But: We live in a world of increasingly networked knowledge. And it’s a world that allows us to appreciate what has always been true: that new ideas are never sprung, fully formed, from the heads of the inventors who articulate them, but are always — always — the result of discourse and interaction and, in the broadest sense, conversation. The author-ized idea, claimed and owned and bought and sold, has been, it’s worth remembering, an accident of technology. Before print came along, ideas were conversational and free-wheeling and collective and, in a very real sense, “spreadable.” It wasn’t until Gutenberg that ideas could be both contained and mass-produced — and then converted, through that paradox, into commodities. TED’s notion of “ideas worth spreading” — the implication being that spreading is itself a work of hierarchy and curation — has its origins in a print-based world of bylines and copyrights. It insists that ideas are, in the digital world, what they have been in the analog: packagable and ownable and claimable.
” How TED Makes Ideas Smaller, The Atlantic. Cet article met le doigt sur quelque chose qui me chiffonnait depuis un moment. J’adore TED et leur intervenants sont souvent passionnants, mais c’est bon de rester critique quand on parle d’idées et qu’on les simplifie (forcément) en les réduisant à une personne.