‘Snackable servings of uplifting wisdom’
The ambition of TEDx is tomakenewideas available to all, writes PHILIP MATTHEWS.
Can complex and potentially life-changing ideas be put across in less time than it takes to watch a re-run of Friends? That is the guiding ambition of TEDx, which organises line-ups of experts and specialists who can summarise important knowledge in 18 minutes. Video of their talks is then made freely available online.
Of course there have been sceptics. But brevity does not always equal banality. As TED curator Chris Anderson wrote in the Guardian last year, ‘‘the Gettysburg address made history in a ninth of that time. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech? Sixteen minutes.’’
Fair enough. I recently watched TEDx talks in which journalist Jon Ronson and philosopher Markus Gabriel, to pick just two at random, summarised their books So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and Why the World Does Not Exist in the allotted time. Rather than talks being too short, maybe some books are too long.
Ronson delivered his TEDx talk in London. An earlier talk, about his book The Psychopath Test, was from a TEDx event in Marrakech. Meanwhile, Gabriel’s talk happened in Munich.
All of which points to the global nature of it. The first TED conference in 1984 was a one-off event, with the title serving as an acronym for ‘‘Technology, Entertainment, Design’’. The links to Silicon Valley at its most utopian were clear from day one: the first conference included a demonstration of the new-fangled Apple Macintosh computer.
Over 30 years, TED has become something of a global brand, franchised into more than 100 countries to dispense snackable servings of uplifting wisdom that feel futuristic and progressive. The ‘‘x’’ means independently organised.
When Chris Anderson wrote his Guardian piece, he was answering criticism from the same newspaper that TED was really about ‘‘middlebrow megachurch infotainment’’. But the criticism was itself delivered as a TED talk in San Diego by Benjamin Bratton, which only goes to show that the brand has become big and flexible enough to even incorporate attacks on it.