New Trends in Knowledge Dissemination: TED Talks

This paper investigates the key elements of ethos, pathos and logos linguistic strategies as some main features of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks, popularizing speeches aiming at Knowledge Dissemination. Through a comparison between the TED Talk ‘HIV - How to fight an epidemic of bad laws’, by Shereen El-Feki (2012a), and another speech held by the same author at the 2012 Symposia The Global Commission on HIV and the Law, addressed to specialists, the paper analyses TED Talks as an innovative tool of popularization, which breaches the typical triangularisation ‘scientist-mediator-audience’, bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences. Drawing upon Aristotle’s three pillars of rhetoric, the paper analyses the strategies used to establish the ethos of the speech, by proposing a topic as morally worth of spreading; pathos, by creating a direct contact with the public; and logos, investigated through an analysis of the elements used to recontextualise scientific discourses into popularized speeches. The analysis suggests that TED Talks are a recodification, not a mere translation of texts; they are a means to disseminate knowledge reducing the asymmetry between audiences and scientists.