about what I’m thinking about that day. Last week I gave an hour-and-a-half talk in Lisbon. It was a branch of MIT students and entrepreneurs who are getting their masters and doctorates in various entrepreneur things and technology things. I talked a lot about how we measure earthquakes, because I was fascinated that a huge earthquake had occurred in 1755 in Lisbon. [Laughs.] It wasn’t what I went there to talk about.
How do meeting organizers usually react to that? I have more invitations to speak than I accept.
You coined the term “information anxiety,” and wrote a whole book about it. Do meetings and conferences have a role to play in terms of alleviating that condition? Well, the term information anxiety is somewhat misunder- stood. The reason we feel anxiety is because we call everything we see information, and yet it’s not understandable. It’s not your own fault; you shouldn’t feel anxious or guilty if things are presented to you in a way that you can’t understand. But we’ve been led to believe that if we read the front page of the newspaper we should be able to understand the articles be- cause it’s information, and if we can’t there’s something wrong with us. No, there’s something wrong with how it’s written. It’s mostly that things are not presented in a way that sinks in, that you can explain to a literate 12-year-old.
Are meetings and conferences part of the problem? Well, most presentations aren’t terribly good. There are a certain number of presentations at TED that are not good, now and then. There are some amazingly good presentations now, and there were some amazingly good presentations in the past. Part of that is helped by how it’s set up to allow people to actually tell a story, to not talk too long, to have a welcome audience, and to set them up in not that kind of pretentious keynote way of selling. A lot of people at TED and at most conferences are up there selling something. They’re selling their services, selling a charity, selling being a do-gooder. It’s more interesting to me when you talk about your passion. Some of the most interesting presentations at TED were
people not talking about what they thought people did. One time, the head guy who came up with all the basic technological ideas for Microsoft — Nathan Myhrvold — gave a speech, and I said, “Please don’t mention the word Microsoft, and don’t tell me about Microsoft. Tell me about your passion.” And he gave a brilliant hour-long talk called “How Do Dinosaurs Fu*k?” It was so good that they immediately interviewed him and did a whole profile on him in The New Yorker, and the first line was based on his TEDTalk. He was an unknown person up until then. The founder of Adobe — I said [to him], “I would love to
have you talk, but you can’t talk about Adobe or software.” So he brought a couple million dollars’ worth of first-edition scientific books that he collected, and he showed these books with an overhead projector. It was fascinating. It was his passion. You learned more about Adobe and more about
him doing that than any other thing. You learn more about Microsoft by realizing this is the kind of people they have working there.
What do you think about the growing use of social media and other technologies to promote and even conduct meetings? The only way a 76-year-old man living in semi-isolation in Newport, R.I., can have the arrogance without a staff of saying he’s going to do a conference in a year and get the word out and hopefully get some people to be able to monetize it by buying an app or by streaming it — is because of social media. I sent [a notice about the WWW.WWW Conference] out to my Facebook list, and then asked people to send it around. It’s all social media. What I’m doing is completely based on something I couldn’t have done 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. The response to the WWW Conference has been amazing — magnitudes above what I thought it would be.
Any ideas for other conferences you’d like to create? I am working on another conference that would occur in 2013. I really can’t tell you now, but it is a conference about prophecy. Not in a religious sense. Everybody’s predictions are wrong, so I want to do a conference about predictions.
Is the challenge to not be overly literal-minded when it comes to figuring out the relevance of your programming to your audience? The basic program is what interests me, not what interests the audience. I never think about the audience. The audience is absolutely immaterial to me. If it interests me, I know it’ll interest the audience. I don’t try to make the audience interested. There’s the Heisenberg effect: If a cameraman goes into a riot, the riot changes. If I think about what the audience wants, it’ll change how I program the conference. See, everything I told you today was counterintuitive.
But you have to work at being counterintuitive? No, that’s the way I am. I have to work just to control my terror. I don’t know another way of working. I get great joy out of it, but great discomfort, too. But I want to do good work. n
u Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene. pcma convene September 2011 91