Back in May I attended the TEDxEast conference in New York City – that was just around the time I took my summer break from blog-writing so I didn’t write a post on it, but after I read a piece about TED in the New Yorker I decided to share my experience of the conference.
TEDxEast was held mid-May at the New York Times Center in Midtown NYC, a very cozy auditorium with cushy seats (much more comfortable than the folding chairs of the BigApple conference in February, another TEDx offering). The organization was stellar, with plenty of food – such as Kind bars and sandwiches from Wichcraft – donated by sponsors, a smooth flow of attendees and talks that mostly ran on schedule. I found all the talks very good, with some truly inspiring. Here are highlights of my TEDx day, followed by comments on the New Yorker article.
I cherished the opportunity to see the PS22 chorus live – they’ve received a lot of publicity over the years and I’d watched their experience on YouTube, but seeing them in person made the experience truly memorable. Dean Obeidally was uproariously funny in his standup comedy act about being a Muslim and using comedy to counter Islamaphobia. The pictures of photojournalist Antonio Bolfo mesmerized many of us in the audience.
The excerpts from performance act Beauty by Jane Comfort and Company made me think about the way women view beauty today – the piece was unequal, maybe because we couldn’t be shown the whole thing due to time constraints, but the part where a woman’s picture is Photoshopped taught me a thing or two about the photographs I see in magazines. Of course I knew that they’re retouched, but seeing the full scale of things that Photoshop can do was an eye-opening moment. Another piece of performance art, The Creation: Plus 40, by Carmen Delvallade, fascinated me from beginning to end.
Helen Fisher’s talk on Biology of Mind: Who We Love articulated in an elegant and convincing fashion what I’d already observed for myself, so it was very helpful to have her framework to put words on all this. Matthias Hollwich spoke about one of my favorite topics, architecture, and specifically, the process his team used to create a winning entry for an architecture competition. Peter Wegner’s description of his work, especially his moving sculpture that “uses the flip-digit technology seen in European train stations, but substitutes color for arrival and departure information”, made me want to see it in person. I’ve got to read more articles by Pasi Sahlberg, who came from Finland to advocate for public education and an alternative course of education reform, and truly energized me.
The last moment that sticks in my mind – and I’m writing this months after the event itself – is the talk about the song inspired by The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, and the live performance of the song by singers from the musical. Now, I don’t exactly remember who gave that talk, but looking at the program brochure (which, very unfortunately, only has contributor bios and titles, not abstracts, of the talks), my guess is that it’s Michael Friedman, who spoke about The Song Makes a Space. The book is about the “knitting and unraveling of [the] friendship” between two boys, one white and one black, who both grow up motherless in the Brooklyn of the 1970s, with music as the backdrop. The song the actors sang on stage was full of emotion – dreams, disappointments, disillusions – and Friedman (?) spoke so eloquently about all this that I bought Lethem’s book.
The New Yorker article, published in the July 9 & 16 issue of the magazine, is entitled: “Listen and Learn – TED Talks reach millions around the world. How has a conference turned ideas into an industry?” It describes in some detail the preparation for a TED talk that reminded me of the worse talks I’ve heard or watched online: “As a research report, [name]’s talk was basic and rote: he offered no proprietary information, and although his arguments dovetailed with any number of articles and books on crowd wisdom (not least, James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”), he did not cite them. As a performance, though, it was delightful.” In other words, some people are better at selling ideas than their own inventors, and at getting the limelight for it.
For those of my readers who hope to give a TED talk someday, here is the basic formula that the New Yorker journalist identifies, including in the talk mentioned above: “Those elements – an opening of direct address, a narrative of personal stake, a research summary, a précis of potential applications, a revelation to drive it home and an ending that says, Go forth and help humanity, form the basic arc of many TED talks.”
Elsewhere, we read that “TED may present itself as an ideas conference, but most people seem to watch the lectures not so much for the information as for how they make them feel… The appeal of TED comes as much from its presentation as from its substance.” I have indeed read a book or two by authors who’d given inspiring TED talks – books that subsequently became best-sellers due to their authors’ talks – and found them hopelessly overblown, of the kind that should’ve remained a magazine piece and yet sold tens of thousands of copies in a heartbeat. I’ve also looked into the work of some TED fellows in detail, when they work in an area I’m familiar with, and was disappointed when one was very much of the “hot air” variety, coasting off the publicity boost while being far too early in her scientific career to have anything to remotely justify the excitement, and that’s something the selection committee should’ve seen through right away.
I’ve got to point out somewhere in this post that the price tag of attending the yearly Long Beach conference runs in the high four digits. Maybe it’s worth it for people who get a high from short talks, and it might subsidize the creation of the videos that we all enjoy watching for free online, but is TED in danger of promoting, on occasion, empty shells with stellar public speaking skills and no substance? Something that was created to promote ideas might in the end only promote shiny, glib, shallow versions of it.
Thankfully the “bad choices” are outnumbered by the good ones, so far. For rightfully selected fellows or speakers, the publicity can truly help them set their goals in motion and achieve their dreams of a better world. Check out the New Yorker's take on "five key TED talks" here, on incarceration & injustice, multi-touch technology, introversion, brain strokes and the most popular TED talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson's talk on education. Fascinating stuff.
At TEDx I talked with some interesting fellow attendees and some uninteresting ones, people you’re happy to exchange ideas with and people you think are just “faking it” or (and that might be worse) well-intentioned folks who don’t give the impression they’ll ever be able to make their little dream come true. I did think that the crowd seemed one notch above the one at BigApple (in terms of aspirations, work situation, potential and accomplishments), but that is only based on my perfunctory observations – maybe I just didn’t talk with the right people at the other event.
TEDxEast planned for long breaks to favor conversations, with plenty of coffee and snacks in the room downstairs, and that was the best attempt I’ve seen so far at developing a dialogue about what was going on, rather than just force-feeding us a lot of information. Some people are perfectly content with absorbing new things and not using them, but others want to create more of a community where they can bounce ideas off each other – and how to achieve that remains the million-dollar question.
Comments