Here is One Just For Fun

        I frequently use mass media for entertainment.  On a daily bases I watch TV shows on Netflix, catch up with friends on Facebook, and many other things.  Because of this I decided that my last blog about TED would be a fun one.  The TED talk I watched was called, "The Shared Experience of Absurdity." The speaker Charlie Todd talked about and showed videos of him doing things in public that were meant to be enjoyment for other people.  My favorite and most funny video he showed in my opinion was him standing on a subway not wearing any pants only underwear.  The video was funny and entertaining, it was exactly what I like to use mass media for, entertainment. 

 

        I highly recommend you to watch this video, just for the enjoyment.  It is not the funniest video I have ever seen but it is amusing.  This blog is meant to explore mass media, and entertainment is a huge part of the mass media experience, so here is that entertainment, with no pants and everything.  

Here is a link to his talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html

TED's Significance to the World

           TED's entire goal is spreading ideas to millions of people, and not only spreading them but also funding them.  TED has created a mass media outlet that is very significant to changing the world through the ideas they spread and the money they give.  TED annually gives away a prize to one of their speakers who has a worth $1 million.  TED gives this prize to who they think had the greatest idea of that year and is used to fulfill the idea laid out by that speaker.  Sugata Mitra was the 2013 winner of the TED prize.  I watched his talk to learn more about his goal and it is a great one.  His goal is to create a school in the cloud.  In his talk, "Build a School in the Cloud," he explains his plan to connect educators to students online, specifically with students in India who don't have the opportunity to meet with educators in person. 

 

            This talk uses mass media in several ways to fulfill a significant mission meant to change the world, and that without the technology would be impossible.  Not only did Mitra use TED to spread his idea, his idea utilizes mass media, the internet, in order to spread education across the world. 

Mitra's Talk that won the award:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

Motivation Comes From Having No Motivation?

A very inspiring and interesting TED talk I watched recently is called, "The Puzzle of Motivation."  The speaker Dan Pink starts talking about a social experiment that has been repeated for almost forty years, and the conclusion to that experiment is that people given an incentive to finish a task faster actually finished slower than people who were just asked to finish the same task with no incentive.  He goes on to explain how this is not how the working world today operates, people are incentivized to work hard and to

finish a task.  This seemed abstract to me and I couldn't believe it until he gave a real world example that coincidently dealt with a mass media outlet.  He used an example of Encarta and Wikipedia.  I had never heard of Encarta and I use Wikipedia on almost a daily bases.  He explained that Microsoft created Encarta and there was a huge team of paid professionals to put the encyclopedia together, while Wikipedia doesn't pay anybody to write articles and anybody can write articles.  Encarta stopped operating in 2009 and Wikipedia is a very well known encyclopedia that has over 30 million articles.

            This TED talk was exactly what TED was designed to do.  It presented a very good idea that is not used in the world today and could change the entire way the workforce can operate.  This is what makes TED so great, it gives many different people a way to communicate their ideas through mass media and those ideas could potentially change the world.  

Here is a link to this talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Introduction to TED

            TED is a nonprofit organization set on spreading ideas.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, which refers to the topics that TED was first dedicated to.  Since TED's founding in 1984 it has spread to cover a wide range of topics that are given in 18 minute or less presentations.  TED has grown to a point where they can say they are truly spreading ideas with having over one billion views as of November 13th, 2012.  

          

  TED events bring speakers together who come from across all different types of fields and offer many different ideas.  Some of the recent talks I have watched cover topics of IQ through out the generations, changing how schooling should work, design, and even pick pocketing.   TED also brings many famous speakers such as David Blaine, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Clinton to spread their ideas.  

            My first experience with TED was seeing it in the app store on my iPad.  I opened up the details and it seemed interesting enough for me to download it, plus it was free.  I watched several videos on it that were interesting but at about 18 minutes a peace I got bored with it.  This assignment got me interested in TED again.  I've been watching several TED videos and been really enjoying them.  I have a list that I want to watch but at 18 minutes a peace it will take me a long time to watch.  I will talk about a couple of my favorites in other posts. 

            TED has become very significant in the media world because it has created a place that people can come and communicate ideas from all sorts of backgrounds, and spread them to millions of people.  Sometimes these ideas are nothing more than entertainment but others are ideas that if acted upon could significantly change the world, a few of my favorites of this type are, "The Levitating Superconductor," which shows how vehicles in the future could hover and have zero energy loss, and Bill Clinton's, "My Wish: Rebuilding Rwanda."

In the 29 years TED has been around they have uploaded more than 1,500 videos, and has had over one billion views.  TED is available all over the world, and works hard on translating there talks into more then 40 languages.  TED has spread phenomenal ideas throughout the world, that it could not have done without the mass media outlet.  

What is this is all about?

This is a project for my mass communication class, meant to submerse me into a form of mass communication.   In the rest of my posts I will be focusing on specific aspects of mass communication the first being TED Global.  The rest of my posts I haven't decided on yet but will range anywhere from inventors of mass communication devices like Samuel Morse to Guglielmo Marconi and other modern day mass communication outlets such as Napster, Twitter, and so on.