A quick glimpse into Guy Dickinson's restless mind
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Having known Guy Dickinson, the proprietor of this blog, for 6 or 7 years, I can tell you that this is a man whose thoughts are never still. He calls it ADD, (as if it was something that shoudl be medicated away) but it's more like he is carrying on a perpetual-motion conversation with the world; he is asking rapid-fire questions instead of taking-for-granted assumptions, and making his own suggestions instead of waiting for someone else's answers.
It's been a couple of months since he and I have spoken, mainly because I've been trudging through a death march project at work, but I realized how much I missed talking with him as soon as I started listening to Nicole Simon's wonderful interview with Guy just before the Reboot10 conference held this past week in Copenhagen. In a little more than 20 minutes, Nicole and Guy cover a universe of topics, from the paradoxical interactivity of micro-presentations, to the novelty of the age-old process of food gardening, to whether easy access to knowledge via Google is actually making us stupid, to how book technology has shaped literature, to how we all may profit by giving away some of our best ideas. It's well worth a listen.
Near the end of the interview, while talking about giving away ideas, I was reminded of a quotation by Thomas Jefferson which seems to me to support Guy's argument and to describe Guy to a certain extent, too.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
