TEDx Sydney is in town but why is everyone so obsessed with TED?

IT attracts heavyweights like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Alain de Botton to share their ideas. But why does everyone have a cult-like awe of TED?

The TED circus has rolled into town with TEDx Sydney due to take place this Saturday under the sails of the Opera House. So be prepared for people to wax lyrical about ideas. Ideas to change the world, ideas to engage the community and ideas to inspire yourself.

TED (technology, entertainment and design) conferences have attracted heavyweights the likes of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Richard Dawkins and Jane Goodall to tell everyone about their ideas.

So yeah, ideas. It is, after all, TED’s ethos — “Ideas worth spreading”.

The global phenomenon that is TED now is fascinating precisely because its focus is something as cerebral and intangible as ideas. But that’s exactly why TED has inspired an almost cult-like awe among its followers.

Clock onto the TED website and you can find intelligent talks on almost any topic ranging from neuroscience to bees. Best of all, you can learn about something interesting from the best in the field in less than 20 minutes instead of slaving away through a small-print academic textbook.

But it’s not supposed to be just about self-education. The more grandiose aspect of TED’s mission is that those very ideas will get people working on how to improve the world through science, technology and people. It even hands out three annual $100,000 prizes to people to actualise their ideas.

The audience at TEDx Sydney last year. Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans.

So you can see why hordes of aspirational and well-meaning people globally have clung onto TED like it’s the second coming.

TED has actually been around for 30 years but only really gained momentum in the last few years when the previously exclusive enclave started releasing videos of “TED talks” online in 2006 for anyone with an internet connection to access.

On Saturday, more than 2,500 people will flock to TEDx Sydney, part of the global network of licensed TED events. Tens of thousands more are expected to engage with the Sydney event through web streams on multiple platforms and through satellite events.

Now in its fifth year, TEDx Sydney moved from Carriageworks to its larger Opera House home last year. Videos from the Sydney events have been viewed online more than 18 million times. Globally, TED talks have been viewed online more than a billion times.

Tickets to TEDx Sydney cost $250 but unlike concerts, theatre or just about anything else, they’re not doled out on a first-come-first-served basis. TEDx Sydney, like TED conferences, doesn’t just curate what you see and hear but also who gets to see and hear it in person.

TEDx Sydney is taking over the town. Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans.

The live audience is curated to ensure diversity and that it represents, in the words of TEDx Sydney editorial director Edwina Throsby, “the city’s most engaged and intellectually dynamic people”.

The idea (there’s that word again) is to stir engagement and conversation among those in attendance. So in order to gain admittance to the gathering, attendees must apply. Apart from standard geographical and career-related questions, hopeful TEDx attendees are asked to talk about themselves and how they can contribute to the TED community.

TEDx Sydney licensee Remo Giuffre said: “People aren’t there to be passive recipients. People are there to be interesting people doing interesting things. They’re there to be curious and engaged and having great conversations in the coffee line.”

Ms Throsby told news.com.au it’s hard to generalise the TEDx audience beyond that they tend to be well-educated generalists, people who are interested in a variety of things.

Remo Giuffre brought TEDx to Sydney five years ago. Photo: Jennifer Polixenni Brankin

As a local event, TEDx Sydney strives to showcase Australian talent. As such, all the speakers are either Australian or have a strong connection to Australia. Some of them fly in from overseas, an opportunity for the intellectual diaspora to come home and talk about their ideas.

This year, the line-up includes author and academic Adam Alter whose focus is on the subconscious things that drive our decision-making, Canberra teenager Jake Coppinger who has developed a gesture control glove, retired state coroner Mary Jerram, public high school principal Jihad Dib, Kabul-based not-for-profit founder OIiver Percovich and writer Markus Zusak of The Book Thief fame.

There will also be performances from the likes of Megan Washington, Black Arm Band, Nigel Westlake and Lior.

The power of the global TED brand is a marketing boon for the Sydney event with all tickets sold out before the speakers had even been announced.

But while ticket sales is not a pressure point, Ms Throsby, who curates the event, said there are enormous expectations that TEDx Sydney will be thought-provoking and challenging.

Ms Throsby added: “I think what TED has done really successfully is demonstrate a good and complex idea can be expressed in 18 minutes or less without dumbing down or patronising your audience.”

Megan Washington will perform at TEDx Sydney on Saturday.

TED talks online has also coincides at a time when the internet has facilitated more peer-to-peer learning and a culture of sharing ideas.

But as with anything that is successful, TED does attract criticism with detractors labelling the gathering elitist and smug.

The official TED conferences in California come with a price tag of $6,000 and it is invite only. Critics have wondered how a social movement which claims to be inclusive can so exclusive. The flip side is the TED talks are now accessible to everyone online and the high cost of the tickets pays for the mechanisms to disseminate the ideas widely.

A few months back, an associate professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, Benjamin Bratton, used his TEDx San Diego to slam TED talks for oversimplifying big ideas.

Mr Bratton said at the time: “This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather this is one of our most frightening problems.”

He said TED was “middlebrow, megachurch, infotainment”.

That the TED website has its own “Debuking a few TED myths” page is telling. The organisation identified what it termed as common misconceptions — that it is elitist, biased, full of pseudoscience and rich.

But none of that seems to bother the thousands of people who eagerly take part in TED and TEDx conferences or the millions who devour the videos online.

To watch webstreams of TEDx Sydney on Saturday, click here.