TEDnesday Talks: "How To Make A Splash In Social Media"

Mister Splashy Pants?

At Student Edge, we like to keep ourselves up to date with all the latest innovative ideas in the world of technology, education and design. We also love puns. So, over Wednesday lunch, we watch TED talks. Thus: TEDnesday.

This week, we watched Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and executive chairman of Reddit, speak about Greenpeace and the viral spread of Mister Splashy Pants. (This was recorded in December of 2009).

Check it out!

Let's talk, TED.

Another epic tale of internet diplomacy, slightly more recent than the failure that was iSnack 3.0 but pre-dating Boaty McBoatface by a full nine years.

Ohanian starts his presentation by explaining how it is not going to be about Reddit. He tells us about Greenpeace's attempt to make people care more about whales and to increase the awareness of whaling. He discusses their campaign to put a tracking chip in a whale, monitor the whale's migration and allow the internet to name said whale. Lastly he discusses why the campaign was so effective, craftily mentioning Reddit and the Reddit community's involvement in the naming of the whale, before ending with his thoughts on what Greenpeace did right and wrong.

As an occasional Redditor myself, I do have a vague memory of the Mister Splashy Pants saga. I may have even voted on his behalf. While I am by no means anti-whale, I certainly don't think this is something I would have gotten involved in if the level of effort required to participate hadn't been so low. Ohanian's point around the desire to hear a newsreader read out the name "Mister Splashy Pants" on the news was certainly a strong motivator for me. The activity of voting on a website is far simpler than, let's say, committing hours to knitting a covering for a street sign.

We found ourselves, once again, sitting around the Student Edge office "concerned" about why people seem to have so much free time on their hands and wondering how this free time can be channelled towards doing something big and collaborative that would benefit humanity. Writer, teacher and technology commentator Clay Shirky talks about this spare time as "cognitive surplus." He says that the rise of the internet and communication technologies has reduced this barrier to large collaborative works and it's one of the reasons the internet should be celebrated. At Student Edge we're big believers in the great power of online communities, even if the result is only to bring more Mister Splashy Pants's or more terrible puns into the world.

Fin.

How could the citizens of the internet bring about the maximum level of social change with the least amount of individual effort? And what if the students of Australia were to drive that movement? Share your thoughts!

Photo: TED / YouTube.