It’s impossible to discuss online video without noting the evolution of the TED conference. As of 2017 TED talks had been viewed more than 2 billion times, an extraordinary count given that the talks can be on such cognitively challenging topics as astrophysics, clinical depression, and redesigning education. The origins go back to 1984, when the first conference on the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design was held, co-hosted by graphic designer Harry Marks and architect Richard Saul Wurman. Demos of the Apple Macintosh and Sony/Philips compact disc along with talks from early digerati Stewart Brand and Nicholas Negroponte (along with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot) set the tone for later meetings. The event was financially unsuccessful and six years passed until TED2.
From 1990 until 2009, the conference was held annually in Monterey, California and quickly became an exclusive event with celebrity attendees from many fields: speakers have included Bono and Bill Clinton, Billy Graham and Richard Dawkins, Sergey Brin and Jane Goodall. Intellectual eclecticism combined with A-list star power to make TED a coveted invitation. Wurman sold the event in 2000 to the British magazine publisher Chris Anderson (no relation to the Wired editor Chris Anderson of “Long Tail” fame).
Anderson changed TED’s direction. Ownership was transferred to the non-profit Sapling foundation, the conference moved from Monterey to Long Beach then Vancouver, and speaker talks were posted for free viewing in 2006. By January 2007 44 talks had been posted, amassing 3 million views. In April of that year TED.com was relaunched to highlight video talks, and by 2011, TED was licensing the conference format (including its rigidly timed and tightly rehearsed 18-minute format for speakers, regardless of their pedigree) to hundreds of TEDx spinoffs. What Anderson called “radical openness” paradoxically made the physical conferences even more desirable and the admission price soared from $4400 in 2006 to $10,000 in 2018. Spinouts include TEDMED, TEDWomen, TED Global, and TED Youth.
As Anderson said in 2012,
It used to be 800 people getting together once a year; now it's about a million people a day watching TED Talks online. When we first put up a few of the talks as an experiment, we got such impassioned responses that we decided to flip the organization on its head and think of ourselves not so much as a conference but as "ideas worth spreading," building a big website around it. The conference is still the engine, but the website is the amplifier that takes the ideas to the world.[i]
TED talks have evolved as a distinct genre. The coaching and time clock impose a certain homogeneity on the talks, but global intellectual superstars have emerged from unexpected directions. They include:
Ken Robinson
Robinson was born in Liverpool, England and, in contrast to his brother (a professional soccer player) had to attend special schools on account of aftereffects of polio. His PhD from the University of London focused on the uses of drama and theater in education, and this degree led to a career in arts education. He has developed into a sharp critic of many educational practices and his TED talks, viewed tens of millions of times, stress the role of schools in encouraging – or more often killing – creativity in students.
Brené Brown
Brown was born in San Antonio, Texas, raised for a time in New Orleans, and has spent her adult life in Houston as a practitioner and later professor of social work. Her work focuses on leadership, particularly the role of vulnerability. She has written five #1 New York Times best-sellers and her 2012 TED talk is one of the top five most-viewed TED videos of all time.
Hans Rosling
Rosling was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1948, the same town where he died 68 years later. In between, however, he lived in India, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, working as a physician and public health investigator. His TED fame comes from his many talks on global health and economic development. His compelling use of attention-getting devices in the service of helping attack ignorance make his talks exemplary. In one video, he launches the Trendalyzer software built by his son Ola which presents United Nations data in compelling visuals. Google bought the software and now makes it publicly available at Gapminder.org, the website devoted to the foundation launched by Rosling and his children. In a different video, Rosling exhibits his skill as a sword-swallower, and in another, deploys plastic Ikea bins to illustrate potential paths to a nine-billion-person planet.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie was born in Nigeria, studied medicine and pharmacy in her native country, then began college at Drexel before moving to be closer to her older sister and completing a bachelor’s degree at Eastern Connecticut State University. Master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins and Yale followed soon thereafter. She was awarded a MacArthur fellowship the same year she earned her Yale masters in African studies. A year later she delivered her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which has been viewed nearly 20 million times as of 2019. A later TEDx talk, “We should all be feminists,” was sampled in a Beyoncé song.
These four individuals illustrate several aspects of the TED universe. Previously unknown experts in a particular geographic or intellectual area can transcend boundaries with global exposure that crosses traditional disciplinary lines. Note that traditional U.S. academics don’t attract massive viewership, except in a few cases (positive psychology as researched by Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert, and Shawn Achor being one).
There are many critiques, and most hit the mark. Even including some of the superstars listed above, the talks can feel massively over-rehearsed, and the staging can make even minor insights and anecdotes come across as profound. The British political activist Julie Bindel notes that “The talks are so rehearsed that even the well-placed pauses and casual hair flicks look hideously false. TED-bots strut around the stage, posing, delivering well-crafted smiles and frowns. It’s like amateur dramatics for would-be intellectuals.”[ii] The cognitive authority of the speakers vary. Some are the genuine article, a truly original and rigorous thinker. Often, however, the featured points of view come courtesy of self-described “thought leaders” who convey a large portion of form and little substance; Houman Harouni, writing in The American Reader, succinctly nailed this point: “TED’s is the language and tone of the pitch.”[iii] Finally, the TED stage has become a kind of church, one where Ideas are Good and can make Good Things happen. The New Statesman’s Martin Robbins noted in 2012 that “’Ideas worth spreading’ sounds more like the slogan of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”[iv]
Statistically, the talks (as of 2017) skew heavily white and heavily male. The expected power law applies: despite there being more than 2,000 talks, the top 25 account for more than a quarter of all views. The most viewed profession is author, lending credibility to the critique of TED as a book-flogging exercise. Among nationalities, the U.S. dominates with 467 talks between 2001 and 2017. That’s four times as many as the U.K. in second with 113, which in turn is three times as many as India, with 41 in third. Canada, Israel, Australia, and France follow in low double digits, with Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy rounding out the top ten, all in single digits. The average female speaker is about 45 years of age, whereas men are typically about 49.
The top ten topics, as measured by views, are as follows (numbers are rounded to the nearest million):
- Communication 2242
- Technology 1973
- Health 1474
- Art 1195
- Happiness 1096
- Education 987
- Creativity 978
- Motivation 869
- Design 6210
- Politics 58
Equally enlightening are the bottom ten categories, again with views rounded to the nearest million:
- Film .32
- Anthropology .43
- Peace 1.14
- Military 1.25
- Physics 1.26
- Disability 1.27
- Philanthropy 1.28
- Terrorism 1.39
- Privacy 1.510
- Society 1.5
Thus it’s easy to form a stereotype of a male US author talking on communications or technology. Big, complex topics (war and peace being ready examples) don’t attract large audiences whereas gadgets and inventions do. Generally uplifting topics – art, happiness, creativity, motivation – all see lots of views.
Benjamin Bratton is a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. His TEDx talk (this did not happen on the big stage, for obvious reasons) was about TED, and he critiqued three aspects. First, Bratton highlighted the oversimplification of complex ideas to fit into a time window and for an audience that doesn’t engage with nuance. Summing up this point, he delivers a perfect TED soundbite: “I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.” The problem is that Chris Anderson never proposed such a venture: the straw man argument Bratton utilizes is exactly what he criticizes.
Second, and on much firmer ground, Bratton gets to the core of TED: its neospirituality. “I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment,” he says. “The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations.” What Bratton calls “placebo politics” oversimplifies complex problems, offers a personal testimony of hope, and ultimately leaves listeners thinking something has been conquered when in fact the intervention likely made things worse. The quasi-religious backdrop of hopeful optimism informs much of the TED narrative, leading to the third critique.
Technology, the T in TED, is in Bratton’s view accentuating and amplifying the flaws in underlying social relationships rather than exposing and correcting them. The techno-utopian thread in TED talks ebbs and flows, but it is always present, if only in the speaker’s knowing relation to the video camera. (I say this as a one-time TEDx speaker.) A better E, he continues, would be “economics” because all economic systems promise one thing and deliver something very different. Finally, D – Design – is where those technologies are realized in actual human contexts: “the potential for [phones, drones, and genomes (what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla)] are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make good futures, design as ‘innovation’ just isn’t a strong enough idea by itself.”
Bratton ends by breaking the unspoken TED talk closing: he’s not personal, not hopeful, and not exhortatory. Rather than wrapping up the idea with a bow, he expands it into multiple dimensions.
I don't have one simple take away, one magic idea. That's kind of the point. . . . [I]t's not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. . . . Problems are not "puzzles" to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed. It's not true.
"Innovation" defined as moving the pieces around and adding more processing power is not some Big Idea that will disrupt a broken status quo: that precisely is the broken status quo. One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination." Wrong.
If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.
Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration," it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualization: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.[v]
In the six years since that critique, it feels as though TED's moment at the center of the zeitgeist has passed. Civilized discourse at elevated levels of conceptual complexity is out of fashion, even (especially?) at the middlebrow tier. The world's population of superstar TED-type speakers is finite, and perhaps it's been relatively thoroughly mined out. Be that as it may, the dawn of online video brought the world its own equivalent of the Chautauqua movement, a healthy portion of uplift and cognitive exercise unable to sustain itself over time, albeit without the picturesque scenery.*****
[ii] Julie Bindel, “Why I’d never do a TED
talk,” The Guardian 23 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/23/ted-talk-smugness-presenters-embarrassing
[iii] Houman Harouni, “The Sound of TED: A
Case for Distaste,” The American Reader no date https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks
[iv] Martin Robbins, “The trouble with TED
talks,” New Statesman 10 September 2012. https://www.newstatesman.com/martin-robbins/2012/09/trouble-ted-talks
[v] Benjamin Bratton, “We need to talk
about TED,” The Gurdian 30 December 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted
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