TED Talk Analysis: John Green

The TED talk being analyzed can be found here.

John Green, critically acclaimed author of bestselling books The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and Paper Towns gave a TED talk in Indianapolis, Indiana in November 2012 to educate an audience of people, who potentially had no idea who he was, on the role of the internet on education. John Green also, fittingly enough, is known for making YouTube videos, many of them educational. The poise he has gained from regularly speaking to a large audience on the internet seems to translate well to his performance on the stage.

He uses natural hand gestures and body language to help convey both the message he is trying to get across and the emotions he feels towards said message. He is a very passionate speaker, and he uses his body language to show just how important he feels the creation and fostering of educational communities on the internet is, and how wide ranging the possibilities would be if we did create and foster said communities. 

He uses several forms of media to assist him in creating his narrative, particularly with his use of a physical map in the very beginning of the video and the multitude of pictures he showed on the projector screen behind him, such as the pictures he shows of the boarding school he went to and the different things he learned at said boarding school. He makes eye contact throughout the whole speech with neither an awkward moment of looking straight at one area or person for an extended period of time not a period of time in which his eyes nervously darted around the auditorium. He seemed completely composed despite being in front of a fairly large crowd of expectant and eagerly listening people. The content of his speech flowed fairly seamlessly, transitioning from discussing a particularly interesting phenomenon involving maps and cartography to discussing his own experience with the broad topic, education, behind said phenomenon. He then begins to discuss education as a whole and how he thinks we as a civilization should move forward with changing the mediums through which education occurs and changing the culture around education and learning, particularly through the use of educational communities. These communities can be in person, or more likely, on the internet. He then focuses on the possibilities that already exist due to the advent of the internet and those that could be created by the formation of these internet communities. He truly does a great job of making the listener care about what he has to say.