“talks”
9 posts under this tag.
TEDTalks haven’t been as inspiring lately but they’re still pretty good. Joseph Pine’s was mostly modern marketing thinking and occasional over-guruing, but it’s still well-delivered and worth watching for these 2 nuggets:
There is no such thing as an inauthentic experience. Why? ‘Cause the experience happens inside of us, it’s our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us. So as long as we’re in any sense authentic human beings then every experience we have is authentic. Now there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience but even that is a matter of degree, not kind.
And there is no such thing as a 100% natural experience. Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods. There’s a company that manufactured the car the delivered you to the edge of the woods. There’s a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods. There’s a company who provides the cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods. All of those are man-made, artificiality brought into the woods. By you, and by the very nature of being there.
The number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are is to provide places for people to experience who you are.. It’s not advertising, does it? That’s why you have companies like Starbucks, right? That doesn’t advertise at all. They say ’You want to know who we are, you have to come experience us’.
And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience, right? Coffee at it’s core is, what? It’s beans, right, it’s coffee beans. You know how much coffee is worth when treated as a commodity, as a bean? 2 or 3 cents per cup, that’s what coffee is worth. But grind it, roast it, package it and put in a grocery shop shelf and now it will cost 5, 10, 15 cents when you treat it as a good. Take that same good and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer in a corner diner, a bodega, a kiosk somewhere you get 50 cents maybe a buck per cup of coffee. But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of Starbucks, with the authentic [ seating? cedar!] that goes inside of there and now, because of that authentic experience, you can charge 3 to 4, 5 dollars for a cup of coffe.
I also liked how he made the obvious but no less important observation that his talk very much applied to TED itself, calling it “the experience capital in the world of conferences”.
Vilayanur Ramachandran has a truly outstanding, enjoyable, and insightful TEDTalk, A journey to the center of your mind. Not only should you watch it for the content, pay attention also to the form—he is a master expositor. Besides, it contains one of the most convincing debunkings of Freudian bull ever (his first example).
(Fret not about having to decipher a strong Indian accent. Aside from strong r’s, he’s extremely understandable and rather pleasant.)
The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).
And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.
Also not to be missed are…
Never had read anything by Larry WallWP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, [My daughter] went on, “Well, it’s like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: ’Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: ‘Tsall good.’’’
“But you don’t actually think everything is good, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?”
”No, Dad, I think when we say that, we’re saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don’t just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.”
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it’s important that we know where our culture is going, and because it’s our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don’t think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don’t focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don’t go out of your way to justify stuff that’s obviously cool. Don’t ridicule ideas merely because they’re not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don’t let someone else tell you what you should like. ’Tsall good.
That’s all well and good, but I ask you, if it’s all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say “That sucks.”?
And an orator said, “Speak to us of Freedom.”
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
So true. So true.
I tried to cram myself with Stephen Wolfram trivia (there’s all you might want at his website) before seeing him live at the 2006 Summer Startup School but I wish I had read this brief correspondence he had with Feynman. I would have been in still more awe (which might had been counterproductive, I might no have had the courage to approach him and make a fool of myself).
Overall I don’t think it’s that good a presentation, but there’s one true (outrageous) gem worth repeating from Seth Godin’s recent talk at Google:
There is a belief among a lot of companies, especially in the valley, especially on this road, Amphiteater RoadWP, that technology wins.. I don’t think it does. I think what technology does is it gives you a shot at marketing.
..I believe that.. what made Google work were some brilliant—maybe not intentional—marketing decisions. And those decisions have allowed you the freedom to do some really cool technology.
Well, ok, here are two more highlights:
[To Googlers:] You guys have built something for the ages.
Hummer and the Mini. The Mini small enough to put in the trunk of the Hummer—but they had a lot in common. For four years they sold at full retail, for four years they made a profit, for four years they had a waiting list, because they were on the edges. General Motors loses money on every mid-sized car they sell, because if you want to buy a mid-sized car, just buy a Toyota or a Honda, the cheapest one. It’s at the edges that people wait in line; it’s at the edges that people will notice you.
(Oh and this is also the first online video with captions I’ve watched. They’re really cool, even if buggy.)
People, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values; media is the landscape where this interaction takes place; literacy is the ability to participate consciously in it.
..what we have to do first then is understand the nature of stories and why we tend to believe them, why we mistake our stories and our myths for fact, and that’s going to be the beginning of how we can dissemble them. The moment that I got this, was, I guess I was a freshman in college when the third, and probably still worst of the Star Wars movies came out, Return of the Jedi. Luke and Hans get captured by those little teddy bear creatures, the Ewoks, on the moon of Endor, do you remember this? And the Ewoks are having their little barbecue party or whatever they’re doing, princess Leia is allowed to be free, because she’s a girl, whatever, but Hans and Luke are tied up. Do you remember how they get out of captivity? C3PO and R2D2 tell the Ewoks a story. C3PO speaks perfect Ewok, and he’s all golden, they think he’s a god. He starts telling the great story of the wonderful rebels, Luke and Hans, and how they’re fighting the imperial starship. R2D2 starts projecting holographic images of this battles, and you see the little Ewok eyes going back and forth, going “Oh my god!” They’ve never seen holographic technology, they’ve never heard a story told this well. The story so wins them over that these Ewoks not only release Hans and Luke, but they fight a war on their behalf. They fight a war against those big robot things. In which Ewoks die. What I thought at this moment—as an emerging little media theorist—was: what would have happened if Darth Vader had gotten down to that moon first and told his story, with his special effects? They’d have fought for him, I promise you! They’d have fought for him.
...and the style of narrative changed too, we started to get shows like The Simpsons, which were no longer this [the traditional crisis, climax, sleep narrative]; we didn’t care of Homer, what, is he’s gonna live or not, is he gonna lose his job or not. No, now what we’re doing in this big chaotic fractal-like media-space where we’re all talking and exchanging ideas with each other, giving away software to each other, now it’s about making connections. It’s about finding patterns in this media space. When you watch The Simpsons, the reward is not the cookie that you get for making it through the story, the reward is making an association. Oh, here they’re satiring Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, this is a satire of that commercial. Here’s, that’s… Connections, connections and openings, connections and openings. It’s no longer a beginninzg, middle, and end: it’s a series of connections.
17% of Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime and only 23% believe in evolution. Why? Evolution gives you a way out, evolution gives you an alternative to this. Rather than the preordained story, we can write another one, we can change, we can evolve, something else can emerge. The frightening thing about having an emerging narrative is that it means there’s no pre-existing story. It means maybe we weren’t put here with meaning at all. Maybe there was no intent. Maybe meaning is something that we do. Maybe meaning is something that we make, not a pre-existing condition. That meaning is made. But how? Through collaboration. Ain’t gonna get no meaning alone, it can’t be done alone in a series of consumer choices. We’ve tried that one. If you could do it that way, would we be doing this conference? No. You can’t. You only get meaning by connecting with other people. Through the discovery of connections and interrelationships.
Question: Something that resonated with me was a comment you made about [how] we need to develop a new kind of story through collective ownership and collective authorship, and there’ve been a lot of news stories that have come through various different individuals. The example was given from the X-Files that the authorship was taken over by a collective of individuals. My question would be, where do you see that threshold point where it’s taken from an individual and moved into the collective?..
The bane of my existence this question, for a long time. Because the main thing I’m studying these days is narrative: why do we construct narratives on reality? why do we need narratives? and then, how can we develop new narrative structures? I think some of you got this novel I wrote called Exit StrategyAM, and the challenge with that was I wanted to create some kind of an open-source collective experience, but I didn’t want to have the situation were if you’re letting a whole group of people write Star Trek with you, one kid kills Spock on the second page, and then you’re dead. So far I’ve found that the easiest way to do collective narrative experiments is to let the collective recontextualize the story.. the Talmudic process really.. There has to be a certain amount of agreement at the beginning: we’re going to play with this myth, we’re going to play with this story.
Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.
Here they are, lest time forgets:
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