In what has been termed the 'Babble Bubble', the popular TED talk threatens to overtake the world of ideas, leaving us with a sort of pop-intellectual, eighteen minute-segmented sphere of discussion. Well, not really. But it certainly seems to have become the new standard of self-actualisation, writes Benjamin Wallace:
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. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (“coffee,” “happiness”), feeling free to “fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,” and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate “amazing and really bad” TED Talks.I have a great deal of respect for a number of speakers at the conference, and indeed its organizers, all of whom seem to have performed the admirable task of spreading and popularizing the pursuit of knowledge and ideas. But unfortunately, I hate conferences. With few exceptions (Alain de Botton's talks at the conference have been reliably intriguing, even the one making the non-point about religion for atheists, and of course Malcolm Gladwell), the segments make use of the kind of jargon-laden prattle that I've come to deplore and loathe wherever it appears.
If TED’s platinum brand is at risk of becoming a generic, it has been with the full support of the brand’s owner. As the TED Talks online uncovered a far-flung global yen for idea videos, TED’s TEDX program, in which the company grants would-be curators licenses to organize local mini-TEDs, has been unexpectedly popular. Since it launched in March 2009, there have been more than 3,000. There has been a TEDX Hunstville (Alabama), a TEDX Timisoara (Romania), a TEDX Gujranwala (Pakistan). There is now one TEDX, and usually more, every day somewhere in the world.
What's most surprising about the TED phenomenon — if you'll allow me the liberty of calling it such — is that the videos have become so popular. Perhaps the most important factor in their online success is the incentive to share. When someone digitally staples something to their Facebook timeline or includes a link to it in their Twitter feeds, they're not so much looking to share ideas and spread knowledge as they are looking to make a statement about their esoteric tastes and superior wisdom. Never mind what everyone else may actually learn from the content being posted; it's what the online audience will be able to infer about the poster. Just like the passing on of any social content, we're selective creatures, looking to curate and carefully craft our own image. It's not something of which we are particularly proud, but a glance at any given Facebook page may affirm this contention for you. Or maybe that's just me.
Previous post on the case against TED here. (Oh, and I've included Alain de Botton's talk, because it's excellent.)