TED is the new Harvard?
There’s an article in Fast Company called How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite. I’ve parodied TED before - see DEADxUninteresting. The Fast Company article barely deserves any comment - it really speaks for itself. But, what the hell, I’ll bite.
The other day, I got an email from a new friend. The subject line read “Are you a TED talk person?”
Yeah, if I got an e-mail like that, I’d reply back with just the word “No”.
The videos give my discovery-seeking brain a little hit of dopamine in the middle of the workday. But just as important, each one I see or recommend makes me part of a group of millions of folks around the world who have checked out these videos. What links us is our desire to learn; TEDsters feel part of a curious, engaged, enlightened, and tech-savvy tribe.
Wow. It’s like Nozick’s intuitions about the Experience Machine are wrong. Perhaps some people do want to live in the Experience Machine and just get little dopamine hits every so often! Oh, do you not know about Nozick’s Experience Machine? I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can explain it in under 18 minutes. Seriously, though, TED talks are good because they give you a dopamine hit? Not because they are educational or even entertaining.
By combining the principles of “radical openness” and of “leveraging the power of ideas to change the world,” TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it’s creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.
Radical openness? That’s why it is six thousand dollars to get a ticket, right? And why even if you’ve got that kind of money to spend on going to a shindig in Long Beach, you’ve still got to be selected. If that’s openness radical or otherwise, I’m a Page 3 model. And, yes, TED is creating a new Harvard: only, for people without the attention span for anything beyond 18 minutes. TED is the lovechild of Harvard and YouTube.
And don’t give me any of the flannel about how TED is so open because they publish videos. So fucking what? So do tons of people. I get video and audio podcasts from loads of different universities now: Harvard, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Bristol and many more. The difference is that unlike TED, you have to pay attention for more than 18 minutes. Sometimes as much as an hour and a half at a time, every week for months on end. Sometimes you need to make notes, follow along in a book - you know, actually study.
Of course TED doesn’t look like a regular Ivy League college. It doesn’t have any buildings; it doesn’t grant degrees. It doesn’t have singing groups or secret societies, and as far as I know it hasn’t inspired any strange drinking games.
It also doesn’t have long lectures, seminars, reading lists, examinations, libraries or journals. Nor does it have research labs, teaching hospitals, particle accelerators, art studios or any of the other many facilities required to provide a comprehensive education. The case for TED being in education is about as flimsy as the case for the traditional university being in entertainment: some lecturers are pretty amusing. Humour sugars the often bitter pill of hard work and learning. But that is still the point: at a university, the lecturer uses humour to help educate; at TED, the conference uses education to offset the fact that it is little more than entertainment - or maybe edutainment.
So, in a much more polite and less ranty way, Dan Colman at the Open Culture blog has said much the same thing. In the comments there is an interesting response from Anya Kamenetz, the author of the Fast Company piece. The key bit that stands out for me:
having TED on your resume
Seriously? People actually put that they attended TED on their CV? Really? What the fuck is up with that? I’ve gone to countless BarCamps but I don’t list those on my CV.I also watch TV, read books and listen to the radio which - by my reckoning - has about as much educational value as listening to warmed over nuggets of Freakonomics sliced into 18 minute chunks.
Jon Stewart described Glenn Beck not so long ago as a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking
. TED is an education for people who don’t have time to actually get educated. Because real education is cheap in money but takes time and effort - and TED is the exact opposite.
