TED2006 Session 4, The World Flattens, began with a three-minute talk by the prolific blogging globalist, Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman noted that as of January '05, the top 100 blogs were all written in English. That's over. This January 12 of the top 100 are in Chinese. As far as we know (it's not easy to get a real read on these things) there are over 12 million blogs written in Chinese, with 2 million on MSN (one of the few services not cooperating with government censorship.) Stay tuned, the changes have just begun.
Rhode Island School of Design President Roger Mandle was next. I'd been looking forward to his talk since the line-up came out and he delivered a rousing testimonial to design's newfound status in popular culture and the "wants vs. needs" business world. Continuing with Zuckerman's theme, Mandle showed a photo of the graduates of China's Shanghai Institute of the Visual Arts, one of hundreds of recently opened design schools. He discussed design as a process, an educational discipline, art/craft/business, an economic development strategy and as a source of meaning. He focused on E.O. Wilson's notion of "consilience," the idea that the reductionistic approach to education has out-lived its usefulness. Regular readers of this blog will recall my rantings about design as a significant path to the transcendence of either/or thinking. As design evolves beyond the production of decoration to the construction of meaning we will be able to embrace the kind of educaitonal approach Mandle outlined: starting with teaching all children from an integrated curriculum that doesn't only focus on developing analytic skills. Big idea: we must develop a national priority for design that matches those underway in other countries.
Next, our own blog hostess, Mena Trott gave a brief history of the blogosphere and her personal blog odyssey, leading to the development of one of the Web's great success stories. A lovely personal tale, told with wit and charm. Big idea: in the future, our descendents will have proof of what morons we were by reading our own words!
Richard Baraniuk's was the only TED2006 presentation I did not hear in full. In what I did hear, he pointed out the need to "set knowledge free" by allowing textbooks to be available (free?) online to enable the kind of sampling, re-mixing and mashing that we've seen in the music industry. Big idea: see this website.
Peter Gabriel's moving presentation ended this session. I came to follow Genesis only in its Phil Collins-led incarnation, too late to appreciate Gabriel's work there except in retrospect. But he's always been a favorite soloist. The social consciousness in his work is embodied in "Biko," his tribute to murdered South African activist Steven Biko. In "Don't Give Up," his moving duet with Kate Bush, he captures what, for me, is the emotional core of his work. But I had no idea of one of the sources of that emotion until this talk. Gabriel began by jokingly imitating the gaits of various speakers, including head TEDster, Chris Anderson, a Bath neighbor. Rather rather than pace or dance around, he said, he'd just sit. He began with a few words about torture and the rights of the imprisoned, and then said that he had some connection with their feelings, because, as a schoolboy, he was grabbed, stripped and abused by a gang of his classmates. Pins dropped clangingly in the room. From that moment, Gabriel's advocacy for victims via Witness was no longer just another celebrity cause but a struggle to put an end to the kind of suffering he himself has experienced all his life. Witness's mission is to "put a human face on human rights abuses," by providing video cameras to people in 60 countries, so that "torture" may no longer remain an abstraction. In addition, Gabriel also off-handedly described another project which has long been close to my heart: providing an opportunity for elders to pass along their wisdom to their descendents. I'm looking forward to hearing more about that one. Big idea: demonstrating the possibility of alchemizing horrific personal pain into artistic fire and global social consciousness.
Tags: TED2006 Roger Mandle Mena Trott Richard Baraniuk Peter Gabriel
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