Psychedelhic Times

TED Conference and the intellectual movement

In an interesting piece titled Those Fabulous Confabs in New York Magazine, Benjamin Wallace says this about TED and a slew of TED-wannabes:

All promise much the same thing: a velvet rope to keep out the attitudinally unwashed, serendipitous interaction, quirky content, and at least the illusion of egalitarian elbow-rubbing. They have their own vocabulary, too. These are “thought-leader gatherings” where “rock stars” emerge from their “silos” to learn about “disruptive” ideas that have been carefully “curated.”

Last year around the time Hindustan Times was organizing the Leadership Summit, I got into an argument with a friend on the substance to BS ratio of these summits. Granted, they get the who’s who of our times together under one roof, but I have a natural aversion for such elitism and self-promotion. Anyway, at that time I decided to give up than continue the argument, as the friend in question was a particularly cute specimen of the opposite sex that I may or may not have been seeing at the time.

In 2008, TED’s attendee list was leaked to Valleywag. Anderson implored site owner Nick Denton “as a decent person” to take it down; Denton, who probably doesn’t even consider himself a decent person, ignored the request and posted Anderson’s e-mail. The list was revealing. “If you look at it primatologically,” one TED attendee says, “it was originally designed like an eighteenth-­century salon, where the very smart and the very rich pretend they have something in common for a very short time. But now there’s a very small cohort of smart people and CEOs—alphas—and a huge panoply of betas: senior vice-presidents. What’s fascinating is how many betas are in the room.”

All criticism aside, Wallace gives TED credit where it’s due. Tracking the rise of TED, he says:

In the six years since its launch, TED has added over 1,100 talks—the most popular TED-conference talks, plus TED-approved talks from other conferences and events. The most popular of these include Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher, recounting the story of her own stroke; a British educator, Ken Robinson, bringing an effortlessly droll delivery to the argument that schools kill creativity; and David Gallo, an oceanographer, narrating underwater footage of bioluminescent sea creatures and crafty octopuses defending themselves. The idea that would prove more contagious than any other, though, was that of TED itself. Collectively, the TED Talks have been viewed more than 500 million times.

On its impact on the speakers:

The speakers seemingly most affected by their talks on TED are academics previously unknown outside their specialties. Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of international health, had researched in obscurity before being asked to speak at Davos in the mid-aughts. He was then approached by TED. At first, Rosling declined; TED sounded frivolous, and he considered himself a serious scholar… Collectively, his talks have been viewed more than 8 million times. Rosling has calculated that his TED Talks have garnered more “hours of attention” than his entire preceding life’s work. He has largely given up teaching to work full time on his nonprofit, non-advocacy Gapminder foundation. “TED changed my life,” Rosling says. And not just his: After Larry Page saw Rosling’s first TED Talk, Google acquired the software and ended up hiring Rosling’s son.

My daily lunch workday lunch routine involves Radbox playing my video queue - mostly TED talks and short films, while I eat. That’s where TED shines - the brightest, otherwise little-known academics talk to me about great scientific findings while I grab lunch at my desk in a distant corner of the world.

It might be too soon to worry about it, but Wallace is concerned about the slew of copycats and the resulting dilution of the TED movement:

Until recently, the universal self-­actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like “My TED Talk.” There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. What happens when the idea of ideas worth spreading gets spread thin? What happens when the concept of innovation itself becomes stale?

I strongly recommend you read the complete article (warning: it is quite long) while I go back to working on something TED-worthy!