In “The Naked and the TED”, Morozov bashes on the TEDBook Hybrid Reality and its authors the Khannas. He then proceeds to critique the TED genre as a whole. Morozov begins his argument with a couple of very bold statements including: “Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation”. Morozov believes that the Khannas are able to get away with an exaggerated, “bullshit” argument through their use of technical terms and broad terminology. Morozov describes “Technik—a German term with a substantial intellectual pedigree that, in the Khannas’ hands, can mean just about anything”. The Khannas are able to make gibberish arguments/sentences seem meaningful by using this word. Mozorov seems to undermine the kairos of the Khannas as well. The idea of hybridity is not revolutionary or even slightly new, but the Khannas are trying to present it as “sexy and original insight”. The Khannas disregard that the fact that hybridity between man and technology has been in existence as long as man himself. Next Mozorov moves into critiquing the argument’s lack of actual, nominal information: “This is a world in which pundits are increasingly using the word “increasingly” whenever they feel too lazy to look up the actual statistics, which, in the Khannas’ case, increasingly means all the time”.
The Khannas are very general in their arguments and especially with their use of the word technology: they group the printing press, penicillin, and Twitter together under the category of technology.
Morozov retorts, “at such a level of generality every fool can sound brilliant”.
After undermining the validity of the Khanna’s whole book Morozov calls into question the TED genre as a whole; “TED is no longer a responsible curator of ideas “worth spreading.” Instead it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister”. In TED world problems that are political or global become technological because speakers are not supposed non-partisan. “Problems of climate change become problems of making production more efficient or finding ways to colonize other planets—not of reaching political agreement on how to limit production or consume in a more sustainable fashion. Problems of health care become problems of inadequate self-monitoring and data-sharing”.
Morozov’s argument is extreme. He hates TED talks but I can agree with some of his conclusions. We can’t solve resource wars in the Congo by throwing iPads to them, after all the rebel groups and the corrupt rebel groups could just steal all the technology initiatives/ reap the benefits. Perhaps the TED talks are too idealistic and give technologic too much power. However, I believe that Morozov is a bit too extreme and all of his arguments don’t apply to all TED talks. I personally haven’t seen too many TED talks but the couple I have seen have nothing to do with technology or even global problems therefore I haven’t personally felt any of Morozov’s critiques and I definitely do not think that TED talks are too general. The few I’ve seen have actually showed me quite the contrary.
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics_of_disgust.html
I watched David Pizzaro give a discourse on “The strange politics of disgust”. I don’t think Morozov’s argument applies at all when watching this video. Pizzaro uses a lot of data and graphs and his whole argument (people who are more easily disgusted are inclined to vote conservatively) is based off of lab experiments. Also, there is no problem that Pizzaro is discussing therefore no solution that would normally be political but now technological. This talk might actually undermine Morozov’s point that TED talks can’t discuss politics because they will offend the audience. At 8:15 Pizzaro simply lays out that “people who are on the more conservative side of the political spectrum are much more likely to be easily disgusted”. This video and some others make me feel as if the purpose of TED talks is to be both entertaining and inform the viewer about something which they had never thought of prior to the talk. Pizzaro brings up controversial issues such as gay marriage or gay intercourse and related views on these issues to political affiliations. I know this is atypical for a TED talk but it manifests that politics are not taboo for all TED talks. At 7:50 Pizzaro displays a visual of how political affiliation is related to disgust level and then proceeds to back this up with data from various experiments and his own experimentation.
Pizzaro’s video leads me to believe that TED talks on technology contrast from just normal TED talks and TED talks are anything but overly general contrasts Morozov’s viewpoint.
In order to have the most effective TED talk I believe that I will have to be both informative and entertaining at the same time. I don’t think that this is going to be an easy task at all considering the fact that the topic of my paradigm shift is relatively serious and has been kind of a boring topic to write about. I believe that I will have to incorporate a lot of visuals and get a lot of data/ graphs/ charts to make sure that someone like Morozov won’t bash my TED talk. Also I do think even though it’s simply supposed to be a talk establishing an exigence will be helpful because that’s something that was lacking in David Pizzaro’s TED talk.
