High Quentinity

“You start being happier the moment you cease seeing yourself as the main character of your own narrative”

WARNING: this video is truly charming and even features some French people actually talking some proper English. Shocking I know!

I just read a very inspiring article published in Google’s great ‘Think Quarterly: The Speed Issue’. In this article Jeff Jarvis tries to open our eyes on the potential massive disruption(s) that the internet will bring. In his mind, what is still-to-come, is an even bigger more fundamental shift for our societies. I definitely agree with everything he says there and strongly recommend you to read this article.

Beyond this, what struck me as a new very accurate and relevant idea is ‘the Gutenberg parenthesis’. I felt like it needed to be popularized as much as possible, and Jarvis has it like this: 

A group of academics at the University of Southern Denmark argues that we are emerging from the other side of what they call ‘the Gutenberg parenthesis.’ Before Gutenberg, knowledge was passed mouth-to-mouth, scribe-to-scribe, changing along the way with little sense of authorship. Inside the parenthesis, with the press, knowledge became linear, permanent, more a product than a process, with clear ownership.

More than five centuries later, they say we are emerging from the other side of the parenthesis. Now knowledge is again passed along, remixed as it goes, with less sense of ownership: It’s process over product. In his upcoming book Too Big to Know , David Weinberger sketches a vision of knowledge that is too big for libraries, institutions, or our heads. ‘Knowledge is now the property of the network,’ he writes. ‘The smartest person in the room is the room itself.’

Visually speaking, it probably looks a bit like that:

Bonus making of.