Analyzing a TED Talk - Allison Butler

The other day, I sat down and watched a Ted Talk entitled “Why thinking you’re ugly is bad for you.” This title caught my eye because I think it addresses in issue everyone struggles with on some level, but especially the young girls I work with on Girls on the Run. This talk was given by Meaghan Ramsey on the TED stage in September of 2014. She has credibility with this issue because of her work with the Dove Self-Esteem Project. She presented this topic to the TED audience and to inform them, and the many that have watched her video online since, about the dangerous consequences of low self-esteem. I don’t know much about the audience she was speaking to, but she did a good job of making everything simple enough that anyone could understand her points.

                  She opened the talk in a very light-hearted way, by showing a picture of her infant niece and telling a sweet story about her niece kissing and giggling at her reflection. I liked this opening, because it warmed the audience up to the speaker and you could immediately see how it related to her topic. She then immediately goes into another story, this time about a young girl feeling ugly and turning to social media for feedback. This story is very different than the last, but it also captures the audience’s emotional attention. It leaves us feeling like we care and want to hear a solution. Throughout her storytelling, the speaker did a good job of shifting her eye contact throughout the audience and changing her inflection to fit the mood of each story she told. Even though I was watching on a computer screen, I felt connected to the speaker, which made want to keep listening.  

                  She then goes into detailing the pressures of social media today’s youth face daily, and creates public resonance by showing shocking pictures that bombard kids which we have all probably seen before on social media. Below is a screenshot from Ramsey’s TED Talk. (http://www.ted.com/talks/meaghan_ramsey_why_thinking_you_re_ugly_is_bad_for_you#t-203720).

                  After showing this image along with a few others, she gives many surprising statistics about how low self-esteem related to appearance affects academics. These statistics both interest the audience and give credibility to the speaker.

                  The main critique I have about this speech comes toward the end, when the speaker gives some statistics about absenteeism in women and then jumps to some conclusions about how this might affect our economy. Although she didn’t really say anything concrete, what she was implying seemed like a bit of a far cry from the statistics she gave, although I did understand where she was coming from.

                  Overall, I thought the talk was really good. She started out with an emotionally stimulating introduction, backed it up with statistics and finished with three main points for a solution. As we have learned, three is a good number of points that people will focus on and remember. The speaker also ended with a screen that showed the picture of her niece from the beginning with the hashtag #kissthemirror. I thought this was a very effective conclusion, that tied the whole talk together and gave a key phrase to remember the talk by. She didn’t use the full eighteen minutes that a normal TED Talk uses, but I thought the twelve minutes she did use were timed nicely and I don’t think she necessarily needed the last six minutes. Other than the potential slippery slope in the middle, I found this talk to be both interesting and informative, and there is a lot to learn from it.