Inventor of the hashtag Chris Messina shares both his motivations and how he came up with his seductively simple idea that’s had massive ramifications on communication and media in our highly networked (and sometimes disconnected) modern internet era.
Because of its transparent, open source aspects, Chris explains how the hashtag opened the door for a new level of connectedness and communication that hadn’t existed previously, offering a democratizing tool for everyday people to participate in conversations around brands, social movements, human crises, personal improvement, and everything in-between.
His talk is an inspiring call-to-action to not only question the standard narrative of success, but to recognize that true wealth is found in human relationships. Especially now as we transition to a time when machine intelligence may eclipse that of humans, and in which we begin to have so-called “conversational relationships” with artificial intelligences, Chris urges us to focus on building better humans, and on building transparent, open technologies like the hashtag that encourage our better human qualities.
Chris works with developers, product designers, entrepreneurs, and communities to bring to life projects that should exist but don’t. His superpower is pioneering initiatives before most people realize they’ll be important, for example: co-organizing the community that launched Firefox, creating Google Developers, opening the first coworking spaces on earth, and starting BarCamp (the unconference). He’s been chasing down trends he’s dubbed “conversational commerce” and “relationship design” in the world of social software and digital agents. He previously lead developer experience at Uber and cofounded a social AI company called Molly (YC W18). This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]
