At TED, changing the future of the world is entertainment

(continued from previous page)

One of those women speaking the TED conference was Scranton, director of The War Tapes, a documentary featuring video from American soldiers in Iraq.

The War Tapes debuted last year at the Tribeca Film Festival and won an award for best documentary feature. Scranton discussed how she couldn't have told the story of those soldiers' lives without technology and the Internet.

For her project, nearly a dozen soldiers used Sony cameras and Microsoft Vista software to film their Iraq experiences. Scranton said her film crew saved 3,211 of the soldiers' e-mails, instant messages and text messages, and installed cameras on the military Humvees for real-time video that captured "that intimacy" of the war and the soldiers' experiences.

Scranton commented on the detachment of the war from Americans' day-to-day lives. "There's such a disconnect," she said. "People can go for days here and not feel like there's a war going on."

Scranton added that she's asking people who say they're against the war but support the soldiers to do something to demonstrate that support. "I challenge us to operationalize those terms."

The talk given by J.J. Abrams was comparatively lighter in tone. The Hollywood impresario behind TV hits Lost and Alias joked on stage that a lot of people ask him, "What the hell is that island? No seriously, what the hell is that island?"

Abrams traced his fascination with mysteries to his childhood, when his grandfather introduced him to a Super 8 camera and a Tannen's Mystery Box of tricks, which Abrams still hasn't opened.

"I love the design of this thing," Abrams said. "It represents something important to me; it represents my grandfather. It represents infinite possibility, hope and potential...Mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do. The mystery box is inside all of us."

Abrams used this anecdote as segue to discussing what he said is proving to be the biggest magic box today in the entertainment business: technology. "The most incredible mystery now is what I think is happening with technology. Technology is democratizing the creation of media."

For his part, Spore creator Wright hopes technology will do more than democratize media. He wants the game to inspire a generation to invent a new future.

Spore, expected to launch this fall, encourages players to grow from a microbe to a land-based creature, and eventually to explore and colonize space, as technology and business moguls like Virgin CEO Richard Branson are trying to do today. But gamers can also play with simple weather systems, the dynamics of the world and the geology of innumerable planets within it.

"Most games put players in the role of (Star Wars') Luke Skywalker. This is about putting the player in the role of George Lucas," Wright said.