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Welcome to my TED Talk
If I was really good at this, I would structure my TED Talk in terms of my TED Talk, but I haven't prepared that far. I am speaking in favor of "the PowerPoint style" of communication, meaning a series of micro-episodes: small consumable chunks of digestible content, with a discernible start and finish, before rolling to the next chunk. While somewhat contemptible, acknowledged, I still find this style admirable in terms of effectiveness, particularly across wide swathes of humanity. The goal is not to teach or to learn, but to inspire; there is no serious knowledge transfer or epistemology happening here.
The Postal Service
The postal service is either a band or the mail carrier, who delivers my mail from point A (my house) to point B (the round file). Not exactly. The postal service is a conveyance along a series or network of posts. There is an inherent contradiction, in that posts do not move, by definition, yet that fact is essential to their nature at conveyance. One type of post is a stake in the ground (Latin: postis); the post we care about means a fixed place (Latin: positum), like a trading post or combat post or outpost. The premise of a postal service is that a message (or physical item) must be transported further than a normal human can travel in a day's time. Without a series of fixed posts (like huts or cabins or stables or inns or taverns), a messenger must forage, sleep, and defend their mission solo, vulnerable, and often defenseless, hungry, cold, wet, tired.
Horses changed the game in Persian and later Roman times, and they remained relevant through the Pony Express in USA frontier times. The implication is that a single messenger or rider would ride a horse to exhaustion until the next post, at which point the horse would rest, and either a new rider or the same exhausted rider would swap to a new, rested horse, and continue to the next post. This provided an astonishing messaging speed to those unaccustomed to the large amount of infrastructure necessary to sustain such an effort.
I tried to give an example of two angles or aspects of "the postal service" above, in the micro episodic format. If I were making an actual PowerPoint slide deck, for the first paragraph, I would have a single slide with mostly photos, 1-3. And a couple bullet points with key phrases.
THE POSTAL SERVICE
Primary distinction: The post stays. The message travels.
THE HORSE
Primary distinction: Replace the horse, not the journey.
Notice we have a series of distinctions. You have a lot of runway if you structure your talk or slide deck as a series of important distinctions. A messenger carries a message unlike a mother carries a fetus. Multiple messengers can speed the process. Is it series or parallel?
Lemony Snickets: A Series of Important Distinctions
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