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From: Rodney Ward Category: Art Date: 22 July 2009 Time: 11:12 AM Review: Who watches TED? Online stay-at-home types with idealism roseying up the lenses. Its a heady mix on the surface, most often featuring some loathsome, self regarding brat out to save a charitable cause or the James Dyeson's of this outsourced tax avoiding world, you have big abstract ideas, usually humanistic, about everyone getting along marvelously and an agenda that is set up by positing individual objectives, by individual I mean separate or disconnected. Usually these objectives are semiotics stretched to the limit, and in this example Gordon Brown, Britains last proper grammar schoolboy attempts to better his slimey comprehensive near do well from across the tracks the nice honourable Toady Blair (now replaced by shiney faced tory David Thing) Gordons vision of a new world is scant on detail, he builds up great slabs of history by using the black and white photograph of the Vietnamese girl, napalmed and running screaming, naked in the hell of another post colonial war. He quotes unlinked passages about the slavery trade in the West, he implicates the West, he references another picture on the powerpoint presenter, this ones in colour, it shows a woman who died in front of the cameras, killed by a sniper in yet another post colonial war but Gordon is talking about the humanistic criteria, the evocative connection between these dreadful occourences and the global, yes the Global network of consciousness, he compares the work of pamphleteers going from door to door in the old days with a contemporary coup inspired by mass texting, witnesses using their mobile phones to photograph ballot papers in Zimbabwe, well TED is about technology and design but a politician cannot choose to make neutral remarks until he is deselected, he should be encouraging everyone to be political about everything not euphemistically sitting on the branch of a tree he himself is sawing off. He talks of Cicero, arms extended out front loader style with hands crooked inwards towards his double breasted wardrobe, stolidity, confidently he paints a picture that hedges at solving the misery of the world inflicted on 11 year old, aids infected orphans, and other bitterly patronizing anecdotal statements that he shamelessly provenances from the tortured dead, who lay in vain waiting for the United Nations to save them...but they died. No mention of whose munitions were to blame, whose allegiances helped to incur such terror, no mention of the wars in this decade carried out in the name of the great false notion they call security, just this insistence that technology will save us. If we all have mobile phones and ID cards, no mention of the economic miracle that provides careers for all these phone contract bill's to pay. Finding solace on channel TED emphasizes how few are the options this man actually has, anyone can inflate the optimism of spin with Star Wars scenarios, I was looking for something a little closer to the reality of existence, after all, is'nt design supposed to engender a core of social commitment?