Tag Archives: TED

TED Talk

Leave a reply

TED talks have been something that I have known about for a while and I have watched quite a few of them in my free time. When I found it we were going to have to give one, I thought that it was a great opportunity to take part in a new social media craze. After preparing my speech and prepping for my talk, I discovered that it is much different than an ordinary speech. Now one not only has the opportunity to get their point across through speech but also with technology. I believe this makes it easier for your audience to understand your point and what you are trying to emphasize. Pereparing for my TED talk made me reailze that the visuals may actually play a more important role then my speech itself in some instances. Every speech has its sticking points and  lulls. I feel that these visuals give more energy and provide a better oppertunity to prevent my audience from losing focus on what I am trying to tell them. Visuals became key for me and for my speech. As interesting as my topic may be, I have the ability to now further emphasize my paradigm shift with facts and visuals to engage and engross my audience. The visual selection was very tedious, but it was well worth the effort. So was the practice.

Ted Talk

Leave a reply

Morozov starts his utter destroyal of  the Khannas off with a bang. He immediately goes into how the Khannas provide so many irrelevant facts and never actually support their argument that there is a paradigm occurring involving a new coexistence and coevloution between humans and technology. Three sentences in and you know our author utterly dislikes the couple’s Pamphlet and is on a mission to destroy it. He instantly questions Parag Khanna’s credibility by discussing his past ventures of alerting the public that a new genre of international relations is upon us. Morozov did his research. He goes on to even pull a statement from Parag Khanna’s earlier work How to Run the World that involves how we need less new global organization and more coordination amongst our current enterprises and organizations. Morozov then blasts Khanna stating that this would in no way help stop global warming and or cyber crime amongst other things. He then quotes several other pieces of past works of other authors and turns them against them in ways that on the surface look credible. An interesting refutation he makes is against the supposed theory of Tedist and how they just try to find a global trend, connect it to technology, and then state how a revolution is occurring due to technology. This is an interesting argument and I will discuss my feelings on it later. So he then proceeds to get into  Hybrid Reality, the current article at hand. So Morozov has tried to completely destroy our authors credibility and now takes  a stab at their new work on Ted Talks. He starts off by comparing the Khannas to the Tofflers, an earlier couple who did the same thing the Khannas are doing. He goes as far to then destroy the Tofflers credibility by stating they were the creators of Gingrich’s crazy theories and thus harm the Khannas. Man this guy is out to get anyone involved in technology. He claims they are civilization savers and touts them as demigods who use bullshit to predict the apocalypse. He goes on to state how this Hybridization has been around long before the Khannas and list names of people none of us have ever even heard of.  Apparently, the Khannas also are secret China lovers as he makes them out to be worshipers of China’s economic standings and their  operations as country. He then inter pets that they are “anti- democracy” and how they relate all their work to so called experts that are just out to fund their own businesses. It gets really interesting when he discusses the Khanna’s word Technik.  Technik  is something so expansive and nebulous that it can denote absolutely anything.  This word is apparently used as a cover up to make anything the Khannas say sound techy and impossible to interpret. There goal is to confuse  there readers so much that no once can make them out to be wrong. All in all technology is being connected to everything without actually saying anything, according to Morozov. Finally he rips into all TED enthusiasts and how they never refute anything and make out that technology can save everyone and is a god send. They never touch on politics and don’t focus on issues at hand instead. They find reasons why bad things occur and connect them to personal faults and not that of government. They stay out of arguments and instead focus on how all problems are due to lack of connectivity. Basically, all Tedists are complete evil doers.

Morozov is not a good rhetor. Form the start, one can tell he is out to destroy TED and all its followers. Every sentence is littered with complaints, arguments and just plain dislike that he makes himself out to be a one sided idiot in the end. Sure one can say he has credibility by relating the Khannas points to previous people like them who failed or are apparently morons. The problem is that all his sources and credibility have to do with people we have never heard of or theories none of us can even comprehend. I believe he makes the Khannas out to be something they are not at all. They are not radicals as he basically claims. They are people with beliefs that the world is facing a paradigm and that soon we will have to evolve with technology. I believe that we do have an increasing dependence on technology and the Khannas may have point. However, Morozov takes their ideas, blows them up, and then finds a way to try to make them look moronic by using some fact about a previous theorist or event that none of us have ever heard. He has no audience. He just wants to please himself and clearly show his dislike for an evolving technological genre. His main fault is this, he pulls out quotes form the Pamphlet, blows them up to be more then they are, relates them to something in his favor, and twists it to make readers see our author’s in a light that does not really exist. If one looks closely, they see right through this smoke and mirror trick.

Kevin Kelly gives a great Ted Talk on how techonlogy’s evolution is very close to that of humans evolution. At 1:30 he asks what technology’s purpose is and gives us a great definition, the first definition ever recorded of technology. It is a pamphlet to help us live and evolve and to solve problems. He then states how technology is anything invented after you were born. At 4:44 he makes a purposeful statement on how technology hacks problems in life we can’t fix or don’t understand and helps us around them and to understand them better. Finally in the 9:30 to 10 range he goes on to discuss how people say that technology only talks to technology and humans and it can never coexist. He states how this is wrong and that there is coexistence all around us. Technology is the seventh kingdom of life. It evolves just like us. Kelly knows his stuff and unlike Morozov, appeals to us more lightly and on a more friendly basis. He is not hear to insult but rather inform. That was Morosov’s greatest fault. Seeking new ways to solve problems, achieve things once thought impossible, and make things easier and more accessible is the goal of technology and humans and without each other neither can thrive and grow. This statement around 10-11 mark really made me realize that Morosov is wrong. He refutes the co-evolution that the Khannas state is happening. They are right due to the idea that there is a co dependence on each other and that if you look at humanity and technology as one machine then if you remove one part the machine fails. There is a paradigm shift. It is not dependence as we see, but now a growth. As we grow, so does technology. Yes, we are its creators, but we need it just as much as it needs us. Who could tell us if someone has cancer if we did not have technology. No one. This Ted Talk kills Morozov’s points and further strengthens the Khanna’s and helps us understand that there is a new era dawning. Yes the Khannas may have some radical views here and there, but there overall message is pretty credible. Technology does wonders for us.  Perhaps Ted talks are leading the way because technology and humans are coexisting and evolving together to better present ideas to each other. This is the future and whether Morozov likes it or not, co-evolution is upon us and he would be arrogant not to acknowledge it very soon.

Ted Talks are going to be very important a few decades from now because as technology evolves, so are the possibilities of our world. It will be very important to make sure everyone understands what technology and researchers are trying to say to us and TED talks are the way to bridge that gap. As we have seen so far, they are very effective at getting a message across as they use both technology and a speaker to help us understand things at a more interactive level. I believe they are going to be vital to connecting ideas with people and helping society as a whole evolve. Whether you like it or not, the technological era has taken off and is moving at a rapid pace. One is going to need to keep up and TED talks are going to help us with that. It is so vital not to fall behind in the never ending evolution of both our species and technology. We both need each other and TED talks illustrate just that through the combination of technology and a human person to sit in the driver’s seat and control it.