TED Speakers Are Filmed with Multiple Cameras and Edited Exactingly
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TED speakers are filmed with multiple cameras and edited exactingly. Online, they’ve had more than eight hundred million views. TNY—2012_07_09&16—PAGE 68—133SC.—livE ArT r22355_rD3 amERicaN chronicLEs LisTEN aNd leaRN TED Talks reach millions around the world. How has a conference turned ideas into an industry? by naTHan heller ’d like to begin with a story. On a graduate work focusses on collective growing, best-educated, and wealthiest bright late-February afternoon, in cognition and social networks, saw his creative communities in America. (Ad- LongI Beach, California, Lior Zoref, an appearance in this company as an ar- mission to the Long Beach conference Israeli Ph.D. student, climbed onstage rival. Last April, he had signed up for starts at seventy-five hundred dollars, to rehearse what he called “the talk of the conference’s first public auditions, not including the hotel; tickets are my life.” It was the second full day of the promising a crowd-sourced talk, on the available by invitation, or through an TED ideas conference, and in the lobby idea that a group of networked minds application that includes both essays outside the theatre doors more than a can shape a better product than an in- and references.) And, although “TED” thousand men and women milled and dividual imagination. After putting out stands for Technology/Entertainment/ gammed and ate lunch in the winter sun. the word on Twitter, Facebook, and his Design, the conferences have recently Zoref was nervous. He had spent the past blog (“Ideas for other questions or sub- skewed toward the first part of the trip- few months preparing with an athlete’s jects I should address?”), he’d received tych. If you have a surprising notion focus for a talk of fourteen minutes. suggestions from hundreds of people. about how business works, how Third While the presentations that he usually Of these, the gambit of which he was World hunger works, how the mind gave were functional and evanescent, this proudest was the only part of the talk he works, or how technology ought to one had to be a virtuosic feat, a summa of hadn’t yet rehearsed: a moment when work, it may be TED-worthy. If you have his work to date. “I’ve been practicing like he’d step aside and call onstage a giant ox. fresh ideas about Second Empire ur- I’ve never practiced,” Zoref had told me “It’s huge,” he exclaimed now, as the banization, or Richard Diebenkorn’s earlier, not long after touching down in creature appeared for the first time. The “Ocean Park” series, you’re best off park- California. (He and his wife had allowed ox was black, sleek, muscular; when it ing your tweeds elsewhere. TED is now themselves two days’ respite in New plodded into the spotlight, under the based in New York, where it occupies a York, on a layover from Tel Aviv, and guidance of a wrangler, the stage crew sleek, beanbag-chair-laden office, but it caught “The Book of Mormon,” on and other rehearsing performers shifted remains spiritually centered on the Cal- Broadway.) Now, with an hour left until tensely, as if each motion might mark ifornia coast, nearer Stanford’s labs and his lecture, he was concentrating on mi- the start of a faena. Cameron Carpen- the cafés of Valencia Street—even as nutiae and grace: the slow, assured sweep ter, an organ virtuoso performing that its influence grows to extend past that of his gaze across the audience; the way afternoon, peered at the animal from a world. he strode across the stage; the timing of generous distance. “It’s going to gore us People who know TED these days a joke. Everything else was muscle mem- all,” he murmured. frequently know it best from “TED Talks,” ory. By the time Zoref arrived in town, “Is it sedated?” someone asked. a series of Internet lecture videos that he said, he’d given his TED talk—to The wrangler shook his head. Zoref has received more than eight hundred friends, to students, to his nonverbal one- moved in close, pushing his brow into million views to date. (That’s nearly year-old son, to anybody, really, who’d the ox’s face. He is a thickly built guy, two-thirds the number of movie tickets listen—more than four hundred times. with an air of willed eagerness, and sold last year in all of North America.) Yet Long Beach is a marina town, a when he gets excited, which happens its style and substance have begun to place where the Pacific Coast Highway a lot, his speech climbs to a zinging overtake other media, too. To feed a hiccups inland and the tallest buildings falsetto, as if voicing an invisible Mup- market for “ideas” which it has helped crowd down to the waterfront. On the pet. “Hello, Teddy!” he cooed into the create, the organization has launched an morning of Zoref ’s talk, this down- animal’s left eye. “Yes, hello!” The ox e-book imprint and an e-reader app to town corridor was dense with traffic, blinked. accompany it. You can watch TED lec- and the Long Beach Performing Arts TED—a four-day conference of re- tures on your seat-back screen as you fly Center—a squat, big-windowed build- search lectures, technology demonstra- cross-country, or listen to excerpts in your ing by the harbor—thrummed with tions, arts performances, and self- car as they air on NPR. discussion of the day’s events. The en- described world-changing ideas—has Abroad, TED spreads through what gineering professor Vijay Kumar had become in recent years a showroom for used to be called soft power. “TEDx” previously demonstrated his coördi- the intellectual style of the digital age. events—essentially, do-it-yourself TED nated swarming robots. T. Boone Pickens An open secret of a conference when conferences, produced by volunteers— NGO i . B r advocated shifting our dependency it began, almost three decades ago, it run at a global rate of about five per day, in M from oil to natural gas. Zoref, whose is today home to one of the fastest- a hundred and thirty-three countries. (Lara THE NEW YORKER, JULY 9 & 16, 2012 69 TNY—2012_07_09&16—PAGE 69—133SC. the Long Beach stage. The applause died down. Zoref was holding a slide clicker in one hand. “I have a question,” he said. “Do you have a dream?” merican culture rides forward on stories about sudden fame and boldA ascent—the singer who invents a new style of celebrity, the unknown actor rising with a quirky TV show, the kid who shapes a generation’s online habits from his dorm room. TED is a display case for such stories and, increasingly, the subject of them; the conference has grown famous for making its speakers fa- mous, even as it claims to tread above the rough clod of celebrity. TED has been criticized for these tendencies. And yet the criticism, like the admiration, has never addressed the mystery of the talks’ success: why TED has grown so excep- tionally popular, and so quickly. The answer may have something to do with the conference’s rituals of prep- “The problem is that your trap is one big macaroni.” aration. Soon after arriving in Long Beach, I met Susan Cain, who was scheduled •• to speak about the subject of her first book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” Stein, who runs the program, noted, ideas in a way the audience would be Cain is a friendly woman with a soft, “We’ve had a TEDx event with six hun- unable to forget. clipped verbal style. In the week before dred people on a floating hotel in the mid- At 2:09 P.M., the “Marcia Trionfale” TED, she’d been working with an act- dle of the Amazon forest with seven high- from “Aïda,” which heralds the start of ing coach to perfect the rhythm of her definition cameras.”) Ambitious young each TED session, echoed through the talk—a measure beyond the pale of nor- people worldwide can apply to be “TED complex, and an audience began to col- mal preparation, since all aspects of the Fellows,” and join a weeklong residency lect outside the theatre doors. The pro- conference are already shaped to make program at the mothership conferences gram started. Carpenter, the organist, the ideas being presented fit for popular as they launch their entrepreneurial ca- launched into an arrangement of Rich- consumption. reers. Or they can stay home and watch ard Rodgers’s “Slaughter on Tenth Ave- Ordinarily, TED’s closely governed TED Talks subtitled into eighty-eight lan- nue.” Reid Hoffman, who co-founded editorial process begins with the con- guages by a worldwide corps of volunteers. LinkedIn, discussed flexibility in career cept: the conference’s “curators” feel out Shortly before Zoref was to speak paths. Then the venture-capitalist David a speaker’s interests, looking for material that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Hornik gave a short, charming talk about that’s new and counterintuitive. They Netanyahu had called him to wish him how his dyslexia makes him forget every- think about form. A TED talk tends to luck—an extra notch of pressure on an one’s name, and Zoref left his chair to follow one of several narrative arcs (some already carefully calibrated talk. Study- lean against the base of the stage. have three acts, others are cast as detec- ing past lectures, Zoref had noticed His name was called.