TED Talks as Life Writing: Online and Offline Activism

ABSTRACT

The peculiar format of the TED talk lends itself particularly well to human rights advocacy campaigns. Advocates worldwide need to present a self in consonance with the ideals they uphold. A TED talk, characterised by condensing information in a manner conducive to capturing the interest of an international audience and in just over 15 to 20 minutes on average, is an opportunity for activists to represent – and identify – themselves with a very simple and distinct memorable message. A determining factor of TED talks is the memoir detail the speakers exploit in a sort of rags-to-riches narrative, where overcoming difficulty and finding success are recurrent tropes. This article explores two case studies – two North Korean young women defectors and their TED/TEDx talks. Reading their TED talks as examples of human rights life writing showcases an interesting move on the part of activists towards online platforms that may allow for immediacy and reach. The technological affordances TED provides, such as the interactive mechanisms that facilitate comments and replies, match the activist agenda of reaching wider audiences, informing the public of the transgressions they denounce. These rights activists’ self-presentation acts are shaped by an emotional discourse to gain the support they seek.

KEYWORDS:

• TED talks
• life writing
• human rights activism
• online/offline

Acknowledgements

This article was first presented at the 2017 IABA-Europe Conference at King’s College London. I am grateful to all those who gave feedback and helped to shape the final article. I am also indebted to Clare Brant and Max Saunders, co-directors of the Centre for Life-Writing Research based at KCL, where I conducted the bulk of this research during a visiting fellowship January–June 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ana Belén Martínez García is a PhD assistant professor in the English Department of ISSA at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) and belongs to the newly formed Research Group on Autobiography Studies (GRINEA). She did her PhD thesis on comparative literature in the Department of English Studies at the University of Oviedo (2010). Her research has focused on issues of identity, from the point of view of socio-cultural, gender and performativity studies. She is currently writing on human rights life narratives and the relationship between social justice and empathy.

ORCID

Ana Belén Martínez García http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7494-6670

Notes

1. In a recent illuminating article, Julia Ludewig (2017) has tracked discursive characteristics of TED talks, among them resorting to tropes common in memoir and relying on highly emotional language.

2. Keen (2008) had previously theorised narrative empathy as producing tangible effects on readers of fiction. However, in her article ‘Life Writing and the Empathetic Circle’ (2016), she discusses how it might apply to nonfiction texts, notably life writing in the context of human rights transgressions.

3. See also Emberley (2009) and Moore (2008) for further reading on the construction of childhood embedded in humanitarian discourse.

4. This and subsequent views data were last updated on 31 October 2017.

5. Note that the original title of the talk was ‘Nothing is Forever’ (‘Yeonmi Park’ 2017).

6. Other famous testimonial accounts such as Rigoberta Menchú’s have been controversial due to accusations of untruth. For a recent exploration of this topic in relation to gender and race stereotypes, see Gilmore’s Tainted Witness (2017) and her refined assessment of Menchú as a ‘tainted witness’ in need of reinstatement as ‘witness’ (59).

7. The time constraint of 18 minutes maximum has been discussed, among others, by Sugimoto and Thelwall (2013), as well as Nicolle et al. (2014) (quoted in Ludewig 2017, 2).

8. In her discussion of recurrent features of TED talks, Ludewig addresses this strategic deployment of emotions: ‘It is not uncommon to witness speakers tearing up during their presentations’ (2017, 6).

9. For further discussions of ‘empathic identification’, see also Whitlock (2015, 9); Smith and Watson (2010, 133–134).

10. For further discussions of humanitarianism and ethics, see, for example, Boltanski (1999); Hesford (2011); Goldberg and Moore (2012); Slaughter (2009).

11. See Schaffer and Smith’s (2004) Human Rights and Narrated Lives for a discussion of paratexts in human rights life narratives online and offline.

12. See Denskus and Esser (2014) for a discussion of TED talks and their potential for social change.

13. See also Moeller (1999) for an in-depth study of the notion of compassion fatigue and the media.