Bob Harris: Joy is an international language

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now.

Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. — people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself — to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics.

Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.  

I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation.

And now you can see the whole talk online here.

It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song.

The first chunk is above.

Bob Harris' Keynote Talk on the Web, Global Culture, and Monumental Screw-ups