I recall that we spent an entire term on Descartes’ Meditations, the work that led the French philosopher to his famous declaration: “I think, therefore I am.” It was a slim volume, yet we micro-analysed every last semi-colon of its tortured arguments. To do well, we had to find flaws in the philosopher’s reasoning. Our adolescent critiques spoke to no one outside our precious circle. To be a successful scholar was to regard inwards, and wade into an ever-denser intellectual world that made scant connection with contemporary realities.
Thirty years on, in the very same venue, TED is doing the precise opposite. It regards ideas as a kind of currency that has not been circulating freely enough to achieve its full potential. The most important thing about them is not that they should withstand the obsessive scrutiny of guileless teenage minds, but that they should be original, inspiring, accessible, and that they should do good. They are catering, in Giusanni’s words, for an “incredible thirst” for knowledge and information, and projecting a “new sense of possibility in a world that is becoming submerged by bad news”.
TED talks are a clever mix of the light-hearted, the analytical, and the rawly emotional. There is a high tolerance for the last category that is perhaps difficult for the notoriously sceptical British sensibility to swallow. When Annie Lennox, the singer and humanitarian activist, gives her talk on HIV/Aids in Africa, she chooses to concentrate on a positive story, showing before and after pictures of a little girl who received life-saving treatment for her condition. She is visibly moved as she recounts the transformation: “I don’t know if you can see the hairs on my arms … ” We can’t, but pretend that we do. Giussani says there is a “lower intensity of cynicism” in a TED audience than in the outside world.
The show-stopper of day one is Naif Al-Mutawa, a bearded, bespectacled clinical psychologist and creator of The 99, a comic book project that showcases enlightened Muslim values in the guise of superheroes. They are shortly about to interact, thanks to some cross-cultural co-operation between publishers, with DC Comics’ Justice League of America in an ultimate act of pop culture détente. Al-Mutawa’s talk is fast-moving, touching and witty (he describes recently manning a food stall advertising “Free Falafel”, only for an earnest would-be protester to ask him: “Who’s Falafel?”) He gets an ovation and his talk is among the first to be made available from this conference on the TED website.
The quality of TED talks is frequently astonishing, word-perfect, immaculately-timed, shuffling potentially dense information in the lightest of ways. The time slot, 18 minutes, shorter than a Pink Floyd tune-up, seems perfectly prescribed for the average attention span, given that you have to listen to five in succession. You can take a break from the intense atmosphere of the Playhouse by watching a simulcast at the nearby Randolph hotel, where there is a more social vibe, and what seems to be the highest incidence of hugs and iPads per square metre in the western world.
via FT.com / weekend columnists / Peter Aspden – Conference of cool.
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