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The trouble with TED talks
In the cult of TED, everything is awesome and inspirational, and ideas
aren’t supposed to be challenged, says Martin Robbins.
By Martin Robbins Published 10 September 2012 13:33
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A suitably vague but uplifting photo of hot air balloon. Photo: Getty Images
A suitably vague but uplifting photo of hot air balloon. Photo: Getty Images
I’ve long been amused by the slogan of TED, makers of the ubiquitous
TED talks. TED’s slogan is this: ‘Ideas worth spreading.’ Apparently
TED has some ideas, and we should spread them. What ideas? Ideas that
TED in its infinite wisdom has picked out for us, ideas which are
therefore implied to be true and good and right. What should we do
with these ideas? We should build a message around them - slick
presentations by charismatic faces captured in high definition - and
we should spread that message far and wide. If this doesn’t yet sound
familiar, try replacing ‘TED’ with ‘GOD’. ‘Ideas worth spreading’
sounds more like the slogan of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It’s nearing midnight, and I’m sitting in my pants in front of the
computer holding a tumbler of scotch, the curtains closed, the lights
off, doing something I don’t do enough of these days – just watching.
This is not how TED Talks are supposed to be consumed. The genius of
the format is that nobody really watches them: we play them on iPods
or we run them in our browsers while working on other things, but it’s
rare that people put one on the television and sit down and really
focus on them. They come at us from the side of our vision, sneaking
past our preoccupied neural circuitry and planting little seeds in the
nooks and crevices of our minds, like mould spores on a damp window
frame. In the darkest hours of countless nights I’ve woken convinced
that a solar-powered cup holder will end third world debt, but not
really knowing why.
I start with a talk by Rob Legato, and sixteen minutes later I’m aware
of only three things: the talk was awesome, I can’t remember anything
of substance from the talk, and I’m now watching a weirdly artificial
standing ovation - by sheer coincidence a camera happens to be pointed
at some of the first audience members to rise to their feet; then the
rest of the audience follows, compelled by social instinct to follow
their peers. Of course standing ovations occur more frequently in
homogenous audiences, and what better crowd could there be than social
elites who’ve invested thousands of dollars for the opportunity to
bask in the warm glow someone else’s intellectual aura.
I choose a talk by Ben Goldacre next, a man whose work I know and
enjoy. Ben’s high-speed presentation style was once described by a fan
as like being ‘skull-fucked with his data-cock’, and his appearance at
TED did little to restrain his exuberance, but I found myself
switching off after a while; I’d seen his talk before, at The Royal
Institution. In fact, virtually none of the talks I watched were
particularly new or original – presentations that are that
well-polished rarely are.
One of the common charges against TED is that it’s elitist, and yet
many of the speakers were the sort of people you might find at your
local ‘Skeptics in the Pub’ event. The genius of TED is that it takes
capable-but-ordinary speakers, doing old talks they’ve performed many
times elsewhere, and dresses them up in a production that makes you
feel like you’re watching Kennedy announce the race to the moon.
The videos aren’t given star ratings; instead you have to rate them by
checking words from a list: ‘jaw-dropping’, ‘persuasive’,
‘courageous’, ‘fascinating’, ‘beautiful’ and an array of similarly
vapid adjectives. Cameras lurk below the eye-line of the speakers
looking up at their sharply defined forms, picked out by spotlights
against dark backgrounds like a Greek god’s statue in a museum display
case. The crowd acts as a single helpful entity; laughing when it
should laugh, whooping when it should whoop, awwing when it should
aww. Quotes are picked out and highlighted as if they carry some
profound truth: “There's no such thing as a dumb user,” says Timothy
Prestero, a designer who has clearly never read the user comments on
Comment is Free. Or indeed the articles. There are no questions here:
in the cult of TED, everything is awesome and inspirational, and ideas
aren’t supposed to be challenged.
The problem with this evangelical approach, discarding the voice of
scepticism and mindlessly parroting ‘fascinating’ ideas instead of
challenging them, is that you risk spreading some utter codswallop. A
couple of weeks ago, TED posted a list of the 20 most-watched TED
talks to date. Occupying third and fifth place is pair of talks viewed
more than sixteen million times, dedicated to a “paradigm-shifting”
technology with “thrilling potential” from 2009. It was called
‘SixthSense’.
Nope, nor me. And yet its inventor, Pranav Mistry, is described by the
on-stage TEDster as a ‘genius’ and “truly one of the two or three best
inventors in the world right now,” the latter assertion based,
amusingly, on “the people we’ve seen at TED.” That Mistry is talented
and clever I wouldn’t dispute for a second, but words are cheap, and
they get cheaper when overused. The presentation looks to my tired
eyes like a slightly ropey sales pitch, except the ruthless
interrogators of Dragons’ Den have been replaced by a whooping,
clapping audience displaying the world-weary cynicism of an arena-full
of Beliebers. Anyone who posed a meaningful question in this
environment would be treated like they’d thrown a shit in someone’s
face.
With the world’s easiest audience, many inaccuracies and errors go
unchallenged. A talk by Terry Moore on algebra was littered with
unsourced claims about Spanish language and history. Their coverage of
science topics is at best superficial, and sometimes downright
misleading. Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s infamous claim that bacteria could
incorporate arsenic into their DNA led to a huge backlash from the
scientific community, during which she refused to engage with critics
and said that: “Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the
same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that
all discussion is properly moderated.” Not long afterwards, she signed
up to do a distinctly un-peer-reviewed TED talk. ‘Ideas worth
spreading’ . . . except in this instance the ideas didn’t survive
peer-review.
Ultimately, the TED phenomenon only makes sense when you realise that
it’s all about the audience. TED Talks are designed to make people
feel good about themselves; to flatter them and make them feel clever
and knowledgeable; to give them the impression that they’re part of an
elite group making the world a better place. People join for much the
same reason they join societies like Mensa: it gives them a chance to
label themselves part of an intellectual elite. That intelligence is
optional, and you need to be rich and well-connected to get into the
conferences and the exclusive fringe parties and events that accompany
them, simply adds to the irresistible allure. TED’s slogan shouldn’t
be ‘Ideas worth spreading’, it should be: ‘Ego worth paying for’.
