You can find this TED talk at: http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/10/deb-roy/
Here is my response:
Deb Roy uses his prepared graphics in a very effective manner, refering to them often and using them to tell his story, but not relying on them entirely for his presentation. His passion is evident in his stance and in his voice. He gestures with his hands to show his points, adding further clarity to the demonstration. He also adds personal stories (caught on tape) that many people can relate to.
Far more important than his speaking style, however, is his message. He taped every moment of his son's life from the day they brought him home from the hospital until he went off to kindergarden. He then processed the data by transcripting it and could see exactly when his son began to utter each word, and how his pronounciation progressed throughout time. He could also pinpoint the rooms in which any word was said the most, the rooms with the most activity, etc. Then, he took this knowledge to a larger scale and applied it to mass media, charting how topics were exposed to people, how many times a given show or news story was mentioned on other channels and by other people, in effect examining the nature of language and where it comes from.
Language is very important to our lives today, in fact it is very difficult for most people to go without saying a simple common word, "like" for example. Many of us do not even realize how many times we use that word in a day, or how often we use it improperly. But our use of it had to come from somewhere, most likely the people around us, seeing as we are not born knowing how to speak. Deb Roy's research in this feild is amazing because it answers questions that many of us have wondered about, yet never really been able to answer. For example, I often find that I am speaking like someone else in my life would normally speak to me. Every once and a while I will say something and find myself thinking something like, "Wow, that sounded a lot like something so-and-so would have said...." Well, perhaps it is. According to Deb Roy, many of the ways his son began to speak mimicked the way his parents or nanny spoke, suggesting that not only language itself, but also the way that we use it is learned largely from those around us.
Another interesting idea that Deb Roy brings up is that there is also a similar ripple effect in mainstram culture and in our everyday lives. When you hear about something interesting, you tell someone else, when they hear it they tell another person. But when you think about where that information came from, it had to originally come from an idea that someone had. Usually to become wide spread, it is broadcast on TV or put on the internet, making it easy to track. In fact, so many people are online in the world today, that quite a lot of the way that we think as human beings could be gathered simply from what we post on the internet or send through a network that can be tracked. Some people find the notion that their phones and computers can be tracked a scary one, but I think that research such as Deb Roy's could shed some light on why we feel so violated when we realize that our internet is not entirely our own, and that yes, it is shared by millions of other people who can see it too.
Perhaps the internet is the key to understanding the human race. Perhaps security cameras hold secrets about how humans act, and really the answers to many of our problems lie inside our fears. Who knows?
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