move out to san francisco, and i had these piles and piles of books, and i thought to myself, well, do i want to bring these out or, as for the most part, they've literally just sat on a book shelf in my living room for the past few years. all the new books i buy are on my kindle or ipad, i don't remember the last time i actually bought a print book. and so, you know, was it worth it to ship all these things out, the money that it would have cost, the gas, whatever, however or they would have gone out there for them just to sit on a book shelf again out in california? and i decided eventually to take about 10% and leave about 90%.

>> host: nick bilton, you also wrote a recent column, there's no data sheriff on the wild web. >> guest: yep. yeah, one of the things that identify really been reporting on over the last year is the lack of oversight, essentially, when it comes to privacy on the internet. facebook has more information about people around the world than any government agency could even dream of, and there's nobody that's regulating them. and one of the reasons that this actually even came up was last, early this year, sorry, sony was hacked, um, and 77 million -- sorry, 77 million people's personal information, um, was essentially compromised by hackers. and part of the reason for that was sony had outdated servers, they didn't have the proper security protocols in place, and the reason for that was because there are no rules or regulations that said that they had to. and so there was no slap on the wrist, there was no, no one got in any kind of trouble, um, and

sony -- that could essentially happen again with any company. and part of the reason for this is because there's no legislation. and this is a real problem. um, there's this tectonic shift that essentially happened online where people's privacy is not, no longer owned by them. it's essentially a currency that we use to get access to facebook for free or g mail. and i think it's a real problem that we're going to see the effects of over the next few years as more and more people's content and information and personal information is taken advantage of. >> host: but aren't most people, nick bilton, aware of what they're providing to these companies and doing so willingingly, and aren't silicon valley companies reluctant or pushing back against any legislative everetts? >> guest: well, so i don't think people are aware. if you go into google and you type a search for, um, something personal, let's just say prostate cancer, google stores that search unless you tell them

otherwise not to, right? if you're part of a group on facebook, um, that is maybe it's a religious group or whatever it is, um, that facebook has, knows that knowledge. and a lot of people, i don't think, are aware that these things are happening. um, in fact, i recently last year, um, i had to go on a television show and explain how to change your privacy settings on facebook, and i couldn't figure it out. i'm a technology reporter, um, who is obsessively online, and i literally could not figure out how to change my facebook private settings. so a lot of people are unaware of the things that are happening when they're on these web sites. and, um, the companies -- google, facebook, all these different companies -- benefit from that because they get to deliver advertising, and they get to store all this data, and they get to make money from that. and so there is a lot of pushback from them. but i think that it's pretty apparent that the, that there needs to be some sort of oversight to say, a, that people

need to have access to their content and information and to be able to delete it from the web because you can't delete anything from the web and, b, that there needs to be some sort of oversight to say that these companies should have protect protections in place to protect people's privacy as they're storing all this information online. >> host: nick bilton, you were recently offered a different job, weren't you? >> guest: i was offered a different job, yes. >> host: and what was that other job and why didn't you take it? >> guest: i was offered, recently offered a television-related job at another organization, and, um, i very seriously considered taking it, but in the end, um, i really love working at "the new york times." it's a place that i'm incredibly proud of going into work every day and proud of the reporting that everyone i work with does and the reporting that i do and my editors. and i don't think you can really get that in many other places. and when i