couple of weeks ago, and he actually said something interesting which ties everything we've been saying together. first of all, how he was willing to say, and he encourages people in his company to be willing to try things that are risky and that are not going to work the first time, and anything that is revolutionary, like what's happening now online is going to involve a high degree of failure, and i think that companies that are going to be most successful in terms of business are the ones that have that kind of culture because that's how the big innovations happen. again, to tie in the need to disconnect, jeff bezos made the point that he has to disconnect himself and go off completely for two or three days at a time and that's what when some of his most innovative ideas have come from so it all kind of comes together again. it's like we are dealing with a brave new world, and we don't know all the repercussions, all the unintended consequences, all

the snakes in the garden. that's why we have to be very alert, very vigilant and constantly it rating. i mean, that's one of the best things about this culture is the constant iteration. it's not like we have a perfect product and here it is forever. and the same applies to how you monetize it. there are going to be many new ways of monetizing that go way beyond how the internet started with the big ugly banner ads and all the things nobody wanted. but just remember one huge shift that has already happened, and at the beginning of the internet, the idea was how can you get as many people as possible to come to your site, right? that's gone. that's no longer the problem anymore. that's no longer the objective. new it's how many people can you get to take whatever you produce and post it on their site, their blogs, their facebook, to tweet about it. it's basically what linda

thaler, the advertising called ubiquity is the new exclusivity. >> ubiquity is the new exclusivity. >> one more question from the audience. >> can we pick up something about business. >> i was going to punctuate is with the audience but go ahead. >> we've mostly talked about consumer interactions with business but business-to-business interactions are taking off and they can even be more automatic, you can do automatic entry, automatic fulfillment so we haven't seen anything et when the massive amount of business that will be conducted over that. business-to-business will swamp the internet in terms of users. >> users will not even be people, it will be machine to machine. >> what do you mean, explain? >> i mean machines talking to machines, i mean a coke machine telling the server that it needs to be refilled. that's a common application

today. we've already seen smart parking meters that interact with a central service so machines exchanging information with each other, automotive engineering will be revolutionized by machine-to-machine communications where the dealer will get everything you know driving down the road at 70 miles per hour. all of that is going to take over. >> our cars are not cars anymore. they are rolling computers. >> absolutely and most of them are not yet rolling internet machines but they will be very soon. >> a really interesting app that i found that i love that we have in washington, d.c. called next bus. i don't know if any of you are familiar with it, but it's the greatest thing. gps devices or some kind of tracking devices on every bus in the city and i can check next bus, tells me how long the next bus is from my stop. it says four minutes and i walk out and the bus pulls out. it's an amazing thing. it works about 60% of the time. it's almost there.

we strive for perfection. i wanted to ask the audience how many of you are engaged in some form of social media, linkedin, twitter, facebook. >> google plus. >> google plus, how many hands for google plus. >> a few hands. see, it was -- you've gotten some -- >> okay. let's give our twitter handles. mine is @arianna huff with two fs. >> do you have a handle? >> @larrymagid and i tweeted just before i came on state. >> i'm vince@google.com. >> and i'm @frank. how does it affect business that people are connecting with one another, they are praising and reviewing and engaging themselves in this commerce? >> well, i gave the delta example and had a recent example with chase where i grapd about it and was immediately inundated. >> do you say nice things online too? >> i said something very nice about amazon, very pleasantly

surprised when i had to return a product and something complicated and some human being who spoke perfect english solved my problem, and i -- i was so delighted. that i tweet it had >> i think the big news of the night is you got through to a human being. how did that happen? >> i don't know how it happened. it must have been a bug. i think the fact is as we said earlier businesses have to pay attention to people and the fact that people may have been able to pass the swearing and complaining and maybe telling their next door neighbor about things. now they can go on twitter and facebook and actually get some attention. >> i think that's incredibly important. it's one of the most empowering things that the internet has made possible and social media have made possible, and after all that's how we started this conversation about the greatest revolution being the empowerment of people who otherwise would not have had a voice, and so now

the question is are we using this new power to bear witness, to complain effectively, to improve things, or are we using it to be massively destructive? >> one of the things we haven't talked about here yet, and we should spend more that be a couple of seconds on it it, is how this technology, how this connectivity is affecting the way we learn. education, teaching, the absorption of information. we have seen suggestions of a revolution but not the real revolution yet s.one coming? >> i think one is in the process of happening, and i think just as napster disrupted music and just as "huffington post" and others disrupted journalism, we are going to see the technology disrupting formal education as we know it. universities and even k-12 schools had better be thinking about how to adapt to a future when not only do we not need them to learn but also we don't

necessarily need them to even credential us, so, for example, i recently did a story on technology disrupting education for "the huffington post" and i pointed out there's a company where you can go in and you can document what you know and what you can do. i'm a really good plummer. i know how to program in c-plus-plus and they are going to figure out ways to validate, this guy really does program in c-plus-plus so if i'm looking for a programmer, rather than to go to stanford or berkeley or san jose state or anywhere else, maybe can i go to this website and find a competition person. universities have to find a way to cash in on that and adapt to that. they have to find out how to deal with the academy doing amazing videos blowing people's minds away. they need to deal with that or maybe they will find themselves not doing so well. >> vin, you have an experience with this. >> there's an interesting experience. two guys at google, sebastian

throne who is the one who deseens our cars that drive themselves and peter norvid, the director of research, adjunct proves source at stanford. decided to teach a class on artificial intelligence and decided to teach it online. thought maybe 500 people would sign up and 160,000 people would sign up. the initial reaction was now what. >> takes a lot of graduate assistants to grade the work. >> so a lot of software later they developed the class it a could be taught entirely online. all the dwhaes were asked could be automatically checked by a computer, so it was multiple choice. >> did they teach 160,000 people online? >> 160,000 people over the course of several weeks, and 20,000 of the 160,000 actually passed the course. i did some back of the envelope calculation and i think that's more people that have ever taken artificial intelligence crasses in the history of berkeley.

>> when i took a class it won't bother me if there were 159,000 people in the room. >> can i come back to your question of arianna and to us in general about revolutions. >> yes. >> it occurs to me, to try to sum this up, guttenberg, guttenberg's invention gave people the incentive to read and to learn to read, so it pushed literacy. internet gives people the incentive to write or to produce films or all these other things to express, and i hadn't until tonight put those two things together, and i think that's a dramatic difference because we are now people who generate as well as people who absorb. >> that is incredibly important, and you know this great sage will.i.am put it best. he said that we used to consume news sitting on a couch, and now we consume news galloping on a

horse. we don't just consume it. we sort of share it. we pass it on. we -- it's a much more active involvement. >> yes. >> and -- and as vince said, it's not just even consuming. it's now expressing ourselves, and -- and self-expression is the new entertainment, and i think those in the mainstream media who don't recognize that are still puzzled by the fact that so many millions of people are producing content for free and they don't get that. i think it's exploitation when in fact it's self-expression. it's like nobody is making them do it. nobody ever asked why are people sitting on a couch for seven hours on end watching bad tv for free you? know, they thought, oh, well, that's entertainment. why is that entertainment, and why isn't blogging or updating wikipedia entries or updating your facebook wall or whatever entertainment if that's what you want to do, and people want to be part of the story of their

times. >> they only want to complain to those of us who used to get paid to do that. suddenly we're competing with millions of people. i think nobody forces to you blog for free, and it is an amazing revolution of communication and democratization of opinion. i think that's generally a positive thing. >> but also this is by no means taking the place of investigative journalism, of long form writing, of the kind that is still thriving. it's just like that we are all recalibrating. >> there's another snake, right? "newsweek" is sold for $1. the publishing industry is collapsing because people are self-publishing and hard cover books for $37 are -- are becoming a thing of the past as people download their books to their readers or whatever they are using. the music industry isn't a record store anymore. >> right. >> it's better. it's better than when it was a record star because i can go

online and listen to a sample and say i'll buy that song, that song and not whole album but the trade-offs, that's what you're experiencing. >> my son is a musician. of course, he's not going to make a lot of money selling records anymore though he's coming out with a cd but his cd will market his public appearances and market his concerts and other activities, and i think people are having to find ways to create new business models for themselves. i worry about journalism a little bit because there has always been at least a certain theoretical purity in journalism, that journalists aren't out there hustling and selling and compromising themselves so i do worry, but, on the other hand, i'm not terribly worried because i do think things have a way of working out. i think at the end of this process, this ugly dirty process, something better will emerge. >> we've talked about the revolutions of the 21st century in the panetta series and what it's been doing this year. one of the other things we looked at was the middle east, and if we think about the world this, leads to the next question from the audience. the recent arab spring uprising was largely coordinated via the

net and twitter, this person writes. some dictatorial regimes try to control these events to censor them and to censor them. how can the internet support and enhance freedom and democracy in developing nations? >> so in some sense it already has, although i must point out that revolutions like the one. arab springs don't always turn out the way you hope. >> yes. >> tunisia has worked out pretty well. egypt is still not so clear, depending on how the elections go. libya is a whole other example and syria is still ongoing. i will say though that there is something important to recognize about the influx of mobiles into our communications environment. it's dramatic. it's more dramatic than any ways on the internet. this is the fastest growing phenomenon, 5.5 million mobiles are in use today. in the all are smartphones and not all of them are internet-enabled but at least 20% to 25% are and that percentage will go up over time.

what's important is that the mobile is not only a programmable device running all those apps and everything else. what's important is that it can communicate with the rest of the internet. when you tweet you send one copy of the tweet to the computer on the internet, and it jeb rates 100,000 copies to go everywhere else. the leveraging effect of being able to get online from anywhere at any time remotely to exercise the horsepower in the information of the internet is what is making that combination so dramatically powerful. i believe that that combination by itself is going to help spread democratic things around the world. >> it's important to point out that the internet sat tool. before we had the internet we had bullhorns and him graph machines and before that many other ways to communicate. many of which before we had electricity let alone mobile. it is a tool. i spend a fair amount of time in

the middle east and everybody i talk to says the conditions on the ground were ultimately what caused all of the revolutions. it wasn't the internet. the internet simply facilitated and perhaps spet up the process but didn't create the process. >> of course it didn't create the process but the facilitation and the acceleration are incredibly significant. >> absolutely. >> the fact that you can so much more easily organize by using twitter or facebook. the fact that, as you said, the mobile explosion which is much more significant around the world. >> the revolution and it's been argued by someone when has written a great deal about this, and i highly recommend you read him if you care about this topic, the revolutionary elment, as he says, here comes everybody. it's the everybody to the everybody. it's not the one to the masses, the paper to the masses, the present to the masses. >> although we can do that, too. >> the internet does both. >> what the internet has

empowered he argues for the first time is the everybody to the everybody. that makes it harder to be a dictator. >> that's the fact that it is -- that's the empowerment. that's the bearing witness. that's the fact that it's much harder to be an oppressive to a regime. after the iranian revolution, the green revolution when, of course, social media was so important in disseminating what was happening around the world while cnn and other traditional immediate have had been censored by the regime and china had an uprising, and it -- it learned from what the iranian government had done and did the exact opposite. it actually censored immediately all the social media, the internet, everything, and instead invite d a thousand well-known journalists to the place of the uprising to

basically spin them in a traditional oppressive regime way. this was really a great moment because an oppressive regime knows it's much easier to spin a couple of dozen journalists than to spin millions of people on twitter and foom, et cetera, so all the things, just to go back to the soviet union, just to go back to the villages, to the way that they managed to fiool so many credentials journalists. it would have been harder to fool thousands of people. >> i'm going to ask another question that leads to another question of the audience. how many in the audience have written a letter, you know, with handwriting and stamp, have written a letter in the last two weeks? >> wow, look at that. >> that is great. >> but the question is, obviously this person did not have that insight. the question is is the post office obsolete?

>> no. >> no. >> somebody's got to deliver those amazon.com purchases. >> this is great. i did some research on the post office before coming here. in the mid-1700s, right, when this republic was first being established, it took about two weeks, as much as 14 days, for a letter to go the 109 miles from new york to philadelphia. it would take months for ambassador jefferson to send a letter from france from paris back to washington. if you were overseas and you wanted to send a letter back to the state, you actually didn't know if it would make it on the ship so it's the post office and the post office museum says people would write five letters and send them on different ships so they knew it would come back. it was expensive to send a letter, and the typical american colonists received a letter a year. >> wow. >> okay. >> a letter a year, and now, arianna, how many e-mails do you

get in a day? >> oh, it's so funny. the "wall street journal" was just doing this funny thing of a day off for next week and they asked me that question so actually the day that they were following me around i think it was over 500. >> 500 e-mails in a day. >> which is why you sometimes can't respond instantly. what does that do to us? how do we deal with all this income? anybody here suffer from e-mail overload? >> yes. >> i become famous among my friends and family for not responding to e-mail, not because i don't want to, because i miss it. i literally just don't see it. in the enormous quantity of things that come at me, i just accidentally ignore important messages. >> and what impact does this -- this revolution have on us as communicators, as correspondents? >> well, that's precisely why it is so important not to be at the mercy of our e-mail. what i find amazing now, again, to compare it to the post

office, is the fact that we sometimes feel that we have to respond to each e-mail as we get it which is really the equivalent of sitting in your office or in your it. but sometimes it is the sense of everything that comes from getting an e-mail. if you want to send something of urgent communication it has to be boxed not e-mail. if my colleagues at work are trying to get my attention and i have 200 e-mails that i haven't looked at -- >> what do you do with it? you can't possibly respond to those e-mails that day. what do you do? >> i do. >> you take your device to bed

with you. ? >> i send short answers. >> yes. >> i think it is like, when do you read and think and absorb the attachment? >> that is a good point. what i do, anything that has been attachment, every week i get updates from the editors who report to me, i e-mail to another person. where i can read them when i have time. anything that is longer, what is why i have four blackberries. one is for my daughters. at night when i turn them off and charge them in a separate

room not near my bed, everybody made that point, so they can reach me. that is what of the excuses that people give. if someone needs to reach me, i have to have it by my phone. the head of abc news says, i can't do that. get a special number for them. the other excuse is i need the phone of as an alarm clock. pardon me, bob, $32, beautiful alarm clocks. >> i actually have a landline. you mean a telephone?

>> it has a wire. here in washington, political stuff, thank god for caller id. >> one thing that you have not touched on, is the impact that the fact that people don't call anymore, don't answer, phone calls from numbers that they don't recognize has had on polling. we have not addressed the question on how accurate are they? given the same people refused to

pa talk to pollsters. who are the people left they are very bored and lonely americans. with nothing better to do than talk to strangers. shouldn't we be re-evaluating? >> we are. we are hiring a firm that is doing it online. i'm sure that has it's own set of biases. but the industry has had to rethink the issue. >> people look at caller id and thirdly, i'm sure you have been robocalled. if you pick up the phone, and there's not somebody there right away, you hang right back up. i do. and i know most people do. poling has become more difficult is it less reliable? >> it is more difficult.

>> how are you getting to the people who wouldn't otherwise be picking up? >> there are companies out there. they are getting samples of the population that you are trying to pull. >> even though many years ago i got a degree in that field, that was long before internet technology. >> i invite the other panelists as well. can libraries get past copyright issues to digitize books to check them out? >> you will recall that the big fights over the ability to copy

portions of material led to the notion of fair use in the u.s. libraries are our frebds in that regard and they were fought when an dry was pushing libraries said that is a terrible idea. so they would still have the problem at google when we started making arrangements with libraries to scan books so they could be discovered. it wasn't to make the book available that way, it was to make it discoverable. >> they will face the same arguments that we have had to cope with. i think the general observation i would make is that copyright

in it's current form is way too restrictive. the ideas like that open a broad range of alternatives to the cray tors creator creators of these works. we should be stepping back to think about how authors should choose how to share their information but the other problem that we run into, and anyone else would as well it is difficult to identify the holder of rights of books no longer in print anymore. they are not required to register rights under the current copyright. it says anytime you create something you have instant rights to it even if nobody

knows that. we have the problem not knowing where to turn to clear rights we need to fix that. a better regime is to use electronic registration. if that is registered like real estate, it would make it easier if they wish to be compensated. >> we have a few minutes remaining. here is a question, it helps to bring this conversation full circle, to a head and to a close. as a high school teacher, what is the most important thing i should be teaching my students about this digital internet world? >> the other thing is to realize that specific content is much less relevant in the ability to

require and interpret knowledge. what is impressive today is part of criminal thinking is the ability to look and make some sense of it and to be a player and producer. in addition to consuming the reservation, create a school blog. submit something to huffington post. as schools i think they encourage that inside the classroom so that it is not rel va gated to outside the classroom. you have some wisdom and give that to the kids. you have a minute left. i would like you each to take a shot of what you see on the horizon. the next big thing that the world holds in terms of its promise. >> three