With the advent of the internet and digital photography, people's virtual relationships and connections with each other grow each day, Butterfield said. The team behind Flickr, a free photo-sharing web site with more than 50 million users per month and a database of three-billion images, wants the site to act as "the eyes of the world," Butterfield said.
"Flickr is the place where we store our collective sense of what we see," he said.
The site enables users to maintain contact with one another through what Butterfield called "ambient communication," or the constant ability to access friends' information.
"Someone I met at Yahoo said, 'I have 32 cousins, and 28 of them are on Flickr,'" Butterfield said. "He can dip his toe into that stream of [information] coming by at any point."
The site also allows users to join online communities of people with similar interests, Butterfield said. Some of Flickr's more popular groups include "wardrobe_remix," a group comprised mostly of "women in their twenties," he said, who post photos of outfits and discuss where they purchased each item of clothing, and "Pisa Pushers," a page on which users post pictures of tourists posing as if they were holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
"People can find a community for more or less anything they are interested in," he said. "There are 70,000 photos from almost 13,000 people in 'wardrobe_remix' alone."
With geotagging -- a new feature that allows users to map the locations where they took their photos -- the site has also begun to link information about places, as well as about people, Butterfield said.
Many of the photos uploaded to Flickr, especially after the recent G-20 summit and other international events, are of the same quality as those published by the Associated Press and other wire services, he said.
"It's a point of pride for me that we were able to build something that attracts that kind of contribution," he said.
The internet has changed how users create and view their own identities, Butterfield said, especially with the growing popularity of online social networking and dating sites like Facebook and Match.com. When Butterfield asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they were "under 30 and [didn't] have a Facebook account," only one person did so.
"Any member of our species can communicate with any other member of our species at any time, and the communication literally happens at the speed of light," he said. "People are much freer to come up with their identities online than at any time in the past."
Copyright laws must be changed to allow more items to enter the public domain, and to make those already in the public domain more accessible, Butterfield said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"There's a huge amount of [media] that should be available for the greater good," he said. "The laws make everything super complicated, and people are scared to use things if they can't be confident enough that they're in the public domain."
Despite these concerns, Butterfield said the growing supply of photos and other media sparked by Flickr and similar sites has allowed Internet users to access information in ways unheard of only 10 years ago.
"You can't underestimate the importance of the Internet and its impact on human beings and society," he said.
After selling Flickr to Yahoo in 2005, Butterfield left the site last year to pursue other projects, he said. He was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time Magazine in 2006 for his work at Flickr.
Butterfield's speech was the Portman Lecture in the Spirit of Entrepreneurship, an event made possible by a grant from businessman and philanthropist William Portman '45 Tu '47 and his family, according to Rockefeller Center director and College economics professor Andrew Samwick.
