TEDxTO: the revolution will possibly not be tweeted

A local version of the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference, TEDxTO, took place yesterday afternoon at Theatre Passe Muraille — a Wi-Fi-free venue, which led to wondering about the relative paucity of on-location tweets from the 110 who scored free tickets to its succession of 13 lectures, each 18 minutes in length. Well, would you want to address a room of people entirely preoccupied with poking at their handheld devices? (A webcast, and remote viewing locations, were better suited for that.) Per the TED conference style established in 1990, each speaker is bathed in lighting set to Genius, which must be intimidating enough — there’s a reason why Malcolm Gladwell hides under that hair. The format is definitely not designed for humility. The local speakers surely glimpsed their share of online videos from the TED mainstage in California: the headset microphone ensure lots of lunging forward to emphasize a profound point. Really, it’s a setting where no one can do wrong on the shiny surface — but what is Twitter good for if not to uncover what discord lies beneath?

The welcome video was from Chris Anderson of TED head office (not to be confused with the same-named editor of Wired): “All knowledge is connected,” he existentialized. Following some love and fear philosophy from poet and actress D’bi Young — a cover version of author Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity — new media guru Don Tapscott explained how TV is the new Muzak, and books are over, except for his.

Priorities on stage shifted to urbanism: Tom Rand on the interactive Planet Traveler hotel that led to the City of Toronto to establish public laneways to install geothermal pipes. Michael McClelland, the architect author of Concrete Toronto ruminated on how cities think of themselves, and the need to open up invisible parts of cities.

Hey, it’s the mayor! Sitting in the front row, listening to Steven Woods represent Google. Then “success analyst” Richard St. John explained how “if successful people were cars, they’d have huge windshields to help them look ahead.” David Makepeace talked about eclipses — apparently part of something greater than one’s self, not that you’d know, because he’s not on Twitter. But then some in the audience were evidently craning their necks to see recently strike-worn David Miller’s reaction to labour relations professor Charlotte Yates, discussing the future of unions, even though they don’t tend to have a presence on “Twittah” — she expressed higher hopes for Second Life.

Sticking up for the mainstream media’s ability to still pay a few salaries, Mathew Ingram, communities editor of The Globe and Mail. Then the stage was yielded to the artists: Waawaate Fobister, on telling personal stories and turning them into theatre; Gavin Sheppard, discussing creative education via hip-hop; and Min Sook Lee, whose film My Toxic Baby is premiering at TIFF. Lastly, a proposal for Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017, spelled out by public policy consultant Peter MacLeod, because the future begins now, etc. And that was the end of that — just under the wire before the whole town is supposedly spellbound by Hollywood. Not to be outdone, TEDxTO had its own afterparty, too.

Live coverage of TEDxTO [the official version]