The battle against Powerpoint presentations has been won (except for the US military).  The world has recognized that bullet points are best pointed inward; anecdotes serve the narrative of a point and visuals paint better pictures than words.  The Powerpoint where glossy eyed speaker-trons read slides to an audience that already has is dead.  In its place, TED Conferences have released a new threat to the expression of complicated ideas in timely formats.

The problem is I don’t have a simple definition of this problem and so probably can’t make a compelling case against it.  Here’s a stab:

TED is homogenizing inspiration.  It is trimming the fat from the meat of the point of the thing that is complicated and selling instead the exuberance of the speaker or the energy behind the question.  What is left is of course a good thing but in concentrated batches it is becoming a pulpy grey soup of new things that are probably good and neat but indistinguishable from the rest.  Video games are a good thing! Food is an important thing! Inspiration is a good thing! TED is about ideas and ideas about communicating those ideas so why is TED selling new ideas in the same way.  It’s like asking a talented shoe salesman (I mean the best of the best shoe salesman ever) to pitch terraforming Mars.  Horrible analogy?  Yes!  Complicated points sometimes make for horrible analogies.

There are many many ways to sell an idea.  To communicate an idea.  To destroy grammar to encourage communication.  Have you ever read or heard of Heat?  It’s a food book by Bill Buford.  It’s a food book – but so are cookbooks.  But cookbooks are packaged like Powerpoint presentations.  Some publications like Cook’s Illustrated include anecdotes, histories, failed attempts and final conclusions to “season” or contextualize their recipes.  Heat takes it further than that.  The notion of eyeballing an ingredient in a recipe (use a bunch of salt, to taste) is as natural to cooking as conversational English kills proper grammar.  There is a specific way to do certain things “correctly” and then there’s the real way.  The real way cannot be broken down into palatable parts – sometimes it’s just complicated.  Buford explored the complexity of Italian food (its complexity wrapped up in deceiving simplicity) and shared his conclusions and the lessons learned and wrote a book about it.  There are recipes embedded in the narrative.  Those recipes look like paragraphs (they are paragraphs) and the point of this example is that the point of the story is not defined so easily.  Sometimes it takes time.

Lawrence Wright wrote The Looming Towers and has now turned that book (and his research into Al Qeada and other terrorist organizations) into a one-man play called “My Trip to Al Qaeda“.  The narrative is complicated.  The point of his work is available to anyone interested in the cliff notes, but Wright discovered a new layer to the story that needed expression.  The words he wrote were not enough and without a clear set of reasons, he redirected his expertise from the quantitative reality of his journalism into the foggy mushiness of a play.  It is drama it is life is is inspirational and probably other things all the same.  And more.  And it is not not not not not a lecture about what it is.  That is what TED maybe is becoming.  TED is becoming TED.

Where's the cat? Where's the cradle?

How good can TED be at sharing the best ideas on the planet when every idea is expressed in the same format?