Julia Ludewig, "TED Talks as an Emergent Genre" page 2 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 19.1 (2017): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol19/iss1/2>
Julia LUDEWIG
TED Talks as an Emergent Genre
With millions of listeners and consumers in lecture halls and online—TED estimated the number of
views for November 2012 at 1 billion (<https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-talks>)
—TED talks are a new media success story. The characteristically short talks (which often deal with
issues of technology, entertainment, and design, or TED for short), together with the framing TED
conferences, have attracted much attention in the news, and increasingly, in academe. The first of the
now-biannual TED conferences was held in 1984 in Monterey, California. In just over thirty years,
these conferences have produced independently-organized offshoots, so-called TEDx conferences, all
over the world. Today, TED and TEDx talks cover more than just technology, entertainment, and
design; they feature presentations about themes such as architecture, mental health, history, and
popular culture. When TED launched its website <http://www.ted.com> in 2006 and started uploading
videos of selected talks, TED entered a new phase of distribution. As a result, the talks have at least
two distinct and overlapping audiences. There is a primary audience at the conferences, and a
secondary audience for video recordings of conferences as they are published online on TED's own
website, its YouTube channel, a private website or blog. It is important to note, however, that not all
conference talks appear on the website, which means that the web presents a curated selection. In
other words, the conference attendees have access to talks that are not available to the virtual public.
Most observations and analyses focus on the educational quality of TED talks or the lack thereof.
The talks have been hailed, for example, as a "powerful way to convey an innovative idea to a giant
global audience" (Holly, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2013/11/14/so-you-want-to-
give-a-ted-talk/ - 660e87f030a9>), a "cultural touchstone" (Clark, <http://www.forbes.com/sites/dor
ieclark/2014/01/02/how-to-give-a-ted-worthy-talk/-3c7fa3195683>), and the "ultimate brain spa"
(Hendrickson, <http://www.ladiesdc.org/tedx-mid-atlantic-the-ultimate-brain-spa/>), while others
have called them "corporate, evangelical," and "noninclusive" (Jurgenson, <http://thenewinquiry.com
/essays/against-ted/>). Yet the talks are interesting for more than their educational value or their
viral spread. Increasingly, the talks have gained attention as a type of talk that can be seen as an
emergent discourse genre. In fact, many commentators use generic descriptors. Thus TED talks are
compared to "enthusiastic sales pitches" (Tsou, Thellwall, Mongeon, and Sugimoto, "A Community of
Curious Souls" 4), or "middlebrow megachurch infotainment" (Bratton,<https://www.theguardian.co
m/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted>).
The format of the conferences and associated talks caught on in public discourse to such a degree
that the moniker "TED talk," often capitalized, has turned into a recognizable label. The fact that TED
talks have not only become immensely popular but also associated with a valorized way of presenting
information can be seen in NPR's TED Radio Hour, a weekly nation-wide radio broadcast, the "Big Fat
Ideas" talk series on iTunesU, and books such as Carmine Gallo's Talk Like TED (2014). High school
and college teachers assign their students presentations, which are ostensibly modeled on TED talks
(See Reck; see also Janzen). Lastly, the critical uptake of TED is in full swing, with multiple parodies
using TED-inspired presentation templates, such as Bruce Feirstein and Walter Baumann's flowchart
illustration for Vanity Fair entitled "Ted-O-Matic" (Feirstein, "The Art" 115), or fully-performed mock
talks like the "Onion Talks."
It is only recently that academic writers have begun to discuss TED talks, mostly in regard to their
potential to inspire new forms of teaching (See Romanelli, Cain, and McNamara; See also Nicolle, Brit-
ton, Janakiram, and Robichaud), as a more or less successful catalyst for social change (See Denskus
and Esser), or as social-media phenomenon whose viewers and presenters can be analyzed using sta-
tistical methods (Sugimoto, Thelwall, Larivière, Tsou, Mongeon, and Benoit Macaluso; Tsou, Thelwall,
Mongeon, and Sugimoto). All these articles mention TED's schematized nature and list select charac-
teristics. Frank Romanelli, Jeff Cain, and Patrick McNamara, for example, observe that "TED Talks are
not as unstructured as they may appear. Presenters are well coached and instructed to follow a specif-
ic presentation formula" ("Should Ted Talks" 1). Sugimoto, Thelwall, Larivière, Tsou, Mongeon, and
Macaluso mention typical features such as "the use of satire, humor, and other forms of comedy," and
the time constraint of eighteen minutes ("Scientists Popularizing Science" 2). Eileen Nicolle, Emanuelle
Britton, Praseedha Janakiram, and Pierre-Marc Robichaud also note the eighteen-minute time limit as
characteristic. In addition, they highlight the "live audience" whose presence is a key element in TED
talks and the fact that presenters "talk passionately about their area of expertise" ("Using TED Talks"
777). Tsou, Thelwall, Mongeon, and Sugimoto discuss a thematic feature, namely the tendency of TED
presenters to talk about "weighty," potentially world-changing issues, often with a science background
("A Community of Curious Souls" 4). They also mention that TED speakers are overwhelmingly male
and that the talks fall "somewhere on a spectrum bookended by 'entertainment' and 'education'" (4).
Denskus and Esser analyze TED talks on international development and evaluate the extent to which
they promote long-lasting social change. The researchers consider TED a "mode of communication"
("Ted Talks on International Development" 2) which follows "a scripted logic" (8) and harkens back to
entertainment elements from American Idol (19), with its elements of theater and surprise. Despite
the general consensus among academics that TED talks are a genre, their generic nature is seldom
studied in its own right. A notable exception is a study by Stefania D'Avanzo that analyzes the extent
to which TED talks can be called "a new genre" ("Speaker Identity vs. Speaker Diversity" 281).
D'Avanzo speaks about TED talks as a genre that arises through a process of "hybridization" (281).
D'Avanzo's study is based on a large number of talks and evaluates them according to discursive ele-
ments such as hedges and boosters. While there is an overlap between D'Avanzo's findings and mine,