TedX creates friction
More than 400 people filled Utah State University’s Performance Hall on Wednesday to listen to 15 live speeches and two musical performances over five hours for USU’s third annual TEDx event on Wednesday.
The theme was “friction,” which Scott Bates, the producer of the event, said was more of a template to guide the speakers in writing their talks than a strict rule to follow.
“I think there were a lot of themes running through these talks, and there were a lot of sub themes running through these talks,” said Bates, the associate vice president and associate dean for the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at USU.
Bates said among the sub-themes was education, as discussed by speakers David Brown, an associate professor of mathematics at USU, Nicole Martineau, an undergraduate at USU majoring in biology education, and novelist Orson Scott Card. He said another major sub-theme was vulnerability.
“The talks themselves are this act of getting out on a stage in front of 400 people and not relying on your notes from your class that you’ve been teaching for five years or two years or seventeen years,” Bates said. “It’s about, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea. I do this for a living, but this is what I’m gonna talk about. I’m a clinical therapist, but this is where I have failed.'”
Bates said only two of the speakers used the word “friction:” Jim Davis, a professor of strategic management at USU, and Noelle Pikus Pace, an athlete who won a silver medal in the Sochi Olympics.
Davis’ speech was about what it takes to be trusted. He said the components of trustworthiness are ability, benevolence and integrity.
Pace’s speech was about friction in life. She said the hardships that come should not keep anyone down.
“We can choose to always look back and be sad or upset or frustrated…or we can choose to look forward with hope,” said Pace during her speech.
According to the program handed out to the audience before the event, using social media was strongly encouraged.
“Unlike when you’re at a movie theater, we want for you to be on your smart phones and tablets,” the booklet said. “In fact, the ultimate success of a presentation depends on those in the audience sharing what they learned, disagreed with, loved or hated.”
USU journalism and communication professor Matthew LaPlante took this a step further during his speech. He turned one of the monitors into a live Twitter feed that displayed Tweets utilizing the hashtag #everyoneissuper.
Bates said one of the reasons for the push on social media is because the point of TedX is for the speeches to be recorded on videos and posted online. He said social media is a good way to promote them before they are posted.
“Social media can promote that notion of ‘This matters. This was amazing. This was something to see. Wait until you see this,'” Bates said.
Bates said another reason was to increase the interaction between audience members and the speakers in a suitable way for a setting that did not allow for questions and answers.
“It provides the in-house audience an experience to interact with the talks and each other in a way that is what the whole point of the program is,” Bates said. “It’s not just interesting talks. It is sharing ideas and letting them bounce off each other and sort of see what happens.”
One person who Tweeted throughout the event was Devon Anderson, a sophomore majoring in finance. In an e-mail, he said he Tweeted for the students who could not attend.
“I live Tweeted during TEDx so that the students that weren’t able to be a part of the event directly would be able to be a part of it anyway,” Anderson wrote.