Has TED Jumped the Shark?

In popular culture the term “Jumping the shark” has been coined to describe the change in momentum. The term is derived from the American TV show “Happy Days” and describes a scene in the beginning of the fifth season where the  lead character “Fonzie” jumps over a shark on water skies (Youtube). This is the moment in a cultural phenomenon where the decline starts. As was the case with the TV Show which by popular consensus never regained the edgy and creative nerve of the first seasons.

Recently it has become a question if the term can also be applied to the TED Talks. The concept behind TED Talks is to take all the leading people in diverse fields such as Technology, Entertainment and Design and let them share their experiences in 18-minute performance-presentations at an annual conference.

The annual conference has taken place every year since 1990 and has now reached a volume of more than 250 contributors every year. So the backlog of inspirational speakers is huge (this spreadsheet has some good suggestions about where to start if you're just coming on board).

So with numbers such as that it gets hard to keep finding new surprising, innovative and creative talents. And there have been signs of imminent sharks to jump.

Recently there was the controversy around Nick Hanauer’s censured talk “Rich people don’t create jobs”. I put “controversy” and “censured” in italics because the controversy was created by Nick Hanauer, when TED Talks did not want to feature his talk on the homepage. The fact that you don’t want to make something you bought available to the public for free is as much censorship as watching a documentary on KONY 2012 is humanitarian work.
Two years ago there was a similar incident with Sarah Silverman’s TED Talk. Sarah Silverman is a polarizing comedian who has made a career out of saying things that are completely socially unacceptable. So of course her TED Talk was anything but socially acceptable, and afterwards Chris Anderson went out of his way afterwards to call it “god awful” on his Twitter account (before changing his mind and deleting his tweet).

In both cases my problem is; why were these people invited? I couldn’t understand in the first place why they invited Sarah Silverman, but it didn’t make it any better that Chris Anderson chose to stab her in the back after her presentation. That is really not nice. And Nick Hanauer’s presentation did include “arguments that were unconvincing” as Chris Anderson puts it in his reply. But why was Nick Hanauer invited in the first place?

I still think there are many great TED Talks to look forward to in the future. But I do have a little plea to the organizers: In the future when you invite people please make sure to invite the originators instead of the impostors.

In other words: More Michael Hedges, less Kaki King.