[CONTRAST Interview] TED Founder Richard Saul Wurman: On Writing, Information and Understanding 2/2
In 1984, Richard Saul Wurman invented TED as a “personal journey to observe a convergence of three areas of focus in our society” :
Technology business,
Entertainment industry, and
Design professions
30 years after TED’s inception, the journey continued.
In September, 2012 in Redlands, Calif., Wurman launched The WWW Conference. While TED is known for its 18-minute, stand-alone speech, WWW features totally improvised conversation.
I was part of the WWW Conference team and interviewed Wurman before the conference took place, from China.
This is the Part II of the interview.
Maggie Xiao: I noticed you have very special ways of writing and speaking, like you just did. Do you read and write poems? Do you think poems are very important to our modern life in the future?
Richard Wurman: Oh. Well, …. You have that book I gave to you, 33. And you’ve seen the description of (the) WWW (conference)?
Maggie Xiao: yes
(At the WWW Conference: E. O. Wilson and Craig Venter. Photo by Jon Kamen.)
RSW: Neither of those are written. They are transcribed from my conversation.
I believe that one of the greatest inventions of all time, human inventions, and in fact it’s the most human thing we do. The most human thing we do is not, building cars or, making clothes or, anything else. The most human thing we do is conversing with each other,..we talk to each other, we have conversations with each other.
Those conversations between people are the essence of new ideas. It’s Steve Jobs and Wozniak inventing the first Macintosh. It’s Watson and Crick discovering DNA. It’s the whole gang of people with Einstein , Finen and all those people inventing a common energy and breaking the atom. It’s two people, three people, talking and generating back and forth in a conversation, flowering, the seeding of an idea. …..
The tone that you talk about is trying to do a tone where people hear what you’ve written. I think that breaks through much of the wall that we have between reading and understanding. Hearing and understanding.
If you hear in a conversational human way, it’s an embrace of humanity. When you’re lectured to or you’re told you have to do this, you have to do that, it doesn’t quite go in and I’m all about understanding.
Understanding is really a warm word and it can be data, it can be information, it can be questions, but what it all leads to is understanding.
I’ve also thought that there’s two roots of two really important English words and maybe this won’t work in Chinese (so you have to struggle with it). But we have a word ‘information’, information age, everything is information and more than half of that word is ‘inform’ and if the stuff in front of you doesn’t inform you, doesn’t really go in, I don’t think it should be labeled as ‘information’, it should be labeled as data, d-a-t-a.
Also a fundamental part of our understanding comes from trying personally to find out something and we have the word ‘question’ but more than half of that word, is the word ‘quest’ and quest is a personal thing, a personal quest to finding out how to, how to be informed and how to understand.
So the root of two of the most common English words, inform, quest, have become more a part of my personal vocabulary.
Maggie Xiao: Great!
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