Confessions of a TED Addict

The Medium - Confessions of a TED Addict - NYTimes.com


By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: January 23, 2009

Confessions Of a TED Addict

Help. Here I go. My pulse is racing. I’m completely manic.

Excerpt:

Oh why oh why have I been bingeing on TED talks again? I promised myself I would quit watching the ecstatic series of head-rush disquisitions, available online, from violinists, political prisoners, brain scientists, novelists and Bill Clinton. But I can’t. Each hortatory TED talk starts with a bang and keeps banging till it explodes in fireworks. How can I shut it off? The speakers seem fevered, possessed, Pentecostal. No wonder I am, too, now.

A TED talk begins as an auditorium speech given at the multidisciplinary, invitation-only annual TED conference. (This year’s 25th-anniversary conference takes place next week in Long Beach, Calif.) TED then creates videos of the speeches and puts them online so they can find a broader audience — and usurp my life. There are around 370 speeches and counting on TED.com. A new one is added every weekday.

TED (which stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”) was founded in 1984 by the architect Richard Saul Wurman and his partners. Their first conference included one of the first demonstrations of the Macintosh computer. In 2001, TED was acquired and is now run by Chris Anderson, the new-media entrepreneur who started Business 2.0, among other magazines and Web sites. Giving a TED talk has become an opportunity for name-in-lights speakers to throw down, set forth “ideas worth spreading” and prove their intellectual heroism.

Read full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25wwln-medium-t.html?


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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.