PRESENT TENSE:You don't need a big brain to enjoy the TEDGlobal ideas conference, but you do need a big cushion for your bottom, writes SHANE HEGARTY.
I WAS AT the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford this week – there must be few such events that succeed so thoroughly in numbing your backside while simultaneously blowing your mind.
TEDGlobal was the first of what will be an annual event, a spin-off from the California conference that has been running for almost 20 years. The acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, although the E could just as well denote Endurance. One attendee described a TED event as a “boot camp for the brain”.
It was that, and yet it was invigorating rather than exhausting, with high ideas delivered in an accessible way, not least because a ruthlessly enforced 18-minute time limit deflated any windbaggery.
A taster: on Wednesday morning you could begin the day at 8.30am in the company of several hundred people crowded into a theatre to hear a range of talks that included how the internet has been good for dictators, why it’s important to lock away seeds from every plant species under a Norwegian mountain and the joy of unusual mirages. After lunch there were lectures on: how we’ll find life on planets outside our solar system; what we learn from optical illusions; screwing with people’s moral judgements by zapping their brains with magnets; and a guy who swam through the North Pole for 20 minutes to highlight climate change.
In between, there were musical interludes, including one from an envelope-pushing 18-year-old euphonium player, Matthew White, who can play two notes at the same time. Although, he observed that the brass band tradition is not usually noted for its avant-garde attitudes.
And the day was rounded off at 6pm after a standing ovation for a 90-year-old Welsh writer, Elaine Morgan, who has spent much of her career pushing a radical “aquatic ape” theory about our ancestors.
It was, then, not your ordinary conference. Sure, there were business cards and name badges and awkward moments around buffet tables where people tried to figure out if they’d introduced themselves to someone they’d not be able to shake off for days. But for a conference so clearly based on innovation, ingenuity and intellect it was remarkably welcoming.
There wasn’t any particularly noticeable “who’s got the bigger brain” competition. There was little sense of people believing themselves to be the smartest guy in the room, even though there were some people there who would be the smartest guys in almost any other room.
Everyone was asked to put three things on their name badges about which people could ask them. Several put “dreaming”. In the context of TED, that is not as cloying as Irish and British sensibilities might presume. Ultimately, I found myself comparing it to Burning Man, a mind-bogglingly creative annual festival in the Nevada desert. TED is what you would get if you mated the Burning Man with a sales conference.
Its accessibility is increasingly key. TED is popular and influential on one level, but in the two decades of its existence it has remained largely unknown to the masses. It really only began to sprout once videos of the lectures were released on to its website, Ted.com. Some 300,000 people watch them every day. The TEDGlobal lectures will now be gradually dripfed to the site. Go there. You will find yourself gorging on it.
There has been some sniping about how it draws the line on accessibility. Its events cost a few thousand euro to attend and while live streaming was available this week, it was for a membership fee of €700. These events, though, can’t be cheap to run.
Its curator Chris Anderson was this week keen to damp down any accusations of elitism or cliquishness. The diversity of attendees may not quite have matched that of the speakers, but ranged from advertising executives through green technology trailblazers to at least one bona fide movie star.
TED is positive, it is ambitious, and it wears its conscience proudly. Those who go are clearly receptive to that message, to the idea of technology driving humanity forward to a better life rather than towards an early grave. It means that attendees are generous and eager for messages of hope. It is why Gordon Brown got a standing ovation from most of the audience after he gave a surprise (and perfectly pitched) talk, and one commentator quipped through Twitter that it was obvious from that reception that most of the audience was not British.
But it’s also why those who watched the lectures from a simulcast room in a hotel down the street applauded speakers with as much verve as if they were in the auditorium. TED takes a sweeping brush to your cynicism.
Its motto is “ideas worth spreading”. “We just put the ideas out there,” said Anderson this week. “What people do with them is up to them.” For now, perhaps the strongest idea of the lot is TED itself.
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is resting