群贤厦大考研网：考研英语《经济学人》阅读：TED产业.doc

考研英语《经济学人》阅读：TED产业欣欣向荣Ideas reinvenTED 来源： 作者：群贤厦大考研网 浏览：218 次 发布时间：2014/3/29 Ideas reinvenTED TED has revolutionised the ideas industry, in part by putting old wine in new bottles THE first TED conference in 1984 was such a damp squib that the organisers did not hold a second one for six years. Today TED is the Goliath of the ideas industry. The heart of the enterprise is TED's twice-yearly conference at which big ideas are presented in short, punchy talks. On March 17th-21st， around 1,200 TEDsters will gather in Vancouver to listen to the likes of Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte celebrating TED's 30th birthday and thinking great thoughts. The conference has also spawned an array of businesses, albeit not-for-profit ones. The organisation has built an electronic warehouse of more than 1,700 previous talks, at TED.com. These are free to view and, so far, they have been watched nearly 2 billion times. It has generated a mass movement: volunteers have put on more than 9,000 TED-like events called TEDx in 150 or so countries since 2009. It has established a TED prize, a TED fellowship programme and a line of TED e-books. And it has become a central part of the world's star-making machinery: an invitation to speak at TED can turn an obscure academic into a superstar guru and a struggling journalist into a celebrated writer. Such success has inevitably produced a backlash. Critics dismiss TED as the Starbucks of intellectual life. Evgeny Morozov, a technology pundit, says it has become something ludicrous, and a little sinister. Benjamin Bratton, a sociologist, goes further and suggests that TED is a recipe for civilisational disaster. In his view TED really stands for middlebrow, megachurch infotainment. The Onion, a satirical website, has produced a series of Onion talks including A future where all robots have penises. There is certainly some truth in these criticisms: any organisation that invites Sting to its 30th birthday party is in dang