Sophia Rodriguez

Summary Response #5

TED Talks as an Emerging Genre

Julia Ludewig

Purdue Univeristy

Julia Ludewig, "TED Talks as an Emergent Genre" CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 19.1 (2017)

Volume 19 Issue 1 (March 2017) Article 2 Julia Ludewig, "TED Talks as an Emergent Genre"

Summary

Julia Ludewig takes 14 TED Talks and studies their connection with today’s society, concluding that it is a recent genre that we must consider. The effect of these TED Talks are so powerful and, of course, emergent in the world. She categorizes this genre into three major components that most, if not all, TED Talks fall under. She begins by describing the number of high increase in watchers and listeners of TED Talks. The audience, she notes, has significantly increased over the years. And a major factor of such increase is the fact that even though the TED website began in 2006 as Technology, Entertainment, and Design, over the years, the topics have spread so broad and so vast that you can find almost any topic. This powerful way of spreading ideas creates a great impact on communities.

For that reason, Julia Ludwig began dissecting and inspecting the genre itself. Ludwig began to study each of these 14 TED Talks and tried to not only establish a pattern of genres and themes approached, but also the way they are approached: with humor, with anecdotes, with specific emotions, ethos, etc. She goes into detail on each of these patterns and genres, bringing attention to the importance of the rise in TED Talks and just like books, movies, articles, and other types of communication eventually become so popular that the works themselves form these genres.

 Response

These TED Talks are a new form of research, of exploration, and I can only imagine how much further we can expand these TED Talks or even create something better in the future. I think it is interesting how as the years go by, there are always great inventions in the forms of communications, always something that gets better and improves our ways of researching and communicating our ideas with each other. There is always something that is invented or improved in our world that makes our sharing of our ideas easier and better spread throughout the world. I think it’s so great how we can actually make so much out of small websites like how TED Talks started. Overall, even though Ludwig doesn’t discover the genres, nor does she create them, she does bring light to these rising topics that are very important and without people like her, we probably would not be conscious of these genres being created. 

by Sophia Rodriguez