Journalist and writer Markos Kounalakis, who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Media and Communication Studies, and András Simonyi, former ambassador of Hungary to the USA, presented a talk at the TEDxDanubia event on 23 September, in which they did not just talk but also played music.
Simonyi and Kounalakis argued that rock and roll should take much credit for helping bring down the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe, since it connected a generation across the East-West divide. Today's rock and roll, a life changing medium, metaphorically speaking is probably the most social of media, they argued.
Markos Kounalakis is a print and network broadcast journalist and author who covered wars and revolutions, both civil and technological. He reported the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan for Newsweek and NBC Radio. He has written three books, co-authoring "Beyond Spin: The Power of Strategic Corporate Journalism," and he is President and Publisher Emeritus of the Washington Monthly.
TedXDanubia is an independently organized conference, held in the spirit and under the umbrella of the famous annual TED Conference, where some of the leading thinkers and doers of the world, such as Bill Gates and Al Gore, have taken their turn to do an 18 minute-talk.