Our ‘Dumbed-Down Society’ Big On Ideas Fests
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October 2, 2011Warnings: World Hunger, Refugees, Labour & Skills Shortages
October 2, 2011The weekend sees Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas take off and there are lots of Australian cities running TEDx ‘fests’.
About TED
TED (Technology, Environment, Design) is a global ideas movement that posts ‘ideas worth spreading’ online. It covers a huge range of topics and experts in their given field get 18 minutes onstage to get their ideas across to an audience of around 800 – handpicked from thousands.
I had my introduction to Tedx from Sydney earlier this year via Radio National. I heard some amazing stuff and didn’t care – as do some – that TED turns thinkers into entertainers.
Ideas And Non-Partisan Politics Are Attracting People
Journalist Rosemary Neill asks if this popularity of ideas fests is
“A reaction to public debates in which politicians are perceived to be talking without saying anything..”
or a response to
“A media bloated with partisan commentary, or of commentators taking numbingly predictable positions?”
This is the view of Simon Longstaff, co-curator of Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. He thinks people are enjoying coming together for more than a few sound-bytes, to be able to go over argumnets, a bit like the old townhall meetings.
TED rhetoric since 2006 has been about changing the world by talking. Some call it ‘crowd-accelerated learning’ and the online interest in free web videos shows no sign of slowing.
Sandy Verschoor of Adelaide’s Festival of Ideas says we are at a tipping point in several areas – climate change, human rights, social interaction and social media – so people want an idea of what the future might be.
TED Audiences
Some say the world is ‘dumbing down’, but at the same time there are thousands of people around the world wanting to meet and think. People are better educated than they were 50-100 years ago and they want content and knowledge.
TED, founded in the US 1984 was initially a conference focussed on technology, design and Silicon Valley ‘blue-sky thinking’.
It has evolved and today audiences apply in writing and are hand-picked by organisers.
To attend TED conferences in California or Edinburgh you pay around $6000.
In Australia conferences are free but the audiences are also hand-picked.
If you don’t already know it, check out TED for a better-informed community
2 Comments
The Q&A on Monday night from there was certainly entertaining! Lots of food for thought though, I think I would have found the Festival exhausting if it was all like that, must be getting old.
I believe that the roblem is not so much a “dumbing down” of the world so much as the fact that our mammalian evolvement is millennia in arrears of our technological development.
Attitudes remain very much those of the tribal village dweller in the early iron age.
As a society we still respond primarily to the loudest voices and those evoking the greatest emotional response.
Factual information and rational discourse are not the principle motivators in our decision making: If they were, the business world would collapse, political debate would take up a fraction of the time that it does presently, and religion would cease to exist.