Notes for TEDGlobal

This July, I will be attending this extraordinary conference and am bringing together ideas I have on the theme.

The Theme of TEDGlobal 2009 is “to explore and make visible the Substance of Things Not Seen.” To address hidden influences in our behavior, we need expose these by describing and exploring them, developing a language, applying tools from the arts and sciences to understand these. Each historic moment has a set of such unseen questions that are pressing to explore. Here are some that to me seem particularly pressing to understand today.
 

• Information Technology
  • What if the web is really a social problem-solving system? New developments address deep complexity, and reduce costs of production, distribution and customization of information-based products and solutions.
  • What social problems can we now solve that we couldn’t before?
  • What’s the intersection of KM and Philanthropy? How do we apply business intelligence to philanthropy?
  • Now and in the near future, the web, with engaged participation, is a social problem-solving platform, machine, and environment. The web will surface attempted solutions, collaboratively filter them, and generate an attention-based attraction to relevant problems, then fit solutions are suitably packaged and delivered in actionable form where needed. The internet is a hospitable habitat for solutions to social problems.
• Psychology
  • Cognitive illusions – in economics, happiness, relationships. Could we have a talk that included someone like John Gottmann to bring new knowledge on Relationships into the TED Arena?
  • Dealing with predictability of one’s death – Remember Randy Pausch and his incredible Last Lecture. There’s a growing group of (especially young) people who are told their death is coming by their doctors. What are healthy and transformational ways to deal with this ?
  • Habits – how do we manage the habitforming and habitchanging process?
  • Beliefs—how do we recognize and evolve our beliefs, and recognize the beliefs of others?
  • Greatness, excellence, perfection, joy, wisdom, ecstasy—what do we know about these?
  • Deepening attentiveness to the future and past in the age of twitter, multi-tasking and ADD.
• Philosophy
  • Certainty and uncertainty
  • The illusory reality of future and past time, the fact of how we model these
  • Habits
  • Beliefs
  • Greatness, excellence, perfection, joy, wisdom, ecstasy
• Culture
  • The influence of our cultures on what we do and think
  • Intercultural dynamics, economics, evolution
  • Does ethnocentrism have a future?
• Language/Storytelling
  • How language structures us
  • Whose voices are silent that we need to hear?

Top Social Media Risks

#1 ppl, groups, companies cloak self-interest in claims to represent

#2 loudest most confident/arrogant voices heard over most wise; declarations favored over discussion

#3 limited, problematic editorial function. more access to participate not necessarily equitable

#4 subversion, exploitation, abuse of openness #swf09

#5 social media are privately owned but thought of as public. IP battles still to come

#6 social media confuses the immediate with the important; tiny facts with more complex truths

#7 social media provides inadequate ramps to offline; mistakes chatter/talk for action

#8 individualism and differences diminished by favoring popularity, peer-love, in-group authority

#9 highly contagious context for meme-transmission, yet immature ability to detect dangerous viruses

#10 false urgency created by constant updates sucks undue attention

#11 context for privacy and anonymity and behavioral fault-tolerance has changed but consequences are unclear. When you make a mistake that is published in text, it’s not easy (or possible in some cases) to redact or correct these, whereas voice conversations allow for more forgivability, more experimentation. Anonymity is constructed very differently online than in person.

#12 Rumors or exaggerations travel faster and wider than truthful facts.

 

These were written in twitterese, so please excuse (or appreciate?) brevity. This is also a test of MS Word 2007’s blog publishing feature.