Why Watch a Speaker Not Just Read His Speech

This is an illustration on how easy it is to misinterpret articles, opinions, and comments. I created an experiment for that. There was an article and the speech video We need to talk about TED by Benjamin Bratton. His article seemed ferocious to me while I was reading it. Then I watched him speaking in the video. I discovered something significant: we won’t see or feel the real emotion of a speaker just by what is written. We have to watch him actually speaking! Try this experiment:

Read his article here and don’t watch the video yet.
Then watch the video here
I hope you saw my point in the experiment.

The TED reference to my blog post

The Baloney Detection Kit
Detecting the ‘most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda’
Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking
‘In a chapter titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan reflects on the many types of deception to which we’re susceptible

‘Carl Sagan was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and common sense, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda…’
Sagan’s rules

Most Startling Tech Facts, Figures and Statistics from 2013 [INFOGRAPHIC]
‘Did you know that Harlem Shake got viral views of 1.2 billion users on YouTube in just 40 days. On the other hand a surprising 1,400,000 Tweets sent in just one hour about Sir Alex Ferguson’s Retirement. What if I told you that people sent 350 Million messages on Snapchat every day, that the maximum length of a video clip on Vine is 6 second or that retail sales for Grand Theft Auto Five reached 1,000,000,000 dollars in just 3 days. Whichever way you look at it, twenty thirteen has been full of startling events and wonderful facts – from gaming, communication and computing to gadgets, social media and careers; and from innovation, business and strategy to tech apps, start ups and digital media these two infographics from the Silicon Republic folks take a statical look at 100 most amazing numbers from the past 12 months…’
infographic

10 things I miss about old technology
By Scott Matteson
‘I’ve been reading the excellent book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie by Rob O’Hara and it has brought back a lot of happy recollections of computing in the 1980s. Since Rob was born in the early 1970’s like me, we both played a lot of the same games on the same computer systems. This book, in conjunction with shopping for tech gifts for my family (namely, iPad Minis for the kids), has provoked some nostalgia for the things I enjoyed during the olden days (hereby defined as the 1980s and 1990s) of technology, when I was a kid. Let’s take a look at my 10 favorite things!…’