In which ways TED can be seen as a intercultural event ? – Case study TEDx Macquarie University
Event Details
Time: Saturday 19 October 2013, 9:00am – 6:00pm
Location: Macquarie Theatre, Building W2.4A, Macquarie University
Ticket: $50 Students, $100 General Admission
Capacity: 500 seats
Cocktail Party: 6pm – 8pm
On Saturday 19 October 2013, we were privileged to attend the TedxMacquireUniversity intercultural event titled Futureproof held at the Macquire Theatre, Building W2.4A, Macquire University. TED, established way back in 1984, sells itself as a platform and global movement devoted on bringing about meaningful change through ‘ideas worth spreading’. TEDx stemmed from this spirit of TED’s mission and is thus meant to afford organization, communities, and individual the platform to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the grass root level. The TEDx events are sold as open-source, local- and community-driven events designed to inspire thought leadership, visionary insight and innovation. Therefore, TEDxMacquarieUniversity is an inspirational high-quality independently-run event (jointly organized by university administration and students), consisting of engaging talks, captivating performers, invigorating action projects, exhibitions. Our aim was to put all these to test by finding from the audience, guest speakers and organizers how TEDxMacquarieUniversity is an intercultural event and its place in bringing different cultures together.
Our group consisted of 3 female students: one from Australia, one from France, and one from Thailand (herein thereafter referred to as A, F, and T respectively). The event attracted the participation of a diversity of people ranging from young entrepreneurs to researchers to futurists to sustainable thinkers to scientists to share their unique insights on the topic of the day, future proof. Our decision to settle on the TEDx event from a long list of prospective other intercultural events across the length and breadth of Australia was informed by the fact the director of TEDxMcq, Lucas Berullier, happened to be a friend from Paris with the French member in our group. This would give us some leverage in securing interviews with the director himself, the quest speakers as well as the audience. In line with the theme of the event, we had ‘future-proofed’ our research as we guaranteed to get the material we needed to meet the objectives of our study from the word go.
The three of us arrived at Macquarie University at 9am for the whole-day event. A notification on the ticket had requested everyone to arrive no later than 9.30am so as to enable the event to begin on time. The events were scheduled to be held at the Macquarie Theatre on Building W2.4A, with full capacity audience of 500 people. In addition, some 40 volunteers and a team of 20 promoters were in attendance. We secured our seating positions somewhere in the middle of the auditorium, which gave us a vantage point to follow every bit of the proceedings.
The program was quite elaborate, split into four broad sessions with tea and lunch breaks in between. The first session was scheduled from 9.30am to 11am. The first order of the day was introduction and Welcome to Country. The event director, Mr. Lucas Berullier did the honors and welcomed all foreigners in attendance to Australia, Macquarie University, and the TEDx event for what he termed “Australia’s herb of knowledge and incubator for great ideas.” The director received a warm round of applause from the entire auditorium when he delighted in the fact that, since its inception in 2011, TEDx events had successfully grown almost 300% annually and a total of 500 tickets this year together with an online audience of approximately 100,000 viewers. Probably this was our first hint to the TEDx’s multiculturalism or ability to bring together peoples of different cultures.
Mr. Berullier then got down to the real business by introducing the theme of this year’s TEDx event: FUTUREPROOF. He brought the audience’s attention to the fact that we currently live in a world obsessed with short-term fixes which we perceive as ‘good enough.’ He challenged us to imagine a world in which people deliberately tailored solutions with the future in mind; if organizations pursued a ‘future proofing’ policy designed to minimize all potential negative consequences. He wondered if we could have seen the infamous 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis at the horizon had we ‘future-proofed.’ Similarly, would we have averted the current environmental problems or a world presently challenged by two conflicting phenomena of food shortage and food wastage in different quarters of the world? Before handing the floor to the first performer, Mr. Berullier challenged us to ask ourselves of the possibility to seize opportunities whenever they arise while protecting our future simultaneously.
The first performance was by Emrys Quin, an Australian young poet, playwright and prose writer based in Sydney. He recited his hilarious and insightful futureproof prose passage. The first guest speaker on stage was Allan Pease, famously known as ‘Mr. Body Language”, who invited a few people in the audience on stage for funny demonstrations to drive his point home about futureproofing. Daniel Elison then recounted an motivational personal account and challenged us to imagine a world in which we are all the “true authors of our choices”. Jodie Sangster, originally from the UK before moving to Australia and then to the US, then gave us all a lesson in data and the reason “we need to make sure we embrace it and are not scared by it”. Ians Lyons was next on stage and demonstrated to us some interesting futureproof drone technology. To cap the first session, we were entertained by the beautiful voice of Emma Louis Birdsall, the star from Channel 9’s The Voice, which left us with some goose bumps. At 11am, we proceeded for the a 30 minutes’ tea break where we had coffee, muffins and fruits in the courtyard before experiencing some amazing student artwork from different nationalities in the entrance hall.
Methodology
The research methodology we chose to employ for our study was observation and face-to-face interviews. As we took part in the TedxMacquireUniversity event, we were keen to observe the interactions of other participants. Our objective here was to observe the different communication conventions of the participants in terms their different speech styles and response behaviors. However, feedbacks to our research questions would be enabled by face-to-face interviews with the participants. We adopted the conversational form of interview in both the individual and group interviews we conducted outside the theatre. While the interviews with the rest of the audience would be impromptu, our interviews with the TEDx director, one guest speaker and one performer were secured beforehand. During all interviews, each of the three of us would have a specific role: ‘A’ would pose the questions; ‘F’ would take notes; while ‘T’ would record the interview with the help of a voice recorder. Respondents would be informed beforehand of the objective of the study and required to give verbal consent (to be voice recorded). A consenting respondent would then first be asked to state their nationality or ethnicity which would be taken to represent their cultures and used to map their intercultural communication at the TEDx event. We agreed to sample a total of 30 respondents of the 500 people in attendance.
We used the greater part of the half hour first tea break to conduct interviews with members of the audience. Of the 16 participants we managed to interview, we sought their opinion on how the TEDx event was intercultural and how it helped to bring people of different backgrounds together. One respondent, originally from the UK, said the TedxMacquireUniversity event “enabled her to meet different people and get an idea or two about their cultural beliefs in a social setting.” Her Australian friend expressed her belief that engaging with culturally different people at the TEDx event would improve her attitude about others. The event, she reckoned, positively contributed to her openness, curiosity and to overcome her prejudices about others. Yet another respondent from China was upbeat in the intercultural of the TEDx event saying that “this event improves my intercultural skills in that I learn the communication styles of other communities especially their non-verbal techniques.” A French participant we were privileged to interview lauded the event as the place for improving one’s cultural awareness – “TEDx enables different guys from different places to develop respect for otherness, understand different people and communicate with others without criticizing or denigrating them.”
The moment of highlight during Session 2 was during John Stinton’s “Luck is just a 4 letters Word” speech. Known for creating events, facilitation sessions and design shops that bring people together to share ideas and inspire progress and 2012 winner of “Stella Fella” award and ambassador for anti-human trafficking, Stinton pulled a first one by proposing to his girlfriend on stage! The bride and a few in the audience were moved to tears, including T. during the one and half hour lunch break, we had our interview with the TEDx Macquarie University 2013 director and curator, Mr. Lucas Berullier.
It was interesting to learn from him that he was of French and Italian descent. He said that TEDx events embody multiculturalism in every starting with the different sponsors to international students on the team who play a significant role in spreading news about the event to potential presenters from their home countries. He positively described Macquire University that hosts TEDx events as “a creative, friendly and international institution that opens doors to opportunistic students from all over the word and afford them a chance to freely express and develop themselves.” The TEDx director also added that “Our Global Leadership Program is also testament to the diversity of TEDx, as there twenty board members of different cultural backgrounds that help out with volunteers.” Berullier further exuded confidence that TEDx will continue to appeal to more and more people around the world and that he was impressed at the sheer number of nationalities that had turned out for this year’s event.
Our next interviewee during the lunch break was Max Randall a.k.a The Chelsea Joker, a magic performer who entertained us at the beginning of Session 2. He started by informing us his multiculturalism, that he was born and raised in London. He then took cognizant of the fact that the TEDx event had invited entertainers from different walk of life to perform, thus staying true to the spirit of multiculturalism. Our third prominent respondent was guest speaker Jeremy Liddle, widely known for his specialty in the art of ‘Entrepreneurial Thinking’. The Australian lauded the TEDx event for promoting multiculturalism by getting together lots of entrepreneurs and professionals to share ideas with both the auditorium audience and thousands over the Internet. He compared TEDx with the “The Entrourage” UnConvention and his own ENYA (The Enterprise Network for Young Australians). The entrepreneurial maniac concluded the interview with the statement: “I love consulting entrepreneurs from different parts of the world at every chance I get, and TEDx has given that opportunity.”
The Macquiarie University Singers Group, a multicultural choir itself under the patronage of their performance coordinator Roberto, opened the third session with a spectacular performance. We used the half hour break after Session 3 to conduct a number of individual and group interviews. In Session 4, Jeremy Liddle made a case of the potential of entrepreneurial thinking to address the imminent youth unemployment crisis in many countries around the world. The curtains came down with a vote of thanks from the curators and team and invitation to a cocktail party thereafter.
Theoretical framework
Findings of our study revealed that the TedxMacquireUniversity event to fit into Bhabba’s (1990) ‘Third Space’ theory, in which conventional boundaries of intercultural communication were replaced by new forms of communications that required new practices, identities and representations (Bergan & Restoueix 2009, p.75). At the beginning of the event in the Macquire Theatre, the lady ushering the first speaker to the stage stated: ” To all of you who have your phone turned on, please do not turn it off ! We want you to tweet as much as you want about TEDx Mcq during the event, we want you to take picture and post them on Facebook etc”. The rationale here was to take advantage of the new social media phenomenon in having an audience of active cultural participants (Samovar et al. 2012, p.82). This underscores the growing adoption of new social media in intercultural communication. It is now commonplace for participants in a multicultural event to make use of such social networking sites as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Netflix and blogs to relay to the outside world the proceedings (Cheong et al. 2012, p.68).
The event also supported Joseph Walther’s Social Information Processing Theory (SIP), an interpersonal communication theory that explains how different people get know each other online and develop and manage communication in computer-mediated environment (Gudykunst 2003, p.51). This was especially the case in the Macquire Theatre where the cameras were directly linked to other cities and the theatre audience was to “hi” to other audiences on a number of occasions.
The communication at TEDx also borrows elements of Hall’s (1976) high-context and low-context theory of intercultural communication. According to Hall, meaning in high-context societies stems from the context of a given event or situation and messages are largely fluid as the interpretation depends on the situation at present and personal relationships (Diluzio et al 2001, p.68). The target group of the TEDx can be said to be in a high-context culture with access to new social media technologies such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.
In conducting our interviews, we were inspired by Ib Andersen’s theory on personal interviews, which translates that our interviews were somewhat structured (Jandt 2010, p.82). This means that we had specific number of questions about multiculturalism of the TEDx event, but we left room for new information and perspectives that the respondents would care to add.
Conclusion
Our research findings pertaining to the multiculturalism of the TedxMacquireUniversity event leave us convinced that indeed the event was multicultural event with definite elements of intercultural communication. The pool of TedxMacquireUniversity ambassadors is constituted of university students from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds, who ensured smooth running of the event by creating exceptional experience for the attendees of the day. The TEDx Global Leadership Team, the guest speakers, invited entertainers, and the participants were people from different walks of life in terms of cultural backgrounds. The diversity of the event was also evident from the responses of our 30 interviewees outside the Macquire Theatre. The theoretical framework of this research also adds credence to the multiculturalism of TEDx by linking it with a number of intercultural communication theories.
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