![]() ![]() But TED no longer completely controls its brand. TED’s army of volunteers has extended its reach to more than 130 countries. The TEDxCharlotte talk, which had received tremendous applause when delivered, was one of thousands produced annually by an extended community of people who neither get paid by nor officially work for TED but who are nonetheless capable of damaging its brand. The New Republic wrote, “TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas ‘worth spreading.’ Instead it has become something ludicrous.” As others piled on, TED staffers called Powell and asked him to send the research backing up his claims. One dared his readers to see how much of the talk they could get through before they had to be “loaded into an ambulance with an aneurysm.” Another simply described it as “sweet merciful crap.” By August the uproar had gone mainstream, as other questionable TEDx content was uncovered. ![]() But the talk went relatively unnoticed until the spring of 2012, when a few influential science bloggers discovered it-and excoriated it. Powell’s talk had been given in September 2010, at what was one of numerous local TEDx gatherings spun off by TED, a nonprofit that puts on highly respected global conferences about ideas. Basically, he’s either (1) insane, (2) a huckster going for fame or money, or (3) doing a Sokal’s hoax on TED. And he is simply doing a random word association with the terms. It’s Stanford professor Jay Wacker responding, on the Q&A site Quora, to the now-infamous TEDx talk “Vortex-Based Mathematics.”Ī member had posed the question “Is Randy Powell saying anything in his 2010 TEDxCharlotte talk, or is it just total nonsense?” Wacker, a particle physicist, was unambiguous: “I am a theoretical physicist who uses (and teaches) the technical meaning of many of the jargon terms that he’s throwing out. No, this is not a snippet from the latest Quentin Tarantino film. TED did that, turning things around by adopting three practices: “listening loudly,” realigning the community through shared purpose, and being strategic about the parts of the business it opened to the crowd and the parts it kept under tight control.įorests Collapsed Upon Forests, 2009, acrylic, paper, thread, bamboo, wood, Martha Otero Gallery, Los Angeles In this article, Nilofer Merchant describes the uproar and the lessons it offers: (1) that “open” does not mean “easy” or “free” and (2) that you need to get the crowd working with you, not against you. The blogosphere trashed TED for producing dumb content and questioned its overall credibility. And when TEDx licensees began putting dubious pseudoscientific presentations on their programs, that risk became a real threat. But they came with a risk: TED no longer completely controlled its brand, and an extended community of people who didn’t work for TED were now capable of damaging it. The brand extension and new content TED gained through these gatherings would have cost millions to produce by traditional means. In the next few years, an army of volunteers produced some 5,000 such TEDx events in more than 130 countries. Chan School of Public Health (47) Apply Harvard T.H.In 2009, TED, an organizer of highly respected conferences on “ideas worth spreading,” threw its doors open, allowing anyone, anywhere, to manage and stage local, independent events under its banner.
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