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?

O It’s Nice To Get Up In,the slipshod mucous kiss
of her riant belly’s fooling bore
- When The Sun Begins To(with a phrasing crease
of hot subliminal lips,as if a score
of youngest angels suddenly should stretch neat necks
just to see how always squirms
the skillful mystery of Hell)me suddenly

grips in chuckles of supreme sex.

In The Good Old Summer Time.
My gorgeous bullet in tickling intuitive flight
aches,just,simply,into,her. Thirsty
stirring. (Must be summer. Hush. Worms).

But It’s Nicer To Lie in Bed
-eh? I’m

not. Again. Hush. God. Please hold. Tight

– E.E. Cummings

The article linked above describes all the things the internet is not.  Or not yet.  Correlation does not equal causation; so if the Islamic Republic of Iran becomes a Westernized democracy, then Andrew Sullivan would feel proud (or happy or whateversomethinggood).  But we can’t fully credit Twitter or his blog for facilitating that revolution.  Nor can we disqualify their effects.  It’s a complicated argument that I can’t write and don’t want to write and can’t write and nobody reads anyway.

The internet’s revolution is not on the screen.  It is not manifested by another site – but a concept that information can be organized on-demand.  This can revolutionize the way we seek and share information.  When information stops flowing top-to-bottom it effects the old clunky infrastructures that depend on that hierarchy.  Elevators are now on-demand.  They don’t just go up and down and catch you if you’re there or not.  They wait to find out where you’re going and take you on the most efficient route.  Network TV is now also on-demand.  Gardens are now on demand (even if you don’t have any land).  Let’s not stop there – let’s make busses on demand.  Let’s make buildings on demand.  The internet is teaching us how information flows – and good design facilitates that flow in the most efficient way possible.  I don’t think I’m inventing this argument.  The medium of the net is not on the computer screen or phone screen but in the mind of the reader/listener who links and shares and distributes or finds and seeks the think they crave and can now get but have to build first and where do I find the how-to’s about?

Yesterday I was inside the Union Market and heard So What from Kind of Blue playing to an audience of focused shoppers.

Cousin Richard Davis plays the Bass.  He’s a jazz musician.  I’ve been yelled at by Cousin Richard a few times in my life.  This is the kind of thing that would set him off.

Jon Hendrick’s once wrote a one-word Jazz poem: “Listen!”