It started off harmlessly enough, my obsession with online lectures. A few TED talks a week between e-mails, until I had gone through the entire TED back-catalog. By then I had grown tired of the format – the applause intro, the smug cleverness of the speakers, the shallow content and short timeframe. TED was intellectualism for kids, I decided, and searched on for meatier content.
Next I found the RSA, one of those ancient British societies where the great thinkers of the Victorian era would return from traveling the world to proclaim their theories and discoveries. They still do, and their talks are available in weekly videos and audio recordings. These days the RSA is where non-fiction writers go to talk about their new books, which saves you the trouble of actually reading them (who has the time when there are so many lectures to listen to?). Through the RSA I discovered the great John Gray (whose books I actually did read), who pulls back the curtain on the myths and illusions of these pre-apocalyptic times.
The speaker’s circuit seems to go from the RSA to the London School of Economics, where the same authors talk for a bit longer and throw in a few extra facts and figures to match the institution. The LSE also features (unsurprisingly) many economists. I’ve lost count of the number of analyses of the Global Financial Crisis I’ve heard in the past two years, most of which say we shouldn’t listen to economists. But it isn’t all numbers and neoliberals at the LSE, there are plenty of challenging thinkers calling us to action, particularly the spectacular Slavoj Zizek, whose basic request is for us to give communism another go. (Incidentally the LSE just held a literary festival, the lectures from which are up on the site now. Anyone interested in the future of the publishing industry should have a listen to these two in particular.).
Sadly the LSE and RSA update their lectures only two or three times a week. As an addict, I need a daily hit. Thankfully there’ always Democracy Now, the hourly news broadcast from New York hosted by Amy Goodman. It’s the antidote to mainstream media, revealing all those terrible happenings in far-flung parts of the world you rarely hear about. Sure it’s biased toward “progressive” tendencies, but perhaps bias is necessary to balance the slanting ship. And at least once every couple of months, you get to hear the soothing gravelly voice of Noam Chomsky explain how the world really works.
Oh there’s more – Yale’s Academic Earth, The Sydney Institute and SlowTV for an Australian angle, SubMediaTV for when Democracy Now isn’t radical enough. I’m not the only lecture addict; plenty of others are also listening to them. Some sites have caught on to the popularity of their lectures and are now charging for them. The site FORA.TV, once free, now asks a monthly fee to download their mp3s. They’ve also bought up the rights to the lectures from a lot of other institutions and sites that used to give them away.
I listen to them all drone away as I ride my bike, work out at the gym, wash the dishes, cook dinner. At some point I realized that lectures had become white noise playing in the background of my daily life. There are times where I find myself half way through a lecture without having absorbed a single word. Once I listened to a complete lecture before realizing I had actually played it once before, without capturing any of the content. Like an addict I’ve overdosed, and the drug doesn’t work like it used to. It doesn’t stop me imbibing.
