TEDGlobal2009 and the Substance of Things Unseen

TED is maybe the best known gathering of creatives in the world. Each year, tens of millions of people watch TEDTalks for free online, but only a few lucky thousand get to attend one of their few events.

TEDGlobal is an annual conference held at Oxford University in the United Kingdom each year, and is meant as a gateway into a world of big ideas and passionate people. The event is just beginning and even from thousands of miles away, I can begin to feel the excitement creeping into blogs, tweets, and the social-intellectual ether. I've got some major, major envy.

I absolutely love this year's theme, "The Substance of Things Unseen." This purposefully open theme is quintessential TED; subtle enough to allow for an incredible variety of conversations, but with a common thread that plays on the imagination.

I have been thinking about "The Substance of Things Unseen" with even more regularity than normal lately. Immersed in the exhilarating chaos of leaving one life to start anew two-thirds of a country away is exactly the type of experience that breeds an incredible reflection and introspection about meaning, purpose, and what's next.

My favorite blog post to come out of the event so far is "The Books of Oxford," a reflection by a frogdesigner about seeing the Magna Carta, a Gutenburg Bible, and some of the other treasures of Oxford's Bodleian library. The post asks what it is about seeing those incredible works in the flesh - despite the fact that almost no one can read them any more and that perfectly good modern translations of the words exist.

For my part, I think it's because history - particularly history of that order and magnitude have a way of making us feel small. Not small in the sense of meaningless, but small in the sense that we are part of something much bigger. That feeling is at once overwhelming and reassuring that we cannot possibly understand or control everything.

TED is ever more active in translating the power of their big ideas to the social realm. This is particularly embodied in their TEDGlobal Fellows, which gives incredible folks like Appfrica's Jonathan Gosier the chance to participate in TED events.

What's more an event so fluid with the ideas of the day cannot help but deal with the enormous magnitude of global problems. In the first day of the event today, surprise speaker Prime Minister Gordon Brown (yes, you read that right) talked about the need for new institutions to combat the challenges we face. His assertion is that pictures, words, and other media have immense power to change the way we think about the world and it's our obligation to harness the full capacity of modern media to make good on that potential.

And that's why I love next year's TEDGlobal theme, announced yesterday. "And Now The Good News" will be all about sharing those stories that paint a very different picture of the promise and potential of the future that we just tend not to hear as much these days.

For now though, enjoy the incredible outputs from what promises to be an inspiring week.