#ted-talks

On the Value of Values

Imagine you just received a job offer. It’s from a reputed corporation and comes with a fantastic compensation package, but the job itself is boring and requires you to be on the road most of the time. What would you do? For some, this would be a dream come true – “What? All that money AND I get to travel AND I don’t have to be learning all the time. Of course, I’ll take it.” For others, this…

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Despite the outcry over teens and texting, the Internet has been one of the largest booms in literacy, depending on how you define it. If you define literacy as not just the ability to read words, but the spread of words, and all that comes with it, ideas, culture, etc., then the Internet has been rocket fuel. This is why the bar for quality television shows have risen so much, people are overwhelmed with so much content that they can be selective.

But this also raises the bar for what is and isn’t middle-brow. The fascination with TED talks may, in retrospect, be viewed as a relic of “early” Internet, whereby the bite-sized packaging of stimulating thought-pieces filled a vacuum of the newly expanded appetite for good content. People may then quickly graduate from watching those talks to reading long-form non-fiction, where ideas can be more substantially examined. Despite all the cries of the downturn of publishing, The New Yorker readership is up, The New York Times is doing well, book sales are up, etc.