TEDx Brighton: Videos online for viewing

The theme – Reasons to be Cheerful: An Optimistic Look Forward – leaves one wondering what exactly the speakers will deliver. In today’s political and economic climate any chance of optimism is a welcome relief from the gloom and doom presented by the media.

Wanting a glimpse of the promised cheer, I chose two talks that I thought might resonate most closely with my own life: Sue Bradley’s Carrogance and Dr.David Bramwell’s Number 9 Bus to Utopia.

I chose Sue’s to view first because she has been heading up the Creative Partnerships programme – a programme which sends artists into schools to work with the academic staff to enhance and deepen the students’ experience of the curriculum. I was particularly curious as to how she would tackle the cheerful topic seeing as her programme has just been cut! As an artist viewing it, I was pleased that someone has studied the gulf that exists between artists and business people, though I wasn’t left feeling incredibly optimistic that a bridge is going to be built any time soon! (And if it is, you can bet it’ll be built by volunteers as long as we have the Eton boys millionaires’ debating club holding the purse strings!)

I chose David’s talk next because I was curious to hear about his quest for Utopia. Although his talk comes off a bit like a travelogue for a privileged hippy, I like his conclusion – and as I’ll probably never get to visit any of the places he talks about (would I want to? perhaps – if someone paid me to go and visit as a journalist), “Dr. Bramwell’s how-I-spent-my-year-off-after-my-relationship-split slide show and talk” is worthy of the 20 minutes it takes to get to his Utopia!  Though he doesn’t tell us exactly where to catch the number 9 bus, he does point us in the general direction!

I’ll probably view the others at some time in the future, though I have to say, none of them is presenting with an infectious optimism that has me panting to press play! Hmmmm…I guess it’s not easy to put on a TEDx event – especially one that was free for the audience, with thanks to local sponsors – nor is it easy to find good speakers (for free), nor is it easy to choose a topic, and one which the speakers can easily fulfil – and when all that is done, nor is it easy to convincingly communicate the essence of each speaker’s talk in a few words. So for all my pessimism, hats off to the TEDx team for even attempting to communicate some optimism by putting on the talks, and getting them filmed and online for viewing! BRAVO!

You can check out the talks HERE .

What do you think?