One matter on which there seems to be no disagreement: TED, today, can make you a star.

TED is a private event that faces the public through its 18-minute-long TED talks -- viewed over 500 million times since they were first put online, wonderfully free of charge, in the summer of 2006. It has pioneered the return of the lecture format in an age that would seem to make that format obsolete. And in converting itself from an exclusive conference to an open platform, TED has become something else, too: one of the most institutionalized systems we have for idea-dissemination in the digital age. To express an idea in the form of a TED talk (and: to sell an idea in the form of a TED talk) is one of the ultimate validations the bustling, chaotic marketplace of ideas can bestow upon one of its denizens. A TED-talked idea is a validated idea. It is, in its way, peer-reviewed.



But the ideas spread through TED, of course, aren't just ideas; they're branded ideas. Packaged ideas. They are ideas stamped not just with the imprimatur of the TED conference and all (the good! the bad! the magical! the miraculous!) that it represents; they're defined as well -- and more directly -- by the person, which is to say the persona, of the speaker who presents them. It's not just "the filter bubble"; it's Eli Pariser on the filter bubble. It's not just the power of introversion in an extrovert-optimized world; it's Susan Cain on the power of introversion. And Seth Godin on digital tribes. And Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce marketing. And Chris Anderson on the long tail.

For a platform that sells itself as a manifestation of digital possibility, this approach is surprisingly anachronistic. (Even, you might say, Chautauquan.) In the past, sure, we have insistently associated ideas with the people who first articulated them. Darwin's theory of evolution. Einstein's theory of relativity. Cartesian dualism. Jungian psychology. And on and on and on. (Möbius' strip!) Big ideas have their origin myths, and, historically, those myths have involved the assumption of singular epiphany and individual enlightenment.

But: We live in a world of increasingly networked knowledge. And it's a world that allows us to appreciate what has always been true: that new ideas are never sprung, fully formed, from the heads of the inventors who articulate them, but are always -- always -- the result of discourse and interaction and, in the broadest sense, conversation. The author-ized idea, claimed and owned and bought and sold, has been, it's worth remembering, an accident of technology. Before print came along, ideas were conversational and free-wheeling and collective and, in a very real sense, "spreadable." It wasn't until Gutenberg that ideas could be both contained and mass-produced -- and then converted, through that paradox, into commodities. TED's notion of "ideas worth spreading" -- the implication being that spreading is itself a work of hierarchy and curation -- has its origins in a print-based world of bylines and copyrights. It insists that ideas are, in the digital world, what they have been in the analog: packagable and ownable and claimable.