TED’s flagship product is the talk, an 18‐minute, carefully crafted speech performed in front of a live audience. The TED talk is offering a re‐packaged public speaking format that uses identifiable and well known rhetorical devices that have been studied in public speaking classes and put into practice by public speakers [22]. A large part of the TED website is dedicated to providing access to a curated group of talks. Talks are also accessible through other media outlets, such as a dedicated youtube channel, iTunes, the TED talk app and a few digital television providers.
6.3.1 TED Ecosystem
In this section, we describe the various products and partnerships of the TED organization. We start by describing the events hosted, or affiliated with TED and then move on to the other types of initiatives the organization engages in. We conclude the section by briefly outlining the layers of publics the organization touches through its products and partnerships.
Official TED talks performed and recorded during a number of events, in front of a live audience. TED hosts an annual 5‐day conference in Vancouver, British Columbia every year. 70 speakers are invited to give talks on the main stage in front of 1000 audience members, who have applied to attend the conference. However, during this annual event, additional people also give talks on smaller stages—selected TED fellows, the best of TED‐Ed club members and selected TED residents. There is also an annual TEDGlobal conference, which is organized like the Vancouver event. The most recent TEDGlobal event was held in Geneva. It is now possible to subscribe to TEDLive, a livestream service that allows you to view the current conference, as well as past conferences, in their entirety.
TED also organizes three other special events which are open to the public: TEDSummit, TEDWomen and TEDYouth. TEDSummit is a 5‐day event with 111 speakers (popular past speakers and new speakers), interactive workshops and community building events. TEDSummit is, according to the TED website, for the most engaged members of the TED community. TEDWomen is a 3‐day annual conference about, well, women and issues that concern them. TEDYouth is an annual 1‐day conference catering to secondary school students.
The best talks from these events appear online. There are numerous other TED‐branded venues where people can give talks, such as TEDx events, TEDxsalon and corporate TEDx events. In actuality, however, the link between these events and the official ones is tenuous. Still, the best TEDx talks do appear on the official TED website in two different ways. The very best are integrated into the official TED talk list. Those relegated to the TEDx section of the website are less interactive for the viewer, thus it appears that the TED organization is setting the agenda in terms of what talks garner the most reactions in the TED talk sphere consequently further influencing the flows of information and the internal hierarchy among talks.
A TEDx event can be organized by an individual, an organization, or a community. A standard TEDx event cannot exceed 100 audience members, must include screening of 2 official TED talks and the event can only take place during 1 day. TEDx events come in many flavors: University events, Youth events, Women events (these can only occur during the official TEDWomen event), Library events, TEDxLive (simulcast of a TED conference) Internal events and Business events. For communities in the developing world, TED has kindly put together TEDx in a box. There are also TEDxSalon events, smaller, more focused events, that must occur three times in a given year. TEDx events do not have to be limited to 100 audience members. An organizer, however, who wishes to organize a bigger event must attend an official TED conference. These are expensive events and range from $2495 for the 3‐day TEDWomen event to $8500 for the 5‐day events.
The TED talk has proven to be sufficiently popular (the top viewed talk has been watched 39 million times), that the organization has begun using the talk as a building block for developing additional products and services.
In keeping with its mission of spreading ideas, TED now has a dedicated TEDEd platform where teachers and university professors can develop lesson plans built around a TED talk, a youtube video, or a TEDEd original (an animated segment using educators’ ideas and words). To date, 185,552 lesson plans have been created. TED has made using TED talks in the classroom easy, thus inciting educators to adopt them as teaching tools and consequently expanding the TED talk sphere to include students from around the world. TED has recently partnered with the publisher, Wiley, to produce subject specific instructor manuals built around a series of TED talks. In this case, the talks function as virtual guest lecturers.
TED has partnered with the publisher, Simon & Schuster, to produce short books based on the most popular talks in the collection. This is an interesting partnership in that the organization is partnering with a representative of a traditional medium for disseminating information. The end result, however, is a book with a twist. Recognizing that 18 min isn’t enough time to delve deeply into a subject, TED Books provide speakers with the opportunity to develop the subject of their talk in a short book format. Indeed, the tagline for these books is “short enough to read in one sitting.”
The American radio station, NPR (National Public Radio), also broadcasts a weekly one‐hour radio show dedicated to a specific theme and built around TED talks. The radio show includes additional content, mainly interviews with the TED talkers included in that week’s show. This radio show, however, is not a direct means to accessing TED talks and so, we consider it to be a partnership, as well as an example of TED’s expanding reach. (NPR is known for its somewhat highbrow audience.)
With the ambient popularity of the TED talk and the organization’s overarching mission, TED has also begun providing companies with internal TED‐like conferences. The goal of these TEDInstitute conferences is to identify thought leaders amongst the employees and give them a platform where they can circulate their ideas. This service has a hefty price tag, $1.5 million [29]. In return, TED provides coaching and guidance in producing an internal event. As with other TED events, the best TEDInsitute talks appear in the online collection, with the company’s approval.
TED has recently partnered with IBM Watson to provide a Watson powered platform that, after signing in with your Facebook or TED account, allows you to ask questions and receive answers in the form of short clips from a selection of TED talks. The TED‐Watson platform also provides personalized playlists based on your social posts. Recently, TED has partnered with Wikipedia. TED will provide the open source encyclopedia with metadata from its collection of talks to increase the accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries.
The TED studio produces content for companies in a TED‐like style. TED also offers consulting services which bring together speakers who have given a TED talk and company employees in order to spur on human‐centered collaboration.
TED’s primary focus appears to be the ability of a well‐crafted talk to increase the dissemination of information. As such, through a number of different initiatives, the organization also provides ways in which individuals can learn the necessary skills to produce a TED style talk. TED Ed clubs are a clear example of this type of initiative. Students in secondary schools around the world can apply to start such a club. In 13 sessions, club members learn how to write and deliver a powerful 4‐minute speech. The club’s final session is a TED Ed club event where members give their talks. Teachers can nominate the best students to perform at the annual TEDYouth event. Italy’s minister of education has recently advocated that TED Ed clubs be created in all of Italy’s secondary schools.
The TED organization also nominates 400 fellows per year and has recently launched the TEDResidents program that will host 28 people for 4 months. Fellows receive access to meet ups, workshops and public relations training for communicating their ideas effectively. The best talks are presented at one of the official TED events, but more importa
ntly fellows become lifelong members of the TED community.
6.4 Discussion
Characteristics that are opaque indicators of research projects and individual researcher’s quality can become, through TED, credible signals and screening criteria, thereby affecting their valuation (see[23] for a close argument on signaling and screening of new firms in emerging markets).
Fig. 6.1 shows the conceptual model for interpreting as well as empirically investigating the TED‐related signaling environment and the role of recognition. The signaling timeline is adapted from [24]. It is worth noting that recognition as achievement has a role both before the signaling process starts and during the feedback phase at t = 3.
Fig. 6.1Signaling environment and recognition (t time)
As pointed out by [25], TED has the features of an infrastructure for recognition in the form of achievements “worth” spreading, where individual speakers gain self‐esteem and a new self‐image, yet encoded in terms of marketing content, leading the achievement principle to ‘marketize’ itself. In actuality, the TED Infrastructure frames the property the signaler (t = 0) wants to signal for a receiver at t = 1 (key elements for signaling pointed out by [16]); although generic, the receiver is in principle any organization (either private or public) capable of valuing the worth of each individual speaker’s proposal. Thus, in a sense the TED Infrastructure is the co‐signaler at t = 0. The TED Infrastructure signals recognition through inclusion of TED talks on the official website, in playlists etc. The individual speaker may, or may not be chosen by the receiver as worthy of funding, etc., depending on the outcome of the signal at t = 1. In case of actual valuation, the individual provides the received feedback to the TED Infrastructure (t = 3) in terms of news related to the outcome of the valuation after participation at a TED event either as i) a new TED presentation on the new project or ii) number of views of the previous TED presentation as a consequence of the new project(s). This increases the appeal of TED for other individuals looking for recognition of their achievements, thus creating a self‐reinforcing mechanism of the TED Infrastructure itself. This mechanism makes the TED Infrastructure different from traditional conference systems, where recognition is limited to a certain domain or audience and is not a “public sphere”. Furthermore, a TED talker already has to have a certain status in order to be chosen to be a TED talker, and among other ways this status is achieved in academic and practitioner conferences; thus academic and practitioners conferences are part of the background for the individual proposals’ ideas “worth” spreading.
6.5 Conclusion
Cognitive‐cultural economy or cognitive capitalism emphasizes the role of computers and digital technologies first in the valuation of cognitive tasks (the cognitive processing of information) as the core element of production systems. These tasks require specific intellectual skills and competences. Cognitive‐cultural economy or cognitive capitalism also focuses on the contribution of digital technologies in the displacement of the cognitive tasks from the human jurisdiction [26]. Vercellone [27], makes reference to the Marxian notion of general intellect 1 and points out that the key dimension of this mutation concerns the hegemony of knowledge created by a diffuse intellectuality. This leads to the consequent supremacy of the “knowledge of living labor over knowledge incorporated in fixed capital and in corporate organization”. In turn, there is a move from “the static management of resources to the dynamic management of knowledge”. It is important to keep in mind that intellectuality does not refer primarily to expertise acquired through education or books, by scientists or engineers, but first and foremost to the simple faculty of thought, memory, and verbal communication, as these are the necessary elements of productive cooperation in a cognitive cultural economy. In this context, the communication industry is actually the industry of the means of production [28].
Taking these issues into account, in this chapter we have attempted to demonstrate how the TED ecosystem is a marketplace for ideas. By applying the concepts of recognition, valuation and signaling, we show how the TED ecosystem functions as both a means of gaining recognition for speakers and their ideas, but also provides a means of ranking those ideas and projects by signaling their importance by inclusion in the curated collection of talks accessible on the TED website. Furthermore, we argue that the TED infrastructure is also a new form of public sphere where public discourse, in the form of TED talks, is debated, ranked and rated by a broad audience. It remains to be seen how this new type of ranking mechanism impacts research funding and policies in the long term.
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