TED2006: The world flattens

Fourth session of TED2006 (background): running notes.

TEDster and blogger Ethan Zuckerman from the Harvard Berkman Center gets a 3-minutes slot on stage to talk about blogs. One year ago, he says, among the top 100 there were almost exclusively blogs in English devoted to US politics, entertainment and technology. Last December, 12 of those were in Chinese (and probably that downplays the phenomenon, for we don't know how to count blogs on Chinese platforms: "It's quite possible that 30 or 40 Chinese blogs could already be among the most visited in thee world"). "We used to live in an Internet that's very north-American", he says. But today the Net is growing elsewhere in the world (there are more broadband subs in Asia than US; the US accounts today only for 23 % of Internet users). "The web is gonna get more crowded, more diverse and more interesting".

Roger Mandle, head of the Rhode Island School of Design, takes the prompt and points out that, similarly, hundreds of design schools are opening in China. "Even though they make cheap copies of products, they recognize that design adds value - think Samsung". Quoting Daniel Pink, Mandle asks: what age comes after the agrarian, the industrial, the information and the conceptual age? The age of consilience, he suggests (after E. O. Wilson): a unified system of knowledge. What is consilient design? Think Leonardo da Vinci in action: integrating proportions, scientific and artistic understanding, architecture, nature. He gives a series of examples, from Frank Gehry's Los Angeles Disney Hall to a "new kitchen" project that was designed after careful study of the movements involved in cooking (almost 300 movements to cook spaghetti: not very efficient).
Mandle's definition of design: "it is the human activity that creates objects, occasions and environments that extend value and meaning through the processes and the content of the arts and sciences. It also enables tangible outcomes of human aspirations that are practical and ethical significant in both their production and their use".

Back to blogs: Mena Trott, co-founder of SixApart (that's the company that manages the platform on which this blog is hosted) is next. Many, when they think of blogs, if anything, think about the Kryptonite lock-that-can-be-opened-with-a-ballpoint-pen story or about the fact that bloggers "took down" journalistic icon Dan Rather or so. But, she says, blogging is not only about scandals: it is way more personal. Blogs are an evolution, a record of who you are, your persona, of people telling real stories. "Blogs are like Norman Rockwell's paintings: people say that it's not real art, but it resonates to us".

Rice University's Richard Baraniuk has a big project about books: he wants us to rip, mix, share and burn them like DJs do with music. "Take all the world's books, tear out the pages, digitize them, store them in a vast interconnected repository, kind of an iTunes for books; then make it all open so that people can modify and improve, and make it free so that everyone can access it, and create tools to make possible for anyone to add information, or even to close the loop by letting them produce on-demand books based on this content": that's an incredibly powerful knowledge ecosystem. Unrealistic? It actually exists, at least in an initial form. It's called Connexions, it's a collection of peer-reviewed scholarly materials and free software. Enablers: technology such as XML, and "new intellectual property" frameworks ("we need to find an IP framework that make it safe to share and re-use, such as Creative Commons").

TED producer Chris Anderson uses the lead to announce that TED wants to play a role in making information available and free, "maybe by transforming the TED site into a TED University site, because everyone in this room has a great talk and amazing knowledge to share".

Closing the session is one of my favorite musicians, Peter Gabriel of Genesis fame. But he surprises everyone talking about being abused by classmates when he was a schoolkid. "When I went back into the school I felt dirty and ashamed and humiliated, and very powerless". Thirty years later through Bono (the U2 singer) he got involved with Amnesty International, met many human-rights activists who'd been detained and tortured, and with his own powerlessness in mind that started his engagement against human-rights violations. "One of the tragic aspects of these abuses is that they're too easily forgotten or denied; but it appears that if there are cameras around, they tend to happen less". That was the insight that led to the creation of Witness.org in 1992. Since, it has given out cameras in more than 60 countries, helping activists groups tell their stories, raising awareness around the world. Witness was born out of tech innovation (small portable digital cameras), but "now we have a wonderful possibility which is given to us by the mobile phone with cameras in them: they're cheap, are everywhere, and move fast. We could have a world where everyone who has something bad happening to them has a chance to get their story uploaded and heard".

(tags TED2006 - TED 2006) (TED site  - flickr photos)