PART I

CHAPTER I
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
PART 2
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue
1NTERACTIVITY
The Business ofInteractivity
The Biology ofInteractivity
Person, Real and Virtual
Presence, Real and Virtual
HYPERTEXTUALITY
All About Hypertext
The Future of News
The Future of the Book
Museums, Real and Virtual,
and the Tyranny of "Point of View"
IX
xv
XXI
3
17
37
57
77
97
107
12
5
PART 3 CONNECTIVITY
CHAPTER 9 Web ness
141
CHAPTER IO The Connected Economy 161
CHAPTER II Planetization
177
CHAPTER 12 Thinking the Earth
191
APPENDIX Test Cases in Connected Intelligence:
How to Run a Productive Workshop
197
Notes
21
9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COMMUNICATUS
INTERR PTUS
I
CELEBRATE November 5 as the day when, in I988, something
ridiculous and grandiose happened to me and to fifty of Canada
and France's most innovative artists and tdecom engineers. We
were performing one of the world's first video conferences for the
am in front of 1000 people (600 in Toronto and 400 in Paris).
T here were two huge video screens, one at the Ontario Science Cen-
tre and the other at the Centre franc;ais du commerce exterieur.
oug Hamburg, in Paris, was dancing with Eve Lenczner in
Toronto. Hardly into the first thirty seconds of this "transinteractive
pas de deux" appropriately called "The Dawn of the New Age"
Doug's arm stretched from Paris ro Eve Lenczner in Toronto became
frozen in to the characteristic patterns of jittering pixels which clearly
indicates that you have just lost your connection to the satellite. We
learned later that a drunken driver had hit a pylon carrying power to
us Sprint's uplink earth station in Staten. We lost our satellite signal
only rhirty seconds into a two-hour show.
Two years of preparation wasted, over $100,000 down the drain
and a cast of a hundred artists, engineers, and technicians stranded
on both sides of the Atlanric. Well not quite. The show wenr on. The
sevenreen transinteractive performances turned our ro be JUSt as in-
reresting in their simpler local interactive mode as jf they had been
performed across the ocean. The overflowing audience at borh sites
remained in their seats unril the end, as jfthe fact that the connection
LX
x CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
across the Atlantic did not work, didn't matter. It was the poetry of
the idea that counted. I, personally, was by the whole
thing, but, i "sPIte of serving_Ille wi!:h vet:ifl._cation
of MurRhx's Law ("if it can down
1
tt wiTI at thd
/ time . .. "), my disk?i:Jr to be a
As Eckart Wintzen, the celebrated founder of BSO, a Dutch Sys-
tem Integration Company now restructured under the name Ori-
gin, recounted to me, Joel de Rosnay, one of the main sponsors of
the event on rheFrench side, and a guest of the 1989 Infolutie, called
it a Eckart, with his typically visionary approach to
technology, saw something interestingly "communicational" in
Transinteractivity and invited me to the 1990 Infolutie on Commu-
nications. For the 1991 Infolutie, Eckart asked fI)..e to write Brain-
book for Orig!!2:
Willy Melgert, who was then Vice-President, Public Relations, of
Bso/Origin, asked me to write the second, this one. He suggested
that I collect all the papers of the talks I had given in connection
with Origin and its clients and put them in a book. So this book is a
reflection of my enduring relationship to the Netherlands and to the
people and the organizations who helped me to write it by stimulat-
ing my thinking. I would like to thank all the persons and organiza-
tions who put me on the track of new thoughts and the audiences
who patiently listened to me thinking aloud. As each chapter reflects
different influences, just like the poet Franc;:ois Villon used to dedi-
cate each strophe to different people, I would like to dedicate each
chapter to those who were my inspiration.
The introduction is dedicated to Willy Melgert who helped me
shape the whole book, but I also remember fondly my students at
the McLuhan Program who taught me about the Net and my under-
graduates in the Department of French at the University of Toronto,
who make me think about their future which is so evidently tied to
and culture. t u \ . . e
I began to focus on the theme of mteraCtlVlty to esnmate the fu-
Jure of television, partly thanks to the invitation of Stefano Marzano,
Vice-President of Design at Philips (Eindhoven). Stefano asked me
COMMUNICATUS INTERRUPTUS XI
to imagine what would become of television once it went "interac-
tive." "The Biology ofInteractivity," was inspired by all the artists I
mention in the chapter and many more, but especially by the vibrant
Dutch art and technology scene. For example, I gave several talks
and wrote papers for the V2 Organisatie which was first located in
's-Hertogenbosch, and is now in Rotterdam. It is also in Rotterdam
that ISEA, the International Symposium for the Electronic Arts, and
DEAF, the Dutch Electronic Arts Foundation, were created and I am
grateful to Alex Adriaansens, V2'S director, who, along with people
such as Caroline Nevejan and Marlene Stikker, at the famous Par-
adiso, and De Balie, and now at the Wang (Society for Old and New
Media), and also Rene Coelho at the Montevideo Gallery in Amster-
dam, who continue for Holland what they have done for me, that is
to accelerate the understanding of what is happening at the edge of
technology, through the study of the artS. At the same time I would
like to recall here, among many other outstanding and deeply inspir-
ing art and biology: events in Holland, the beautiful and ephemeral
"Brain, Internal A f t a l ~ ~ at the Beatrixziekenhuis in Gorinchem, a
show that was placed in the older building of the hospital destined
for demolition and which lasted until the old building came down.
This was another great idea by Suzanne Oxenaar, founder-creator of
the celebrated Supper Club, and of the Aha! group. The McLuhan
Program's video-conferencing participation to the events surround-
ing this epoch-making show were superbly assisted by my friend
Louis Molnar.
? Chapter 3, "Person, Real and Virtual," is dedicated to Pier Boss-
cher and Marije Dippe from the Dutch Congress Buro who got me
going on comparing human and technological networks. Chapter 4,
on telepresence has to be dedicated to Geke van Dijk and her mag-
nificent team, from the Amsterdam Cultural Studies Interactive. In
collaboration with the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam
and the McLuhan Program and with the support of Bso/Origin
and Telindus, among others, Acs-interactive organized "The World
Series in Culture and Technology" during the fall of 1995. A video-
conferencing link with Toronto (the McLuhan Program) enabled
XlI CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the audience at three different Dutch universities (Amsterdam, Delft
and Groningen) to "attend." The guest speakers had the opportunity
to exchange their thoughts and ideas on the various themes by way
of presentations from the different locations. These presentations
were followed by a debate in which members of the audiences were
invited to engage. Each week an artist was invited to perform an ex-
periment using the video-conferencing link. My warmest thanks to
Geke and also her able assistants Karl Koch and Bas Rijmakers, and
to the chairman Patrice Riemans, to Gertjan Broekman, who ran the
Delft end of the operation, and to Eric Kluitenberg who took charge
of the Groningen end.
q For all of Part 2, I want to thank Wolter's Kluwer's CEO, Cornelius
Brakel, Joost Kist, and Jeff van Gool from the Nederlands Biblio-
theek en Laktuur Centrum who, in the course of a few months di-
rected my attention squarely on the future of books. Another
constant source of inspiration for its many experimental forays into
CD-ROM and Web sites is Mediamatic and its Balzacian director,
William Velthoven. To him and to the remarkable team of vpro, the
Netherlands most innovative independent television production
team, I dedicated the chapter on the future of news.
Chapter 8, on the future of museums, is dedicated to my Dutch-
Canadian colleague at the McLuhan Program, Professor Kim H.
Veltman, a Friesen in fact (an origin which, apparently explains
everything in the Netherlands), who, by working untiringly on find-
ing ways to put the contents of museums and galleries on line, has
kept me and the program abreast of the most cutting edge on-line
technologies.
\0 I learned about connectedness by watching Marlene Stikker and
Felipe Rodriguez demonstrate Digitale Stad, Amsterdam on-line,
the first virtual city on-line, a full year before the Web made its pub-
lic appearance. "The Connected Economy" is dedicated to John
Thackara, and to the Netherlands Design Institute where I discov-
ered the real art of brainstorming with Caroline Neyejan, Helen and
Loes Vreedeveld, and Conny Bakker, as well as Josephine Grieve, Jill
Scott, Ross Harley, who along with Chris Ryan, Catherine Murphy,
COMMUNICATUS INTERRUPTUS XIII
and other Australian friends later in Melbourne, first taught me the
rudiments of applied connected intelligence.
\\ The next chapter goes to Eckart Wintzen whose series ofInfolu-
tie conferences for BSO, and later Origin, revealed to me the Intelli-
gence of Business. I am indebted to Eric Kluitenberg for inviting me
to Groningen and introducing me to SCAN and to its director. This
visit led me to write the chapter on Planetization. I must also thank
here Patrice Riemans for a tonic reminder of not letting my overly
positive approach carry me away.
'I'\. The last chapter, ''Thinking the Earth" is dedicated to Holland
where that kind of thinking has been going on for centuries, and to
Canada too.
\') During the time I wrote the book, I had much help and support
first from the publishing team, Wim de Ridder and Ms. Elizabeth
Jonkman, of SMO, and from a lengthy and rich discussion with two
of the three translators, Eli ten Lohuis and Rene Wezel. At the Ori-
gin office, I received help as well from Yvette Schuyl and Keejet
Philippens. At the Toronto end I would like to recognize first, my
publisher, Patrick Crean, from Somerville House Books, who has
supported my work for a long time and my editor, Wade Rowland
who generously shares his writing skills and expertise in communica-
tion technologies with me. I want to thank as well, my research assis-
tants Derek Robinson and the two junior McLuhan Fellows from
Cologne, Oliver Brink and Henrik Greisner. I would also like to
thank for their administrative support Kathryn Carveth and Roger
Bannister. Many people have made suggestions in conversation or
have commented on different parts of the book; among these, I
would like to thank Chris Neal, Sally Grande, Takeshi Amano,
Wade Rowland again, Brian Alger, who e-mailed lengthy and valu-
able observations, Cattle Ken, the McLuhan Program Web master,
Kaja Kruus (a graduate student who introduced me to the Internet),
Amanda Brown, Henriette Gezundhajt, Diana Platts, Susan Fast,
Johanne Besnard, Tom Strong, and Jose Mourao whose paper on hy-
pertextualliterature written while he was at the program as a Senior
McLuhan Fellow, was an inspiration to my own chapter on the same
XIV CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
theme. Another Senior McLuhan Fellow, Bob Mcllwraith, devel-
oped the notion of the "feelings economy" from his association with
the Program. And then, there is my wife, Mamie, to whom I dedi-
cate the whole book, because without her, I would not be in the posi-
tion to write a book at all.
Toronto, March I3, I997
INT R O D U C T I O N
BY WA D E RO W LA ND
T
HE BOOK you have in YOUt hands (so much more convenient
than a lapwp!) is an informed, highly creative, and wholly
credible exercise in near-term prophecy; an argument for, and
a poetic proclamation of, the existence of an emergent property
called connected It is also a call to action, because as
Derrick de Kerckhove writes:
With [he common nervous system and senses of the world pop-
. ulation now in the care of satellites, and with machines approxi-
mating the condition of mind and the minds of humans
conneering across time and space, rhe furure can and should be
more a fu'atter of than of destiI!l.
The notion of emergent properties is one.rhat from the new
J Jf II " 1...1 .... J
science of Chaos Theory, which in turn nas been maae possible by our
recently acquired ability to examine the inner workings of seemingly
random or chaotic systems, using he formidable calculating power of
electronic computers. The classical science of Newwn was initially
constructed on linear equatiQo_s and predictable, cloc iWoik
because that was how science believed the universe worked. Increas-
ingly, though, it became evidem mat chaotic systems-in which equa-
tions were nonlinear and in which he relationship between cause and
effect could be wildly disproportionate, allowing for many surprising
xv
XVI CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
things to happen-were the rule in nature, rather than the excep-
tion. Science had been looking for the keys to the universe beneath
the street lamp oflinear equations and static, predictable systems be-
cause that was where the light was best, where the tools available to
them worked. But the keys were to be found elsewhere.
The physics of quantum nearly a century old
and still unshaken, tells us that nothing happens- in the universe
without in some way affecting everything else. It also tells us that the
fundamental constituent of the universe is something closely akin to
information; an insubstantial force-field out of which the material
world is distilled in the form of dense concentrations, or focal nodes
of the field. "We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by
the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense," said Dr.
Einstein. Physicist David Bohm has added, "There is a similarity
between thought and matter. All matter, including ourselves, is
determined by 'information'." Modern Information Theory equates
information with unpredictability: if you already know the answer
to a question, the answer contains no information. If the answer is a
surprise, it is also information. are
Out of the _chaotic dynamics of thejnf9J-
mation-rich universe emerge phenomena that are self-organizing
and-can be self-perpetuating. -One such' emergent property is life.
Life, it is now understo()d, not be a product of a static, New-
- ---- - ,- - c:1 it'o. " .. ,,,dod
., tonian universe. It takes the ran omness of a chaotic system to pro-
\."I> duce surprises: like life; like a thunderstorm; like a black hole; like a
,; . supernova; like a genius. Like consciousness. It takes a chaotic sys-
'. tern to produce a miracle.
Computers are our window on this world of nonlinear systems,
for they are information processors eqJal. With their gar-
gantuan computational capacities, they have allowed us to begin to
see the patterns, the logic, the recurrent themes behind apparent
randomness in nature.
A computer <l: wonderful thing, all the more marvelous because
it is the product o{humanm-m-ds:-It is a machine that can simulate
the of any other machine. In fact, it can simulate the work-

fbV1') jot-f,'
j
INTRODUCTION XVII
ings of any other nile-based system whatsoever. If you can figure out
what makes something tick, you can get a computer to replicate it.
The levels of complexity that the computer can replicate are limited
by the machine's memory and
has t he first "electronic brains" of fifty
years ago, and continue their explosive development with no end in
sight. And now, tens of millions of computers are being linked by
the global Internet, which doubles (and computing capacity)
'every it doubles, its potentral power is squared, by
the law of networks.
S
h' k h d al '11 all
orne researcners t m t e stan - one computer WI eventu y
be ca able of simulating the functioning of the human mind a
force us to admit the existence of machine intelli-
$ence; others find the idea preposterous and abhorrent . But what if a
computer can be intelligent: what does that mean for the worldwide
networkof these machines? What does it mean for us?
,The rules a com uter follows in mani ulatin information are
called algorithms. !tn algorithm is simply a list of the step-by-step
processes t6""ei edjte Algo-
can esltilple.or t ey can be enorm()Usly complex, and they_
may have buried within them which in turn con-
tain further algorithms and so on. But no matter how complex or
multilayered-'they may be, the digital computer can execute them
flawlessly, because it follows them step-by-step with infinite patience
and because it shares with all digital systems the ability to perform \
such operations flawlessly. I
:"<1 I l .p'. Un\! (lIJ Q I)", eyodUC-lt> A. U'vl
W1i:atevtr '1I1telligence rna be we know that it is 'aproduc,Lof a
S'''\I>-'1 .... ,j',.l'k,J bi"'I 90-0 Li""W:j d
. comp e , 'se -co tameu, ru e: uasea t e mm . Un-
n'O bne, des'pite two thousand years of focused inquiry,
can say what a mind is. But we can, now, produce self-contained,
rule-based systems inside computers to virtually any degree of com-
plexity. Complex in their algorithmic rules, certainly, but complex in
another important way as well.
Computers run on machine (I'S and o's), but very _
soon after they were invented, programmers had devised "assembly
\ [..1 1 f\ \ Q.. \ I (j " 'J 0 0:: "J., 1 "
XVIII CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
languages" which were easier for humans ro deal with and which the
computer itself could translate back into machine language. Then
"compiler languages" were created, in which programmers could use
scraps of ordinary English in composing their programs. The com-
puter would translate that back into assembly language and from
there into machine language.
There is no practical limit ro the number of layers of language
that can be used by programmers in feeding information to comput-
ers. Indeed, ordinary speech is being used more and more: the com-
puter translates it, stage by stage-flawlessly, within the limits of its
evolving algorithms-back down ro machine language of r's and o's.
It is not impossible ro imagine that in the process of designing ever
more complexity into the language we use to communicate with
ever more powerful computers, we may reach a level at which it
becomes clear that in its dealings with us, the ma.chine is in_distin-
guishable from an intelligent entity. At that point, we will have to
concede the reality of machine intelligence.
Some of us may seek what cold comfort is offered by a belief that
human intelligence is in some way innately superior ro other forms
of intelligence. It will be a perilous position ro defend. The human
brain, with its awesome electrical networks of billions of neurons
and synapses, may be demonstrably superior in processing capacity
to any foreseeable computerized artifact, but in what way would the
intelligence that emerges from the brain's networks be intrinsically
s.l:lE..erio:...!:o the intelligence that emerges from a silicon-based entity?
~ o r sophisticated perhaps, or broader or deeper, or different-but
bc:tter? The same laws of physics that govern our enigmatic universe
apply to both brain and machine. ''A rose is a rose is a rose."
The very earliest electronic computers, thirty-ton monsters with
thousands upon thousands of vacuum tubes, were so powerful, so
staggeringly fast in their internal processes (and so expensive), that
their designers thought that perhaps a dozen or so would serve the
foreseeable needs of the entire world. Today the capacity of one of
those computers is likely be contained in a child's video game. Any
one of the millions of computers now connected to the Internet and
INTRODUCTION XIX
its World Wide Web contains more computing horsepower than
existed in the entire world until the mid-I950s.
The question (among others) that Prof De Kerckhove is asking,
and in important ways answering in this book, is what happens
when all of that computer capacity gets wired up in a worldwide web
of high-speed, high-bandwidth data lines? What happens when the
amplified and accelerated intelligence of humans equipped with
high-powered computers in the tens of millions connects on the
~ e t Other highly complex systems we are familiar with exhibit an
ability to throw off emergent behaviors; what might we expect from
all of this networked intelligence?
No generation of humanity has lived in a more fascinating, por-
tentous time. When Marshall McLuhan began writing the diary of
this new era of information, the personal computer had scarcely
been launched: he died the year Apple went public, in 1980. Derrick
De Kerckhove, as a student, collaborator, translator, and co-author
of McLuhan, and head of the McLuhan Ptogram on Culture and
Technology at the University of Toronto, in this work is carrying on
a brilliant tradition of scholarship and imagination that allowed us
to see clearly for the first time the meaning of media in our lives, and
to ask where they might be leading us.
PROL OGU E
-,
., e"
\ I T TOOK ME A WHILE to get on the Net. It cost me many
hours of nail biting just to learn how to send e-mail. And then I
needed more time to overcome a reluctance to read my incom-
ing mail for fear of having to answer it. I couldn't handle yet another
information stream pouring into the office. At the minuscule coach
house headquarters of the McLuhan Program on Culture and Tech-
nology, besides the routine torture of three telephone lines ("Should
call-waiting be on or off?"), we have a fax landing every ten minutes,
snail mail twice a day, students, staff, and visitors coming and going
through three doors (sometimes simultaneously), three TV sets (one
often on), three radios (one almost always on), and three times
a week on average, we do video conferencing with somewhere in
the world.
For years, people had gently warned me that this situation simply
couldn't continue and that, if! didn't rationalize activities, time, and
resources, the program was heading for disaster. ! have)earned, how-
ever, that if you are at the center of things, chaos turns out to be just
fine. It is only at the edges that chaos frays focus and dissipates
energy. In fact, chaos may be the only answer when you are really
interested in knowing what is going on right now. Chaos works for
me like a kaleidoscope, !\'ith information churning and turning,
tumbling into patterns which make sense. Nowadays I can't let a
day go by without getting on-line, and our cluttered little office
boasts seven pes connected to a ten-megabit backbone. Anywhere
from three to twenty people can be found there at work-or at
XXI
XXII CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
play-anytime from 9 A.M. to midnight every day of the week
(except some Sundays). There will always be some madness in my
methods.
I can still recall the precise mo'ment when I bought into the idea
of the Net. During a seminar, one of my students showed us a video
of a museum's World Wide Web site and told us-we had to believe
her because audio recording hadn't been possible-that when you
clicked on a button there you could hear the song of that bird in the
photograph. I thought: This is it! Interactive CD-ROMS on-line, in
real time! Now we're talking! It was not long aft!=r that that I realized
to my own surprise thatX was using e-maU
to develop a new kind.of cO!llpulsion, the hunger to get to the next
log after ever-shorter lapses of time.
r None of this should be taken to mean that I am an avid surfer,
anymore than I am an avid TV watcher. I keep my distance from all
media except the telephone and the computer. However, I find that
I keep looking into the direction of the Web, almost in spite of
myself. There are any number of thin-gs about the Web that I
actively dislike: first, the waiting; then the lifeless colors of Windows
and Netscape; the primitive clumsiness of so much of the design; the
occasional stupidity of the contents, and, of course, the hype sur-
rounding it all. Nevertheless I can't avoid the conviction
something genuinely revolutionary is taking shape there, that it
_ wi LLaffect all of us, and that we ought to get to know it better. That
is what this book is about. -
f While I was at work on these pages, from time to time I referred
back to my previous book, The Skin of Culture, to measure my cur-
rent thoughts against what I had written earlier. I found that my
understanding had evolved in several areas. One of my biggest sur-
prises was to read the following: long ago, the was
and we were clever. But the computer-assisted world is becoming
very clever and faster than we are. Very soon our collective techno-
logical intelligence will outperform the individual organic ones both
in speed and integration. It will be interesting to know how this uni-
fied cognitive organization will take care of the environment and
PROLOGUE XXIII
poverty, and what criteria it will dictate for genetic engineering. For
"t he -time-beIng, relax. We are not there yet. "I
v Since writing those lines I have revised my thinking in two
(- ....., "\". "' I "
important respects. The first is that our commonly shared techno-
intelligence is not really "collective" but more precisely "con-
nected" *. The other is that we are in fact there, and while we should
keep our cool, this is no time to relax.
Indeed, the present book is driven by a new sense of urgency. L
While The Skin of Culture was about electronic media seen sepa- c
rately, this book shows how they are converging and tries to discover '
what it is they are converging towards. While Skin is basically on the
mark, what it lacks is a discussion of the implications of networked
digital communications.
" Whether we call it the Net, the Internet, or the Information
Highway, the growing synergy of networked communications is,
with the exception of language itself, the communication medium
par excellence-the most comprehensive, the most innovative, and
the most complex of them all. It is also the most interesting. In the
mega-convergence of hypertext, multimedia, virtual reality, neural
networks; digital agents, and artificial life, each medium is
different parts of our lives-our modes of communication,
entertainment, and work-but the Net potentially changes all o(
that and more, all at once. The Internet gives us access to a live,
. environment ofmllfion; of human intelligences per-
petually at work on anything and with
- vance to anyone and everybody. It is a new.cQgnitiV:LCQ!}ditiop Ica"ll
qlM.'(O (u (\J. [" vee.) '.
\; By webness, I mean the essence of any network. The word is
derived from the World Wide Web. During the summer of 1991,
* lowe this change to a suggestion made by Australian technology artist Ross
Harley, who kindly rescued me from my embarrassment with the negative, po-
tentially fascist connotations of the word collective. Readers of my previous book
would do me a great favor if they replaced, at least mentally, each occurrence of
the word collective in connection with intelligence with the word connective .
. \ ,"
XXIV CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the CERN (Centre Europeen
de Recherches Nucleaires) released the World Wide Web computer
\. communications protocol to allow researchers to address the specific
) contents of databases directly, without having to search each one
,
separately. In effect, this amounted to linking all the contents of any, r.
You
coti1a now access the world. s memory Just as you access your own.
Within five years there were thirty million users of the Web, with
the number growing exponentially, and there was every indication
that a new sector of the if not the eco_nom as a whole,
converging there.
\ i) And if, as Esther Dyson et al. have recommended
2
, you added to
this new henomenon all telecommunications, wired or cabled; all
and or cellular relays; all
'so; ting out d; ily reality
the planet for everybody 'or at once, you were
by the sudden realization that a giant is underw,ay.
\\ The"mai{)tech'ii8IBgicaJ i:llrusts are the
digitization of all content, the interconnection of all networks, the
humanizing of interface hardware and software, and the globalizing
effects of satellites.
LDigitization is smashing everyrhing.-!.o bits and
? rebuilding of matter, life, reality in the hands of people like
,.: and, !l!e. A defining phenomenon of our time, it is moving.,com-
'<> merce and industry from the realm of atoms to that of bits. At at
, level it is movin'g' the -;'ealm of the
,tmaterial to that of thought. Bj ts make matter more malleable than_
:'>{ atoms. Digital data is making shapes, substances, and identities
mutually compatible, the way ideas and images are in our minds.
are being digitized to enter mind.
Interface pushed by an unlikely combination of pres-
sures from art and military aviation engineering, is getting closer and
closer to direct access hardware-software combinations which will
allow thought to control computers directly. Eve

(J1rection--from joystick, keyboard, and mouse, to voice, to
PROLOGUE xxv
mental command-is making our relationshi s with machines more
intuitive, one might sa more human . . , / '
. - - ut C'lV! (O",Ole--c,' \n,.
\'-\ Networks support the of what we know as mind into
'" ridt' co associations. They are providing
the operating environment for convergence of all data. Such mind as
we can still call our own is spilling into the networks as we engage i
them more interactively, more intimately, more tli.;n ever
before.
\ S The three main underlying conditions of the new ecology of net-
works, by which I mean both the economy of
theJ}ew habits that su ort them, are:
121 r', I{ 0 Ot \"'" Q,., 0.014(%
1. Interactivity, the physical linking of people, or commuriica-
. b d' d . (h"c' '(lrlV+'(' 4
l
f (' i.flJl b d )
tlOn- .t Ie !n 'n'( )"..;'40 , G'.""
2. Hypertextuallty, the hilU:'lng df contents or
industri<;s (the df --'I ' / - - (r
',1,0' - -,0:\ - /6 (e. 0'/" , I d ( ""
3 or :veDness, ot
of networks (the o(
" Satellites figure importantly in the equation in that they give
humanity the agency and the image of the new planetary scale of its
reach; the new proportions of its collective body image. As individu-
al d
. _OY h (l ew' , ' ,. ' \Q ) C-"ji
s an as a s eCles, we can be In to see t e groWIng connec Ions
between our selves, our bodies, and our minds 0 dfgvon ' hanit a" C
other.
-----
Together, interactivity, hypertextuality, and connectedness con-
stitute the basis for the lanetization of ordinary people
nations, bl;Yv secrtllpita
. c,,\o_.\,cC! S" i'j',-,u 1<>.\ (,. 11"'<> '!YJ.':! ". 'n 1
. OCal K.2Da aua sate lteS. '
INTERACTIVITV
\ The word interactivity was a lexicographer's curiosity ten years ago.
Now it's on everybody's lips. What does it really mean? Interactivity
XXVI CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
is the relationship between the person and the digital environment
as defined by the hardware that connects the two. There is rapid
progress being made in military and artistic research into mind-
"-
\. machine direct access interfaces. the bulk of human
" ventions in both the material and the virtual environments will
remain rounded in the human body. It is no surpris;-that the
most interesting areas of research in virtual reality (VR) today is in
tactile feedback. lnteractivity is touch. . 1\ I
o .. .. ,)&\.>'j '\I.) "..IvV , l jV'r/"l y ",
'I.! VR, multimedIa, and systems are proJec- .
Within the rich electroni.c
If . for ourselves, we often entertaIn unconsCIOUS propnoceptiye ela-
"' tionships, that is, responses activated by stimuli so deeply
,lJ'l in the media that we are scarcely aware of them. \ .
. 1"'0 " dQ:7 I' ',',O'I(j .l>::> [J..v..
.... '- Networks, too, are extens!.ons oJ tou<;:h.
the and video conkr:.encing aii all 1hir"<
I tlily'J'TI"' ill
t kiof l'iq If S< ' eo CU'L' VI " 1.1...1"
na or t.e1epresence. you can e Ii re anu mere SimUltane-
:.: ' ously by telephone or by video conferencing,
h d k
'l t't If\:e t{1;, ''{rlf ' (1" (' r c ' """''''.
t ousan 1 ometers awa, ou nave oecome-en er very fast or very
large'. c'omniunicatl6Yls re'q'ii ire feedb-aCl{' to confirm that the
message has been received, ev'@f' if'ft information_
d
h . hi" '1)) d' . f hi'
on a ata stnnn-t at IS t e tru y tactl e ImenslOn 0 t e re
ship, and the ..essence of resence.
'I:\.- From the time of the telegraph to that of the Web, the population
of the world has continuously increased the density of its network
connections. New forms of concentrations of human energy happen
on-line in these networks and they do not necessarily coincide with

12 physical population centers. On the Web, ancient cities such as Pom-
eii, Monte Alban, <:;atal Huyuc, Karnak, and others, rise ghost-like
"":\.!n digital replication. Real twentieth-century such as Berlin,
C" . " -' - -
and_ San Fran5:isco are b_eing_ recreated j n databases
reagied,!o -E-0nnect with reaJ.:time inormation,- on-line. Three-di-
mensional worlds, complete with virtual architecrure, reliable news
and weather services, age-old social and antisocial behaviors ranging
from the disposal of virtual dog droppings to virtual vandalism, are
PROLOGUE XXVII
beginning to appear and to attract thousands of "residents." Virtual
malls are opening up at Web sites, URLS (Universal Resource Locator,
the protocol for assigning addresses on the World Wide Web) with
walls to make you feelbettc;r about shopping in virtuality. Very soon,
" . " ',",vl" o\ U'<- Su ' r (' \-"{f4 [""
VIrtual offices wIl have re laced many or theIr materIal counter-
parts, as le'am td"Cl'iSpense \vithSOln&' 6 "me tdtppingsv-4
iris' increasingly possible-for people'to assume
real presence in their virtual environments, it seems highly likely that \
they will transfer many of their current "real space" activities to these
virtual environments. \-1>-
,i..'"
t":l It should come sur rise that artists vie with militar re-
cuttin of ical investigation in
all of this. B6tll" hkVe
Uo
a veste'd Interest in understand in and ex loit-
-- --
JE.g the if!! act of the technology on the human sensorium. And each
is involved in his or her own way with issues of aggression-, -the mil-
itary for obvious reasons and artists due
. the of new estab-
lished social order. The paradox, of course, is that society grants the
military lavish fundingtor its R&D and the art world lives on crusts.
Moreover, the military w6rksihsecrecy"while art tries at every op-
portunity to claw its way out of obscurity. Having no access to mili-
tary secrets, I have opted to go to the art of our time to learn about
where we are going, trusting McLuhan's perceptive recommendation:
1. L\ If men were able to be convinced that art is precise advance
knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social conse-
quences of the next technology, wQuld they all become artists?
Or would they begin a careful new art forms intO :,\, <P' (,
social navigation charts? I am curious would hap- '
pen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, nameJy, exact infor- "",
mation of how to rearrang_e to antici \
the next blow from ou): .o.wn extended
:: J '\' ' \ I
f .\(, &"',II',Q ,,h U'J Q e "",,,,,Ju u) cr \ '
'L S The privileged realm of the new art is the world ot'
only because it is an accessible field for exploration but because it is '
H' ,-\J{
XXVIII CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
II ! {(( !.\()' <.t;\'lC. , J ,_/
the technological metaphor ' for the senses. With our hands, ears,
eyes, and other conduits for action and sensation, we are constantly
relating to or interacting with the world: those are the relationships
to which artists have devoted most of their attention since the begin-
ning of art. It is therefore quite logical and predictable that they
would now turn to the modulation of these interactions through
the new technological environment. Though most (but not all)
artists choose to look at patterns in phenomena-sounds, images,
thoughts, processes-the new breed is not afraid to get intimately
acquainted with the digitized substitute.
HVPERTEXTUALITV
c, - f)o,,-' ; ; ( -0[, '" .l \'
.10 Hypertextuality means interactive access to anything from any-
where. Just as digitization is the new condition of content produc-
tion, hypertextuality is the new condition oet'ofife-i1r"si6fage i nd
",I," e ivery. By itself, @Perte"Xp might beiliought of as a very
automated Indexing and referencing system. But the big
IQ" news of the implementation of the principles of hypertextuality in J
, . the World Wide Web is precisely that the search-space is worldwide. -;
The World Wide Web is the paradigm for what happens to hyper-
w en it emigrates from a stana=a one system, or a local
work (LAN), to the worldwide network. It changes the rules of the
- --- ---- - - -- - -_. ." -- -- -- - --- ._-- .
content game. -j" (u'O "I."
'l-1- is invading the traditional of
in data, text, sound, and video. It is changing the rules of
' 1""11) IP '( (.
storage, dlStnbutlon,_afld dehverl of books, records,
-ffipes ap9:.. fiJm. Because it is becoming ubiquitous and
because it responds much better to the instant delivery requirements
of the market, it is replacing older methods of news delivery wher-
ever the existing networks permit. Countries such as Canada and the
Netherlands that are endowed with a good network infrastru2ture*
* For example, cable penetration in both countries is well over 90 percent.
PROLOGUE XXIX
stand to gain immediate economic advantage over their neighbors,
if their governments and industries will only allow themselves to be
persuaded to facilitate the hypertextualization of their economies.
There is, of course, some resistance to such a move. First, because it
rocks established patterns of commerce; second, because corpora-
tions tend to focus on short-term profit rather than longer-term
opportunities; and finally, because it takes both vision and skill to
implement hypertextual access across the board, and the first of
these requireme,nts, in particular, is generally in short suO,ply.
4 \iQ,l)'f ' UI' ?\I u ' ) o
:-..10 1'{evermeless', digitization h:asalreaay "zapped" or q.ematerialtzed
devices such as books, tapes, and
----- - - - - - , .. _. - "' " - - _. " ., - ..
.. The opportunity to incorporate hypertextuality is also a
powerful motivating force behind changes in the modes of produc-
tion and access from linear (analogue) to nonlinear (digital) media.
Thanks to the ease of reconfiguring data, news is now shifting from
mass to t 'he information economy.
- ism<wing away trom Zoncrer e sro;::-age technologies such as analog
video, audio, and print towards intelligent machines which produce
the In other words, while the technologies ,
of information of the past are aids to memory or storage (books,
tapes, records, films, videos, photographs), the main technologies of
today's information systems are aids to processing; that is, aids to in- .'
telligence. This shift i's a reflection of a much broader permutation of '
,!:he culture from _memory-based to 'producdofi.
We are moving from the era of "replay" to that of "remake." WeAre
developing computer-assisted cognitive habits and r
forms of collaboration-new forms, in fact, of
, \
(jl .. ' :", . ".1 1(1 ' f'?' ''lI.JdlX(.!.I' ; C, !f If :' (1 '(\ -<t:J'vV'lOU Vf'fb,
." .
CONNECTEDNESS
CQ " c <. VI 'l"
. " '\ >,
Connectedness is a human status or state just as surely as collectivi lJ..
or individuality: It is that conc!i.ti_on of at least two
.persons in tou<:., h with_ for
in collaboration. The Web, the connec;ted mediUlILp_;!.Lexcellence, is
xxx CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the technology that makes explicit and tangible this natural condi-
10 cr ('ol( Jtitct>b MCJ \<J'/'-' 'r..; .....
tion of human interaction. The only other connected media we nave
known ire the telegraph and c,
-t 'poi .ot voZal The Internet, by
combining two an'd adding po-'"
( " .;r '")\? ............ t- -'. . ,rtf A ...!" :. \ .... ,
tentlal, much Increased useful connectedness among people. The
World Wide Web added another dimension of connectedness, with
:\ hypertext linking the stored content of their communication. Then,
if to achieve critical mass, Marc Andreessen threw in the kicker
the launch ofMosaic.* In making the Web colorful and sensual
'1
as well he made u I.\.v' eo"";", ,t .i I
, What is"<connected" the Web' is that it allows and encour-
i-;;ut bf l{fdlvidi1;IS ra1e"tollective" The
result is that the information processes and the social organization
otit and gme.
"e\b "'. t......o\rt V","" '" 1 ,,. ... ' r"I.,.
Books, by com arison, fostered inciividualisrn. only,
f r6"fu e';ich o'tller t silent.
The effect of books was to accelerate the growth of individual minds
and of individualism within those minds. (Books are not at all con-
nected because they do not allow individual input.) Radio and TV
are truly collective, addressing, as they do, everybody at the same
like books, they are not connected because they do not allow
I. or invite real-time individual input. The exception to the rule is the
phone-in talk show on radio. These, however, are tightly formatted,
heavily screened, and strictly moderated. "afe
;r
,And once they became networked, the connected became an alter-
to both the individual and-.ilie cQilective. Connectedness is
I')
,Jo * was the .for navig.ari0h on the World Wide Web. A
. young- programmer named Marc Andreessen working then with the NSCA
(National Super Computer Association) developed it and launched it in the
summer of 1993. Almost overnight, the Web, as it soon became known, was
.., invaded by newcomers. Since then Mosaic and Andreessen have become associ-
ated with Jim Clark, founder and eX-CEO of Silicon Graphics, to create and
, launched the current market-leading browser, Netscape.
PROLOGUE XXXI
l" 'fj "",. oe v-. ,,:, k ..
one of mankind's most powerful resources. It is a condition for the
accelerated growth of human intellectual production. .' -
') \
is possible right now, for any-
one with access to the Web, to download almost-real-time images of
planet Earth from a ite. It is not quite like standi ng
atop a mountain, and the experience . always generate the
mountaineer's sense of pride of ownership, butwhacyou see on your
screen is unquestionably really there, and it is your pe'Tsonal access to
the worldwide world. You can uide a cursor to change the aJ!gle of
YQ.ll the planet. With time-
lapse imaging, you can watch the development of cloud formations
and of hurricanes.
')'l.. The extraordinary change of scale brought to ordinary humans
by direct access to their total ecological environment is making
room for new varieties of psychological structures. How tiny, by
comparison, is the Renaissance model of man!
1? We might reasonably expect a connected sensibility, a new sy-
{ -
chology, to emerge from the number and speed of network connec-
th:1iis'wnat ml!ch_of theIest ot this bb'; k
is a growing need, perhaps repressed as a result of our cen-
tury's sorry experience of shattered ideals, to believe in somethi ng
that might yet have a pleasant outcome. While there is abroad in the
world an increased religiosity rife with all the usual contradictions,
and violent clashes between local and global cultures living in differ-
ent time warps and different time zones, there is at the same a grow-
ing awareness, even among warring factions, of creative ways to
make accommodations and find solutions.* With the common ner-
vous system and senses of the world population now in of
satellites, and with machines approximating the condition of mind,
o. and the minds of humans connecting across time and space, .!.he
be II}ore a matter of choice than of destiny. !t's
* Considering that it is also about the issue of survival, could ecology, as the
vehicle that brings all agendas together, become the next religion?
XXXII CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
much less difficult to make up one's mind when one understands the
context.
~ Connected Intelligence is a book, not a hypertext. However, I have
kept in mind that different people with different agendas might find
some parts more pertinent than others. Each chapter can stand on
its own. Parts one, two and three, entitled respectively, "Interactiv-
ity," "Hypertextuality," and "Connectedness," reflect each other and
the whole book. I h-ave tried t6 integrate interactivity, hypertextual-
ity, and connectedness in each chapter as I believe these principles
operate across the board in all concerns involving technology and
culture. For those who enjoy the continuity of an argument, I have
ordered the chapters in such a way that they reflect the one I sup-
port, namely that if indeed our technology is precipitating us in a
new order of reality, it had better be informed bycare and attention
for everybody.
PAR T 1
INTERACTIVITV
o f
CHAPTER ONE
THE 8USI N E SS
INTERACTIVITV
W
HEN I WAS TRYING, between November 1986 and
October 1988, to raise money for that "gallant f;ilure"
called Transinteractivity, all I could raise were eyebrows,
and polite refusals from business executives. Today, there's been
an about-face in attitude and it's turning industry and governments
around. "Interactive" has ' become a byword for a projected multi-
billion-dollar business in the media, and especially television. Indus-
tries involved in delivery by satellite, cable, telephone, and
even some electric power companies, are champing at the bit to
deliver "fully interactive services," in the form of programming on
demand, home shopping, and financial services. On the retail end,
there is a huge market for interactive games, a healthy industry in
multimedia hardware and software, and a steady stream of "hit
CD-ROMS" that get hyped as the latest and greatest in interactivity.
Both the cultural and the entertainment sectors are investing in
interactivity as a lure to patrons. Interactivity has penetrated dis-
plays in museums and galleries. Virtual reality, the summum of inter-
active applications, after being a trade show curiosity for selling
cigarettes and motorcycles, is finding its way in to media parks and
arcades with a full complement of shoot-'em-ups and Jurassic ter-
rors. And upshot of this frenzy of "interactivity" is that people
still get i1-_ -
3
4
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Take the most common example-cD-RoMS, the core of the
retail interactive business. These can hardly be deemed interac;tive,
if one means by the word that medium res. way
to the in2ut of the other than by bringing up the desired
display. Most CD-ROMS are less interactive than a dictior:ary. The
fact that QuickTime video gives you an illustrating low-definition
motion picture instead of an illustrating high-definition still photo-
graph can scarcely be classified as qualitative progress in interac-
tivity. It may be fun for a while to see Mick Jagger strut in slo-mo,
choppy, impressionistic splashes of pixelated colors, but you soon
tire of it. Video games are more seriously interactive and I will
get back to them in due course, but by and large
interactive systems, or installations, are a steady source of disap-
- - - .. -- - --

I have tried. As a judge for several interactive media festivals and
prizes for government and educational instructional media, and as a
member of the Interactive Digital Media Association in Toronto, I
have been subjected to hours of explorations into Peter Gabriel's
Xplora, Myst, Johnny Mnemonic, Burn Cycle, and many more. What
kept echoing in my mind was the stern interdiction of one of
Toronto's top CD-ROM experts: "Always remember that your dient
has five times less patience than you do when waiting the
- I " ------- .
_ to s ow up. .
.) Let's face it: the finest cDs-and there are quite a few-and the
best VR are so slow and clunky, and the image definition is usually
so poor as to dispel forever the fears of journalists and media com-
mentators, that we might someday take them for the real thing.
These facts are plain to see, yet they don't seem to lessen our fascina-
tion with the lures of interactivity. Even the ubiquitous spread of
self-help, interactive instruction kiosks is not abated by the fact that
they tend to be ugly, dirty, clumsy, and broken. So what's the attrac-
tion? Why do people part with small fortunes to upgrade their
already pricey platforms to six-times sampling speed CD players and
l.!Jrround their computers (and now their TV sets) with cumbersome
..!!l ultimedia peripherals? The answer, in a word, is television.
THE B USINESS OF I NTERACT IVITY 5
In spice of all che talk about how "passive" it is supposed co make
us, TV" has been interactive from the start. With its seduc-
tive influence over the viewer, television is li ke a siren.! The desire to
cozy up co {he screen seems to begin at an early age: preschool chil-
dren cend to huddle with rheir nose to the set as if they
immerse themselves in (he stream of The current trend
towards interacrivi ry is an entirely predictable outgrowth of our
involvemem with <! medium that, in a manner of speaking, sucks its
user in. Indeed, while we are watching TV, the stuff of our imagina-
tion is nor confined co the privacy of our mind, but is happening OUl
on the screen in full motion and color with a high sensory can:
tent whi ch contributes directly to the elaboration of mea ning. TV'S
auditOry, visual, and kinesthetic stimulations address the spect7tor
direcdy, without the kind of detached, secondary elaboration which
is a feature of the decoding of a printed text by turning it into men-
tal images. TV thus unavoidably evokes mulrisensory responses
which summon our whole body into play With its carefully crafted
audio levels, visual fea tures, and, especially, camera movement and
editing rhythms which call for proprioceptive 01:., kinesthetic reac-
tions, very much Like real-life events in evoki ng multisensor)"
the significant difference is that
while rea11ife usually brings about a direct physical as well as
and emotional participation in the situation, TV'S symbolic content
does not lead to action, but only to interpretation.
As TV becomes explicitly interaC[ive, first via remote control
and now with CD- ROMS and video arne controllers, the el abora-
tion of one's mental ima&es mUSt continue to be conducted Oll...ll
screen outside the body, only now with the body's active, voluntary
in the process of making sense of the world. This has '
led to three related, largely unconscious, drives in the culture of
television: the recovery of couch, a need for telepresence, and a
.. By TV, I me:an the: appliance: or delivery vehicl e ramer than the content pro-
vide:d for it by the conventional television producers ar Fox, cac, Televisa, and
the rest.
, ..
6 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
reversal _ screen In virtual

The technqJogi_cal search for ways to realize these unconscious
j.rives has taken _ many forms, some more naive . than others. But
2ince the invention ?f the zapper, TV'S potential for interactivity has
been growing by and If so-called passive TV
':l:lt!filate step in the evolution of frontal and detached the
zapper may have been the first step towards a radical reversal in our
relationship with the information we process: I zap, therefore I
think. I zap, I am in control of the screen. Asfor VR, reverses
another aspect of our relationship to TV: while books allowed people
to introduce information in their heads, virtual realiry-aHows them
to introduce their heads into information.
Ct It is no surprise that the television industry, after some initial hes-
itation, has tried to move in on the interactive business in a big way.
But what exactly is "interactive television"? Is it technologies like
Montreal and Quebec City's Videoway and UBI, two reasonably suc-
cessful though now defunct cable-based experiments with_asymmet-
,tical, two-way interactive The secret behind this system was
to split a single channel's content four ways, giving an illusion of con-
trol to the user by permitting him to choose among the four with
his zappet. Do we include "full service" trials such as Time-Warner's
Orlando experiments or Viacom's Castro Valley test of Video-
on-Demand (VOD) , or Intercom Ontario's high-bandwidth, wired
community test? Other trials have been conducted in Chicago, Cam-
bridge (U.K.), and Queen's (New York), but none has succeeded in
capturing the not to mention the wallets, of con-
sumers. pgrhQapS" the destiny of interactive television is
represented by NTN Communications, the very successful U.S. net-
work that for eleven years has been broadcasting interactive video
games to restaurants, bars, and hotels in the U.S., Canada, South
Africa, and Australia.
I} One of the reasons why the broadcasting industry is finding it
difficult to get at the real meaning of interactivity is that its vision is
still, understandably, blinkered by the broadcasting model of the
THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVITY 7
audiovisual economy. At its root, the broadcasting model is simply
the extension to radio and TV of the top-down industrial or factory
system for production and distribution of goods and services. _The
paradox of the business of interactive TV is that while it is perfectly
that conve-!l-tional television withits universal presence provides
_ an ideal means of introducing interactive media into most homes,--
real interactivity is available only through digital media, another
technological universe altogether.
Digitization illl but eliminates the technological boundaries sep-
arating communications media and reduces to bina!y
data, the new common denominator of all information. By elimi-
nating materi; l digital together
in a unified environment indusg)es of
phone, radio, television, computers, and print publishing. The tele-
vision response to Che p romise 'af digital
technology has been High Definition Television (HDTV), still in the
development stage. With its emphasis on image definition instead of
technical flexibility, HDTV demonstrates once again how litde the
television industry has understood the message of computers. The
real value of HDTV-and its only real hope of commercial success-
lies not in its high-definition screen display, but in the fact that it
will put television squarely in the digital domain. Television will
then enjoy the same level of intelligent and adaptable processing as
exists on a computer screen, closing the loop of convergence
between the digital and analogue worlds of information processing.
Much, if not most, behind-the-scenes production in television has
already migrated to digital technology: when HDTV makes the fin_al
delivery system digital as well, TV, will be _solidly in the digital camp,
with all that implies for the medium's message. If the TV industry is
uncomfortable with the interactive capability implicit in digital
media, it has every reason to be, because interactivity spells the end
of corporate control of the erstwhile "mass culture."
What we are seeing, as many commentators have observed
aaron Lanier, George Gilder, John Perry Barlow, and others), is
indeed an end to television as we've known it, though not its demise .
. In ............
j' .. '. '-;, '(. J. -' ',J . _........ .: f. ). ,
8 [ CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
, .... '--.
. '
TV will 'go on what it is good at for a long time to come. It will
continue, as well, to hold a prominent place in the mass cultures of
the catching-up societies. TV'S role has always been to provlsk..ili.ared
ex erience and values) !"! Far from being the alienating
medium il:cri tics have television is i.n fact a c9r::munity
builderl a of our kids, a purveyor of community news and
gossip.Thus the real identity of TV is "public" regardless of whether
this 0; that particular station happens to be run by the state.
'':. In some respects, people in the postindustrial societies have been
interactive ever since they learned to get their money from Auto-
matic Teller Machines (ATMS) instead of from bank clerks. In France,
the Minitel has taught a whole generation the ABCS of interactivity.
While the interactive society is not quite a palpable reality, it is
creeping up on us from the periphery to the center, from the grass-
roots upwards, from the bottom up. The i-people are the grandchil-
dren of TV. They have been trained by the video game both to run
their parent's VCR and to get on the Net.
Television viewers, once putty in the hands of TV programmers,
began to recover their lost- autonomy -the moment they were
entrusted with distribution of the apparently
innocuous remote-control interfaces in the middle 1970S marked
the beginning of the end of top-down control of television produc-
tion. The first effect of putting this crude form of instant "editing"
power in the hands of the average consumer was to allow him to skip
boring dramatic sequences and hackneyed advertising spots. In
response, program producers learned to "zap the zappe( before he
had the chance to zap the channel. This tug::0F-war between produc-_
ers and consumers of programs helped to accelerate the pace of pro-
g{;mming, and later its so that particular attention was
paid to the opening moments. The average length of commercials
soon shrunk from the original sixty seconds to thirty and fifteen sec-
onds. Quick editing and "jolts-per-minute" strategies were imple-
mented in programming to help maintain the zapper's attention.
No sooner was this battle joined than VCRS made their appear-
anZe-ill"" the early 1970s, the more discriminating viewers
THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVITY 9
("",,\"we\ (',,("'-"
store one ram
gram from its scheduled airing to a time more convenient to the
viewer. The mere notion that you could actually record and replay,
-;irh the right equipment even reedit your own programming,
put a new bug in the television system it was Qf,_e aring
res onsibility (or content delivery
and use.
I': Meanwhile, home video cameras and editing decks were improv-
ing at warp speed, thanks to the application of digital technologies.
The line between rofessional quality and consumer equiE-
ment blurred t? point of al together. the
l ate ancL the eighties witnessed an unprecedented growth in
.small, quality-conscious independent video production companies.
EI cov-o
THE USER AS CONTENT
Understanding the potential of all of this digital technology, with its
latent otential J or interactivity, demands a fundamental shift in
point of view. To look at interactivity from the traditional broad-
perspective is about as helpful as looki-;-"gthrough wro;;g
end of a the of :riew should be q itical one.
The First Law of Interactivity is that the user shapes or provides the
content, either by taking advantage of nonlinear access to make pro-
gram selections, or by actually taking full responsibility for the con-
tent as a bona fide content provider; This is by no means a trivial
distinction: Marshall McLuhan once quipped, "If the medium is the
message, then the user, really, is the content." In other words, the mes-
sage of any medium may be thought of as the way it shapes the user
merely by engaging him or her in connecting with the medium. Tele-
visior:, rad}?, interactive each in way condi-
fron:! their_users, be they consumers
or interactive "prosumers." Media, seen this way, are
complete environments which contain their users as their content.
This observation may have seemed obscure, not to say flippant, in
IO CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
McLuhan's heyday when broadcast television was king. Today, how-
ever, the of home pages on the Web, his aphorism
takes on a more direct significance. Home pages are,
for their creators, instant "station identification devices." The fact
that the viewer needs to activel seek out content makes both'the ad-
dressors and the addressees of any di_gital, networked communica-
tion the principal providers, and thus the real content, of the
communication. This should be kept in mind by the content quota
wa-tchdogs in national broadcast regulatory bodies. Any national user
of the networked structure becomes, ipso focto, "national content."
(\ Interactivity has also changed the processes by which we design
content. While desi n used to be the rero ative of the _l"QQucer
imposing his or her vision on the service or the product to be sold
(the "broadcast" model of design), the availability of new hardware
and software tools to assist individuals in designing their own prod-
ucts is pushing the limits of design to the level of "meta-design."
Meta-design is the desi n of tools, arameters, and 0 eratin condi-
tions that allow the end-user to take charge of the final design. This
is the "network model" of design. In a truly interactive environment,
tea vantages of meta-design handed over to the end-user, with
support and coaching from the provider. This makes the client of
anyon-line industry a partner in that industry.
\'< Meta-design is affecting not only audiovisual software, but also
the hardware-based industries, allowing end-users to take control of
major design decisions in anything from a desktop publication to
such products as shoes, clothing, and furniture produced by com-
puter-assisted tools for pattern-creation, cutting, manufacturing,
paCkaging, and even distribution. Thanks to the efficiencies in time,
labor, and cost and the run-control abilities of software-supported
meta-design "thing' past), the once
battered textile industries of Canada, the U.S., and Europe are
beginning to beat back the low wage, labor-intensive competition
from the world's sweatshops.
\') In this new context, the true destiny of interactivity is clearly not
to stand alone, but to go on-line. For example, by itself, the CD-ROM
c - THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVITY II
industry is hardly more than a glorified adjunct to the book, record,
and tape markets. Their "read-only" nature defines them as part of
the old industrial order, that is, Qpe-way or broadcast distribution of
self-contained, However, just as
books are useful only if they are read, understood, and reused in
other contexts by literal or thematic quoting and elaboration, the
CD-ROM'S real providence is to be used and reused on-line in
changing contexts. Indeed, the most positive aspect of interactivity __
in CD-ROMS is that, on-line, the content of interactive programming
may enjoy a much longer shelf life than
contenI. Most, if not all, television programming, whether
interactive or not, is destined to become the content of network-
accessible databases which will bring revenue to the producers on
the basis of on-demand use. At that point the broadcasting and CD-
ROM industries will merge .
L, ." I \ ' v ,d qt
l
ADAPTING TO INTERACTIVITV
Critics are prompt to take big business to task for overhyping interac-
tivity. For example, the Finnish social critic Erkki Huhtamo makes the
following comment in recording his disappointment with a demon-
stration of the Time-Warner's Orlando "full-service TV" experiment:
.0 The concept of interactivity seems to have been hijacked by cor-
porate interests to sell more of the same in a newly designed pack-
age .... Many seem to believe that the existence of interactive
gadgets, from teller machines to home computers, automatically
implies a change in the human-machine relationship. However,
interactive technology provides no more than a frame of oppor-
tunities, which is always filled by specific applications and ideo-
logical ideas. These may have little to do with "interactivity."
\1. Among the most severe condemnations of the whole trend to the
computerization of culture is one by Clifford Stoll:
I2 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Today's Internet hustlers invade our communities with comput-
ers, not concrete. By pushing the Internet as a universal panacea,
they offer a tempting escape from all this all-too-mundane
world. They tell us that we need not get along with our neigh-
bours-heck, we needn't even interact with them. Won't need
to travel to a library either; those books will come right to my
desk. Interactive multimedia will solve classroom problems. Fat
paychecks and lifelong employment await those who master
computers.
',)" They're well-meaning, of course. They truly believe in virtual
communities and electronic classrooms. They'll tell you how the
computer is a tool to be used, not abused. Because clearly, the
computer is the key to the future.
The key ingredient of their silicon snake oil is a technocratic
belief that computers and networks will make a better society. 2
\-1) And for critic Stephen Talbot, "by means of the computer, con-
crete human activity itself is invited towards passivity, automatism,
and lowered consciousness":
(;- The sleight of hand in the argument about interactivity is
repeated on many fronts. To cite one example: the informality of
much computer-mediated communication is often seen as a
recovery of the direct, the personal, the participatory, the emo-
tionally expressive. Many observers, contrasting this "new oral-
ity" with formal or "literate" communication, see the computer
carrying us back to earlier, more vivid and personalized forms of
human exchange.
,_" But the relevant comparison is not between oral and literate.
It is between the genuinely oral communication that once took
place face-to-face, and the "secondary orality" now electronically
that communication. Here we see the computer's
influence: running exactly to the usual informal
communication is tending towards the abstract, disengaged, and
remote, with conveyed indirectly through the artifice of
THE BUS I N E S S 0 FIN T ERA C T I V I T Y 13
and participation unavoidably
the
"I) I should add that the ease with which this sleight of hand
; ucceeds-and anyone willing to spend time perusing a selec-
tion of Net discussion groups can quickly verify the success-is
itself testimony to an idealism loosed from reality}
'0
0
On all these points, I have to say that I agree. But only because
they are so obvious. Yes, it is true, and everybody knows it-for
business, interactivity is just another delivery mechanism, a way to
get people to buy more stuff; for the mass consumer, an interactive
device is a toy with which to play with more toys. And yes, behind
all the hype, you will uncover a singularly primitive model of man-
h
I' b d h h bl' . f ro, !". 10 v Me; . 6..,
mac me re ations ase on t e urn e)o Stic. e WilY mteractlv-
. 'iUC 'hd", vv\,j [ubJ 10"0 .roOh,"'LI J\Q,'f</. [, t'f"-UU- hi o C
k
'4 C"h1t v fiJ h
Ity IS yped, one mig t ue
v
torglven t 1ll mg t at t e whole
.. 0, .. ,," k " l '.ii'C ( <-' ,
culture IS gomg through an adolesc;:ent fixatIOn on a Video game. But
- n k e.,-I, f U: fJ".,.f1()_
1 perhaps d1at IS preCIsely what IS fiappenmg.
If, as a society, we didn't want silicon snake oil, we didn't know it
until it was too late. We should have gotten rid of television, as Jerry
Mander recommended.
4
Of course, that was a ludicrous proposi-
tion-like suggesting that we pull the plug on all electrical power.
Electricity is here to stay and interactivity is stage two of mankind's
large-scale adaptation to it. Stage one was television.
ny Interactivity has become the leading edge of a comprehensive (
biotechnological inter lay whIch no doubt be an with the invention
of the wheel, but has fully flowered only with electricity. This is be- ,
cause electricity is coextensive with the human Jll
every interaction with our new technologies, electricity comes in and
out of the human body as impulses and currents affecting nerve cells
and electronic relays, synapses and semiconductors. Interactive sys-
tems, in creating a new continuity between the body and the machine,
clearly hel to reinforce the network of connections that ex and our
beyond our bodies to the exterior world. \
lAo:; I -. " r) vwet-'%l*"- "c.,y.o. -ll L D "'1 ' ,-..
'J"i Unti pow, practlca ya our tecnno unaer t e general (
of W'fen"iion, described by Mumford, Leroy-Gourhan,
'1\ C'(eo.r tAA'< Vo ( ,d,v'1 (G,,).\u;d.,_ 0, "
, ,
14
CONNECTED ' INTELLIGENCE
McLuhan, Giedion, and many others as a continuation or an
outering of the body. The glove extends and protects the skin, the
shovelextends the to allow it to dig the ground. The alphabet
and the computer extend the mind to process language, itself a
complex extensior; of ,the brain. With the interactive technologies,
two firstly, the machine is
develo in a rudimentar will of its own as it becomes more and
-
more adept at storing and analyzing the patterns of the interactions.
Transcending its original of it now becomes ,mort?
and more a projection. dh2 ii
ihi ri''ii carqor a u aozer. It is
a robot. AAH it"l!an dN el'Oip-' Indeed, the various aspects
of research into interactive interfaces are coming together in the
science
body. ThIS IS autonomatlOn, aI!!:L.!!_fan be mechalllcal, or
\, \ I
vlrtua. . "L 0", ,' .. ,".,I.,\c,)
0' At the same time as they are "going digital," the extensions and
projections developed by today's technological revolution
are also going on-line. Hence a second, more comprehensive order
of integration is occurring, well beyond the personal limits of the
body and the self. We are about to be invaded by populations of
"agents" and Negroponte predicts ,that:
, [, -Co y', :, "" 11<2." 0 j ,( , I
, "-':r - I
li(\ ( , '. l..--. r Co( t-
What we today call "agent-based interfaces" will emerge as the
, dominant means by which computers and people talk with one
)
another. There will be specific points in space and time where
bits get converted into atoms and the reverse. Whether that is
the transmission of a liquid crystal (display screen) or the rever-
beration of a speech generator, the interface will need size, shape,
color, tone of voice, and all the other sensory paraphernalia.
S
'll: As more "virtual communities" take hold and more telepresent
technologies develop and spread through the economy and the cul-
ture, the meaning of interactivity may become transitive (and trans-
parent) and designate not the primitive concept of the "man-machine
THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVITY 15
interaction," but a more fulfilling-and "adult"-sense of person-
to-person, computer-assisted interaction.
Telepresence, or virtual presence, for example, is fast developing
into an indispensable industry, and, if we believe media critic Peter
Weibel, will become more so in the future under the pressure of ever
more limited physical and material resources:
f'\Qu .. 1l-J 1Q.("" (uW", h .. ..,y ";)
""'::.., ..., I. -'C;;l ... ",I ",: 14 S'V'-.o/((,
We need technology to survive. The scarcer the space, the larger ..;--re....-
the population, the more vital is the overlapping and simulation cOV\
of spaces, times and bodies, so that more objects and subjects obI
can be present at the same time. Technology must therefore tJ<,

develop further towards teletechnology. The tools must become
, ,..,---.-
teleoperators and telefactors, socIety must become a
civilization.
6
L I" on",,,,- ,p. {o ... J v it v }.t
'''_ .. tl Ie fCI,-a'ya.-o I (4 ,aG' p dCtrJ ek 1", c()
('JI 1,(cl[l"
For the moment, whether transitive or not, is still
mostly fun alld-gan;es. But there are enough portents of reality
reproducing itself in virtuality that we should pay keen attention.
While I do not expect for a moment that we will "escape" to cyber-
space, as my friend Pierre Levy fears, I am certain that it be the
way in which as individuals we connect in these virtual environ-
ments, that will decide what kinds of people we and, especially, our
children will become. These developments raise, as Sherry Turkle
observed with keen attention in her recent book Life on the Screen,
some serious issues about identity, personhood, presence, and, of,
course, that old standby, reality. ii
V\ V"-l
CHAPTE R TWO
THE B I OlO GV
o F INTE RA CTIVITV
\ I T HAS OFTEN BEEN OBSERVED that playing and learning are
born genetically intertwined in us, only to be artificially unrav-
eled at school. Today, high-technology marketers have spliced
them back t2gether, with uneven results, in what is known as "edu-
tai nment." More hand-held video games sets are sold each year than
TV sets, and this simple economic indicator underlines a major
sociocultural transition. Sega, Nintendo, and other video game
makers are the driving force behind a large-scale retooling o our
educational practices.
'\.- Educators and toy marketers agree that games and sports can
have as much educatio al as recreational value. But they often have
no clear idea of why that is the case. he reas_on is that games and
sports tune the nervous system. Like sports, games stretch personal
limits by providing the right level of motivation and by rewiring the
body, or the mind, for better performance. What these activities do
for the individual, they also do for the culture at large. As Don Tap-
scott observes:
':, The new technology is penetrating our lives; much of this is
happening through our children. Over one-quarter of American
homes have a computer, but for many adults the machine is a
mystery, or it is used for word processing, accounting, or home
business applications. Children, on the other hand, are using
17
18 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
machines for games, homework, communications, art, music,
reference, and a host of emerging applications on the Internet. I
'-\ The main role and purpose of games in our technological culture
may be normative, that is, to hel introduce the technolo into
everyday use. The younger generation is addressed largely because
their nervous system is still malleable and capable of integrating
structures.
Many video arcade games and their domestic versions in Nin-
tendo, Sega, and Lynx-based PGttorms--combine mental and hand-
eye coordination skills in aggressive postures. In spite of their often
simplistic scenarios and such computer games
are successful to the extent that they integrate more complex synthe-
ses of sensory-motor involvement, mental acuity, and reflexes. They
work the body and the mind of users into new configurations, con-
ditioning them for use of computer-based tech-
nolo ies.
10 Video games are successful precisely because they respond to a
need in growing children to externalize and monitor the growth of
their own nervous systems. Games are to the central nervous system,
what sports are to the neuromuscular Because they involve
physical contact with a joystick, keyboard, mouse, or other instant-
feedback interface, they address the nervous system directly. Thus,
they are able to retrain the nervous system directly. On a purely
physical plane, games rea5Jjg!l timeandhallcl-
- eye-ear -but, more pertinently, they allow the children
to form -and improve their
the required physical !!lenta) :pproaches to deaf-;Trh
computers and the Internet.
'\. Getting on-line or p-Gyi; g video games or trying virtual reality or
experimenting in interactive arts eaCh invo ve strategies to map ancr
remap the user's nervous system at the as !he_
physiological level. The effect of video games, for example, with
respect to tete evkrm;industry, is to train ordinary people from
totake control and res onsibility for the content of the
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 19
tscreen._ Douglas Rushkoff explains how children learn to integrate
the schemata of the controlled screen:
9, Thank's to their experience with video games, kids have a funda-
mentally different appreciation of the television image than
I They it's While their
in the living-room passively absorbing network programming,
the kids are down in the playroom zapping the Sega aliens on
their own TV screen. The parents' underlying appetite is for easy
entertainment or, at best, prepackaged information. Meanwhile,
they bemoan the fact that their kids don't have an attention span
long enough to endure such programming. The kids, on the
hand, rather than simpl)' receiving media, are actively
the on that 2
Video games are often condemned out of hand as onanistic, nar-
cissistic devices that create antisocial dunces out of nice, clean kids.
But video game critics fail to see the larger picture of the video game
industry. There are indeed a plethora of solitary, not to say solipsist,
games such as Gameboys, Lynxes, etc.; the solitary games tend to be
used largely by boys, but often in the context of one-upmanship with
other teens.
tion, usuall involvinK rou s rather than individuals, and there are
also the games designed to be played on home TV sets, some now of-
fered on-line,
\C All these varieties of games perform different social and biologi-
_cal Solitary game systems aCt as bio-accelerators and
adrenaline-boostin mechanisms; in fac:t, they can be thought of as
computer-assisted neurotransmitters. Whether hand-held or TV-
Unked, user into an artificial "alert" mode. The group-
oriented games for video arcades probably respond to genetically
programmed self-assertion biases, and, like bodily sports, provide a
limited range of survival-based competitive skills. They have already
generated their own subculture and are training the cyber genera-
tion. The 9'ber culture surrounding them is best expressed in the
20 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
garners from all over the world who get on-line to play together.
Here connection, not destruction, is the Some of the
games, such as Simgraphics's Combat Zone and other paramilitary
groupware products are of the old-fashioned aggression-based vari-
ety, but others, such as Carl Loeffler's Virtual Polis, and Habitat, are
based on meeting, and relating-on cooperation rather
than competition. Such connected games offer an enticement to get
on the Net, and education as to how to excel at using it. They also
give us a clear indication of some of the most lucrative busi-
nesses of the forthcoming Infobahn are going to be.
,,-"- Many critics have complained that a large proportion of the
video games, especially those designed for arcades, are violent,
.... ghoulish, and vulgar. (The same criticisms are often heard of TV.)j
. ! ar:gut;, howeyes.. !bere. is _ redeemi.t:1g social purpose in

release valves for larvae

an_d_ im_ agl_ n_a_tio_l1. As well, the physical involvement burns off excess
energy. There is a momentous social change going on right now and
video games are an important part of the necessary adaptive process.
That, I would argue, is their principal role and the explanation for
their phenomenal popularity. Of course their distribution is driven
by market priorities, but that does not fully account for the phe-
nomenon. The less obvious motivation for their appearance may be
hidden in our own unconscious drives, which regularly produce
of cultural icons via the and
games like Clue were an epiphenome-
non of the print world. Vi eo games arecloser-to the psychofoglca]
conditions thatproduce all games: they may be spontaneous expres-
sions of a technology exploring new modalities of being and making
them available to large numbers of people.
\". They may appear to be no more than the Ttojan gifts of a mighty
industrial-cognitive complex, but video [ ames actually respond to
real needs in the Anyone who has trieOawell-designed video or
computer game for more than two minutes knows that the ex eri-
ence is totally absorbing, and removes all other concerns from the
mind. The game provides a perfect loop with one's own reactions.
THE B I 0 LOG Y 0 FIN T ERA C T I V I T Y 21
Games like Lynx's BMXor Broderbund's Loderunneror Patrick Buck-
land's Crystal Quest put you in rouch with your body in a paradoxi-
cal wa . The uite s ecialized, of
course, reducing one's proprioceptive connection to a single array of
sensations, all geared to increase- ef&ie;cy. However, what is lost in
of experience is made up for rn the inrensity of the feel-
Games cater to purely physical needs created by a social envi-
ronmenr now irrevocably invaded by machines, and at the same
time they help manage emotional stress by offering the opportunity
to remove oneself completely from any other preoccupation.
\) The sportive aspect of computer and video games includes motoi
._-_._- - .----- --- - - - -- - - . (.
control, which is what makes them so involving in the ,
There may be a cathartic effect in the realignmenr of 0!:le's nervous "
energies in the with At any rate, there is
recreational value for the whole person, body and mind together, as
opposed to a process such as reading or watching television, which
favor mostly mental relationships. These video "neurosports" are
usuall racticed at the time when the children need it most, that is,
when their nervous s stem is still growing and pining for experience.
Mter -;-couple of years of video games -;re
aside when other, more adult concerns begin to emerge. *
0. " 0 e\ "(<I. 'VQ .
T HE JOB O f ART
\ If the purpose of compurer and video games is to update nervous
systems, the function of inreractive art is mote subtle and less direct.
Inreractive art, like inreractive games, works directly on the body
and the nervous system, but its function is primarily to update the
* As it is mediated by a screen-based event, the physiological and cognitive
expression of the user is "outered" pardy. The person moves out of the confines
of the skin, if only for a very short distance, but often for a long while. Escapism,
if you will, but of a different sort than that provided by passive entertainment
such as cinema or television.
22 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
IS culture's psychology and sensibility. Technology is a significant
J source of dis-ease in the culture because it threatens the status quo.
New technologies such as computers or networked environments
change the behavior of the social constructs created by earlier tech-
nologies such as television, radio, or print. The main function of art
in this context is not merely to entertain or to decorate, but to revise
the standard psychological interpretation of reality in a way that
accommodates the consequences of technological innovations. -
In interactive art installations, as in Kames, the sensory-motor
component is very hi as it is in video games. But the goal is not to
master something simplistic and well known, rather it is to enjoy
something new. The art installation carries the exploration of the
technology to new levels, attempting ta generate new combinations
of sensary-motor interactions. Thus there is an overt neura-cultural
functian to new art forms which has always been present in alder
.ones, though it has gone unrecognized within the strict limitations
of our literate mental categories. This rale of this neuro-cultural
function is ta pasitian the body and mind .of the human subject in
relation to the environment as by the of the latest
are
systems. What they-reach is how ta adapt to new sensory symheses,
. new speeds, ananew perceptIons. . - .. . .. . -
\t, Crista Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's installation, Inter-
active Plant Growing, is a case in point. In front of you is a huge
video screen where you and leaves and shaats of many dif-
ferent kinds of complex and colored plants. As you get claser
you can see that some of the are growing in a kind of time-
lapse, accelerated effect. They someane approaches .or
'..
gently touches one .of five real plants which are an a stage in front .of
the screen. The real plants are very sensitive" ta human presence.
Depending an how relaxed .or tense yau are, dtey create different
kinds .of shaats an the screen in front .of yau. The hat the inter-
face .or the medium provided far the interactian in this is
a plant, emphasizes the cantinuity between the human and the
batanical. The combined .output .of a number .of patrons can "also
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 23
rep,resent the general mood of the crowd. Interactive Plant Growing
for how to arrange a new kind of cocktail party
where plants andllowettgive instant, public feedback of the party-
goers' state of mind on
Within this installatio
l1
, two simultaneous ex eriments on the
connections between the human nervous system and the technocul-
,lural are being The_ first one to
theyser, namely how to adjust, by trial and error using instant feed-
back, one's overall state of mincLas it externally. The sec-
Q.Ild experi!!lent is how_ t.9 integrate the .!lQ..nbiQlogical or techJ:lical
_elements of the whole experience within the realm of one's
absolutely and irrevocably personal experience. Both experiments
directly to the mapping and remapping of one's overall
chosensory experience.
arts, like games and sports, are directly tied to the
human learning process. The mimetic function in higher animals as
well as in humans serves to integrate new information in a sensory-
motor and neuromuscular way. New synaptic connections are made
in the nervous system to include and order new experiences. There is
nothing inherently "natural" about human beings in any given his-
torical period, and all media, whether or nc;t,-h-a;e al; ays
been internalized by the central nervous system. This is done
qirectly, as favored roytings of im ulses, or as schema of men-
tal and gestural projections. This process applies to technologies
from the to com u!.<:.r, an4_most notably to writ-
ing, perhaps the most "desensitizing" of all the
devices invented by b.L!maI1.s. *
All the extensions we add to ourselves require ,
strategies of Just before you step into your car, from the
* Art only became a recognized human reality when the Greek alphabet shat-
tered the human senses by reducing the rich sensoriality of oral language to a
series of abstract squiggles. The job of art, then as now, was to take each sense
and reconstitute a world around it in terms of drama, painting, music, dance,
fine food, etG.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
time you open the door to the moment you turn the key, you condi-
tion your whole physiology in preparation for a car-driving experi-
ence. Thus the role of the body as an interpreter and integrator of
.0f9rmation and is Meaning is achieved by the
combination of verbal and sensory inputs. The meaning of
see and result of the s nthesis of sensor com onen_ts,
data-processing. ,We make sense of the
_world and of our role in it byfinding the and the
comprehensive configuration of images and words which are rele-
vant to is at hand. We c;r;. achieve this either in
- - . -- - - --
.9ur mind_or through the use of our body in context, or by a c0!!l.i-
nation ofboth.*
'10 It is clear from even a cursory analysis of how our sensory appara-
tus works that the senses are far from being hard-wired genetically,
but rather include a generous sup..ly of context-sensitive ada tation
artistic innovations address
thephysiological response -0 ( the performer or the user as an essen-
tialp artner In sense-making and meaning creatio;;-. art
play the They invite users to inter-
nalize what they are experiencing, to make new connections, in
other words, to remap their own nervous system. This process usu-
ally involves sensory remapping, that is, restructuring our sensory
responses according to the culturally and technologically grounded
inputs that are experienced.
* However, in the wake of alphabetic literacy, Western cultures have tended to
separate the psychological and the physiological levels and modalities of learn-
ing. One can, after all, learn new things without the use of one's body, simply
rehearsing mentally, that is, by interiorizing the content of what one is reading.
Westerners have thus lost touch, literally, with the physical component oflearn-
ing, except in sportS, which also carry the mark of mimesis. In a literate culture
that has commonly practiced the radical separation, even the abstraction, of
logos from bios, art was perhaps developed to recover for and from the body
what had been lost to the exclusive culti vation of the mind. The art of the West
has been characterized by presenting our main sensory experiences isolated from
one another, as spectacles abstracted from the immediate context of living, for
the purpose of contemplation and the achievement of meaning.
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 25
1\ A longtime expert in surgical and psychological remapping of
self-perception, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, makes the following
keen observation:
1'L For me prosthetic communication and the things it creates,
specifically interactive entertainment software, the Internet,
cyberspace, and virtual are not a question of market share
or even of content. In a sense these
things are part of ourselves. As with all powerfuLdjscourses, their
very existence shapes us. Since in a deep sense
,guages, it's hard t.? what they do, because what they do is to
structure seeing. They act on the systems-social" cultural, neu:-
which we make Their implicit message
changes us)
... ;,. :, I , t.Jt.:.. ,':e. \'Y ) - ...'/IJIfl'
1-\ Tamas Walicksky's The Garden is a 'One of the most
beautiful virtual reality environments ever created by an artist. But it
is not really interactive, nor is it really "virtual." In its present state, it
is just a plain old video of an animated computer graphic, but it con-
tains much of what one needs to know about virtual reality and
about the job of the artist within it. Walicksky wanted to get a sense
of how a child sees the world. He simply took a video of his three-
year-old daughter in a nice but ordinary garden, with flowers and
trees, and birds and bees. Then he digitized the video in a computer
so that he could work on all the figure/ground relationships between
his daughter and her surroundings. He first separated the figure of
the child from the ground of the garden. Then he mapped out the
various shots of the garden into flexible frame structures that could be
made to respond and adjust automatically and smoothly to the pres-
ence of another object in the image. He reinserted the images of the
child into the new context-sensitive backgrounds and obtained what
he readily admits are his own interpretations of how his daughter
would see the world. What you see on the video is how the objects in
the garden react to the child's presence. As she leans against the tree, it
bends slightly to accommodate her back. As she goes up the ladder of
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
a toy slide, the rungs expand and contract with her passage. As she
rubs her eyes, the whole scene disappears. As a big dragonfly appears
in her field of vision, the entire scene except for the insect turns
blank, as if to show that the child's attention, at that precise moment,
is entirely focused on the insect. As the child walks among flowers
taller than herself, they seem to just glide by her without shrinking as
they would in an adult's standard interpretation of perspective.
1 \ The Garden gives us a very strong conceptual tool for exploring
not just the psychosensory synthesis of a child's world, but the per-
: ceptual environments of all of us. The historic film La dame du lac
: was edited entirely from the protagonist's eye-level point of view. It
didn't do very well because the technology was not flexible enough
to translate believably the subjectivity of the protagonist into that of
the spectator. A recent film, Strange Days, has tried this again with
greater success. VR is an ideal medium for a new genre in entertain-
ment based on the substitution of subjectivities. It would enable us
to experience in detail completely different psychosensory synthe-
ses, even t oseofCIiHerent animals. We know enough about horses,
r:a6hits, and dogs, for example, to be able, at some point in the not-
roo-distant future, ro simulate what they see and hear.
15 Another gentle and delightful way to remap our psychosensory
synthesis is provided by David Rokeby's interactive art installation,
Very Nervous System (VNS). * VNS allows you to create am usical reflec-
tion of your presence within the installation. You dance-or just
walk, if you feel shy-in front of a camera and sounds are instanta-
neously created by your movements. These are not the random
sounds which are generated by so many early-and boring-
* Rokeby is a Toronto composer. VNS is an interactive total surround sound cre-
ation system, an installation which involves the linking of a set of video cameras,
a computer, and a synthesizer. The performer's movements are recorded by a
camera and are directly digitized into a computer as live data sources. I should
say that the video stream from the camera is really "rokebytized" because, when
Rokeby conceived of his instrument, there was no digitizing system available
and he had to build his own; over the years, he refined the system in such a way
that it is capable of many operations that are not available on standard systems.
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 27
so-called interactive music installations. In VNS, the music is the con-
trolled interpretation of the movements of your whole body. Rokeby
is a composer as well as a brilliant programmer. His installation al-
lows for very flexible variables. Each body part, each gesture can cre-
ate a different sound, and you can verify that this or that gesture
makes this or that sound simply by repeating the gesture. The
sounds do not clash with each other, but flow into one another with
increasing levels of complexity depending on how fast you move or
how close to the camera you are. You can thus create not just noise,
but real music. You become simultaneously the composer, the per-
former, and the audience of your own musical environment. All the
while, your body movements and your gestures, something un-
doubtedly very physical, are being translated into something quite
ethereal and beautiful, not to mention limitlessly variable.
l(., At the opening of Origin's Multimedia Center in Baarn, in
October 1992, I had occasion to watch two professional dancers
explore Very Nervous System for the first time. They were so taken
by this novel experience that they danced nonstop for twelve hours.
They couldn't get over the fact that, for once, they were calling
the tune. It seemed as if they were rediscovering their own space,
sharpening the perception of their own presence in the world.
Rokeby explains that his work uses machines to give us back some
of the intimacy that they normally rob from us. The experience
is extraordinary: it is as if your body is pushing some melodious
medium around you, or as if everything around you reverberates
with the sounds of your presence. The effect is one of controlled
improvisation.
Through the computer, the rokebytizer sends the real-time data to a MIDI (Musi-
cal Instrument Digital Interface), a special connector devised to allow a sound
synthesizer to receive and execute commands from a computer. Depending
upon the level of sophistication of the synthesizer, it is possible to introduce pre-
viously sampled sounds to generate the basic structures of the sounds used in the
installation. Theoretically, it would be possible to record and sample piano
music played by Glenn Gould or Keith laren, and use their exceptionally fine
"touch" to characterize all the sounds coming from the performer's movements.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
1"1 The whole experience creates an intimate involvement with space,
at least with that part of space that is at the limit between sound and
touch. That boundary is potentially the most important component
of the sensory interface between man and the environment which is
created by electronic communication technologies. It is an image of
our unfolding relationship with that environment and it mimics
some of the new physical and psychological dimensions given us by
our extended electronic reach. That is why interactive artists are ex-
ploring that limit so intently.
C ~ Charles Davies' magnificent VR installation, Osmosis, is remark-
able not only for the beaury of its imagery and the complexiry of the
many levels of exploration it affords the audience, but especially for
the interface that was developed for it. The decor is a secluded spot
in a forest, with a brook and foliage. You can go underground,
through a dead tree down to the roots of life-at least to the roots of
computer calculations!-and up into the sphere of the mind where
you will encounter sound bites or quotations from famous thinkers.
In Osmosis, you don the goggles and gloves that are standard VR
paraphernalia. But you also wear a light, brassiere-like vest which
enables you to move just by controlling your breathing. If you
breathe in, you rise, if you breathe our, you sink. If you breathe nor-
mally, you stay on the same level. The symbolic implications of
Osmosis are many, bur the most powerful for me is that it reminds us
that even in the immateriali of the virtual, breathin is still the
mark of one's presence in life. *
Z'i People interact with machines with the help of interfaces: tools,
handles, buttons, mice, keyboards-even Davies' brassiere; systems
that allow them access to the machine's capabilities. The desire to
* Another, much earlier and equally poetic use of breathing is La plume by
Edmond Couchot and Marie-Helene Tramus, developed at the University of
Paris VIII computer lab. In this installation, you simply breathe on what looks
like a small microphone. A feather on a computer monitor reacts to your blow-
ing in perfect simulation of how a real feather would react. The effect is eerie.
Couchot explained that he wanted to find a precise interface between the virtual
and the real.
THE B I 0 LOG Y 0 F _ I N T ERA C T I V I T Y 29
improve interactivity is prompting the exploration and interpreta-
tion of all the possible technological interstices, all the modalities of
exchange and relationships available, from the fingers pressing but-
tons to gesture, voice, and breath control, and now to thought con-
trol. Explorations into the different ways people relate to their
environments and among themselves seem to be limited only by the
varieties of expression humans can produce with their minds and
their bodies. Interfaces emerge into the worlds of art and industrial
production as material precipitates or formalizations of our gestures.
However, thagks to the rocess, these interfaces are
_themselves inte[nalized within the body._
10 In interactive art, as with interactive technology, the research on
interfaces can take at least two radical directions: the first one is
when the interface invades the body and physically penetrates the
human nervous s stem. I call this bionism, but it is also referred to
as cyborgism. In the second case, it is not the interface that invades
-------- - - - --- - --:----:::------,--
the body, but the mind that becomes its own interface. From the
h o w- - --- - .. - - : - : - ._ . .
l\\1tri{,le keyboard to sophIsticated eye-trackmg deVICes and bram-
waves scanners, the pursuit of this ultimate goal in the development
of interfaces has been relentless. It will not end until we can com-
mand our own electronic extensions by thought alone.
The notion ofbionism, cyborgism, is taken quite literally by the
Australian Stelarc, who in my opinion is one of the most important
artists of our day. Srelarc combines biological and technological sen-
sors and effecters in his work. Using transponders taped to his arms,
legs, and chest, he commands the manipulation of huge industrial
robots directly from his own nerve impulses. In his work, we find
one of the most extreme explorations of bionism, or the new social
contract between biology and technology. His performances are
spectacular, verging on the repulsive. To make his statements about
the obsolescence of the flesh-based body and the bionic integration
,.9!"the organic and the technological, he has allowed himself to hang
150 feet above ground, in Manhattan, supported by an industrial
crane and attached by hooks attached to the skin of his back. Stelarc
practiced this novel form of the ancient ascesis for decades as if to
3
0
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
"punish" the skin for being so limited and weak, before getting into
neuro-robotics. He never says "my body" when speaking about him-
self; he says "the body."*
'7,1 WIj1en he exhibits on a large public screen the meanderings of his
own digestive system as seen in real time from a tiny endoscopic
video /camera, Stelarc is demonstrating that electronic technologies,
by erhulating and extending our body functions, are turning us
out and projecting our bodies on the outer world. Further-
more, by combining electronic with biological nerve-endings and
even', in other performances, by affecting the neural controls of the
body of another person with the help of an impulse simulator,
is co-opting medical technology for impli-
cati/ons.
''I>' Relentlessly, Stelarc pushes both his own limits and those of the
technological environment even as it expands around us. As the
thrust of technology now goes to the networks, there goes Stelarc. At
the first Telepolis conference (Luxembourg, November 4-II, 1995),
Stelarc was "downloading" his nerve impulses onto the Internet to
cause gestures in someone else's body in London. Sensors connected
to his arms and legs picked up the impulses of his nervous system
and transmitted them on-line to London so that somebody else's
arms and legs, connected through the appropriate interface, could
execute a dance neurophysiologically willed in Paris. Stelarc is saying
that we have to get ready for new sensory configurations which
will include their technological supports and infrastructures in a
* Stelarc is fond of saying both in private and in public that "the body -his, or
anyone else's for that matter-is obsolete," One day, in Melbourne, Stelarc had
arranged for me and a few friends to attend an Australian football match
between the Tigers and the Bombers, He got so involved in the game, jumping
up and down every time the Tigers scored a goal, that I kept wondering how
long his body would remain obsolete, , , , As for his "self," where it is may be a
moot point. He says that it is a distributed, self-organizing complex of different
functions called forward by different situations at different times-postmodern
attitude with enough grounds in formal biology and psychology to merit serious
examination.
THE B I 0 LOG Y 0 FIN T E RAe T I V IT Y 31
biotechnical totality, and that this new body is just as critical for
information processing as our minds. We are invited by Stelarc to
take the adaptation of the whole human nervous system, its techno-
logical extensions and its cultural adaptability, as seriously as we
have taken the often difficult bur necessary remapping of our ideas,
assumptions, and concepts, whenever we have been challenged by
new paradigms.
The electronic extensions of the human body allow rapid
crossover back and forth between hardware and software, between
thought, flesh, electricity, and the outside environment. With the
interactive arts, we are beginning to graduate from a passive, one-
way relationship to our screens to an interactive one. We have shared
our minds with TV for four decades. With TV often substituting for
-our own imagination, much of our visualization was already occur-
ring on the screen. With the interactive systems, our psychotechno-
logical development is taking us one step further. The video screen is
often becoming a necessary intermediary not only for our imagina-
tion, but also for our thinking processes. It as a dis EX: not
only for themselves, but also for the effects of the ro-
,grams on our minds and bodies. What we can do now that we
couldn't do with one-way TV is "computer-assisted thinking." The
contact between thinking and visualizing that is automatic in our
inner imagination is currently assisted in most cases by our hands
-i rouS e}1:ysicil interfaces, but there is also
direct interaction between thought and screen. We are about to rec-

action on our screens that we can experience in our brains. Here is
the progression from looking to thinking to doing in three quick
steps:
): Step one: Looking. Joachim Sauter and Dirk Liisebrink's Zerse-
her allows its audience to change the structure and the texture
of a painting simply by looking at it. You stand in front of a
painting scanned onto a computer monitor and placed at eye
level as it would be on a wall in a gallery. After a short time,
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
you begin to notice that the surface of the painting becomes
slightly blurred, distorted precisely at the point where your
gaze is directed. Wherever you look, you find the same effect
of destruction. A hidden, eye-tracking device is in fact follow-
ing the movements of your eye to connect, in a quasi-tactile
fashion, the end point of your gaze to the computer screen.
The effect is to give a startling power to the art critic's eye, not
merely to look at the artwork, but to modify it. One possible
interpretation of this very postmodern piece is that it is a sar-
donic statement about beauty and truth being quite literally
"in the eye of the beholder." Radical art criticism.
There is a problem with Zerseher in that it only works if the
observer, like the classical art patron of the great masters of perspec-
tive and trompe l'oeil, is positioned at a rather precise point in the
museum environment. Another eye-tracking interactive system
invented by a group of Californian artists, collectively named Bio-
muse, is based not on following eye movements by a camera, but in
the use of sensors which pick up and interpret the movements of the
motor-control muscles surrounding the eyes. The Biomuse interac-
tive device allows someone to direct precisely and deliberately his or
her gaze as a pointer on a screen. The execution command is
achieved either by pressing on a mouse-like device, or for disabled
people who can only move their eyes, simply by blinking.*
:} ,
Step two: Thinking. While the systems so far described involve
the use of one's eyes exclusively, they also use the eyes as the
extension of the hand. We could say that it is really nothing
* An interesting fact about Biomuse research is that this group was not looking
primarily to develop this particular system, but it grew out of previous work on
connecting voluntary muscle contraction to various musical devices to create
music directly from the body movements. Thus the literal touch involving the
hardware materiality of muscular controlled very quickly to another fundamen-
tal aspect of touching, which is to handle intervals.
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 33
" () II
\,:.( \
more than a kind of "sleight of eye." But the eye is a lot closer
to the mind than the It is, in biolo,gical fact, an exten-
sion, or an outerin , brain. Looking and thinking are
almost coextensive. In advanced systems developed by mili-
tary aviation, the visual interface is bypassed altogether, as if
to complete a perfect symbiosis between mind and machine.
The pilot, connected to command mechanisms by sensors
placed on his skull inside his helmet, can order certain simple
operations by thought alone. The basic technical princi Ie is
quite simple: all that is needed is access to a "yes" or "no," an
or off just like the_basic the com-
puter itself. Everything else can followfrom
1'b In the art world, there is a new generation of biofeedback sys-
tems, such as Masaaki Kahata's "Interactive Brainwave Visual Ana-
lyzer" (IBVA) system, which allow people to identify, select, and
control some of their own brain waves. A headband containing two
or three sensors is placed on the user's forehead. The surface electri-
cal potential generated by the brain is picked up by the sensors and
processed through a computer. It is possible to see on the screen, and
hence presumably to monitor and affect-by thinking differently or
by thinking about different things-the graphical rendering of
brain waves. Even though the transmitted data is only a very loose
and generalized rendering of what is in reality a much more complex
series of psychophysiological events, the end result is a workable
approximation of mind-controlled operations.

Step three: Doing. The young German artist Ulrike Gabriel
uses IBVA for her stunning installation, Terrain OI. I experi-
enced Terrain OI as presented at the Landesmuseum in Linz
for the I993 Ars Electronica. Wearing the IBVA headband, I
was seated in front of a computer screen and I saw what I was
told was the almost instantaneous feedback of my mental
state. I was asked to relax and the feedback information
appearing as changing graphs on the screen helped me to
34
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
quickly shift from an agitated, slightly anxious state to a more
relaxed condition. Fairly soon, I realized that the more relaxed
I felt, the more light there was in the room. This light came
from a large reflector attached to the ceiling of the room.
After the light reached a visibly higher level of intensitY, I
heard a curious rumbling coming from the floor area where I
saw a few dozen big cockroach-like objects moving at first
rather slowly and then gradually faster. These strange looking
objects, about the size of a hand, were in fact light-sensitive
robots bearing photoelectric cells on their backs. The robots
are programmed to move smoothly within the performance
area without banging into each other; even as they move, the
rumbling sound created by their wheels is picked up and
amplified to provide yet another feedback mechanism to the
source of all this activity, the user. Thus the loop is completed
between the power of thought and the technological exten-
sions of this complex but unified biological activity.
;) Ulrike Gabriel's installation is one of the most striking and sim-
plest demonstrations of the endlessly controversial "mind-body"
deconstruction of stages of transforma-
tions of a single input go from the highly complex realm of the mind
to the physics of acoustics via data processing in the computer for
biofeedback, to pure electrical energy in the light-well, to electro-
mechanical conversion with the photoelectric celis, to pure mechan-
ical dynamics in the robots' motors, to computerized behavior-
programming in the movements of the robots, and finally to a
mechanical energy-to-sound conversion with the help of a pressure-
sensitive surface upon which the robots travel.
,\\ Another artist, Seisuke Oki, has adapted the IBVA interface to cre-
ate semidirect interactions between thought and electromechanical
environments. Oki's Digital Therapy is a biofeedback system that
allows a user to generate sight, sounds, and vibrations as feedback
loops arising from his or her own brain waves as fed through filters
and interfaces. First, you ease yourself into one of those automated
THE BIOLOGY OF INTERACTIVITY 35
self-administered massage chairs the Japanese are so fond of. Then
you put on a helmet with VR goggles and earphones which also con-
tains the sensors from the IBVA system. Mter a few seconds of adjust-
ments during which you are asked to relax-not unexpectedly, since
you happen to be in a La-Z-boy-you begin to hear buzzing sounds
and see indeterminate shapes and colors in the eyephones' video
screens. Nothing is happening yet while in the chair. Only after a lit-
tle while do you begin to suspect that there is a potential connection
between what and how you think and the changes in the patterns of
light and sound. You find yourself straining to smooth out the
sounds and the events in the VR world. This sets you back again.
Mter much patience and appropriate goodwill, you eventually begin
to succeed in stabilizing an image of what seems to be a landscape
seen from a low-flying airplane. At that point I think I felt a vague
vibration coming from the chair, but I will never know for sure
because I don't think that in spite of my earnesrness-or perhaps
because of it-I ever made it past first base in the system.
Digital Therapy is akin to a neurospoft, ready for the video game
market. Bur with a little more technosavvy, it could become what its
prophetic name says it is. We can imagine people easing into their
electronic armchair for a quick zap into harmonious sensory-'motor
conditioning. The need to provoke a fully externalized response by
the power of the mind alone in all likelihood invites a reordering of
certain normal mental sequences and the temporary restructuring of
one's body image.
Terrain OI..3nci DjgitaUb..erap1. are the taggl9le _of
what may become rourine in the near furure: our-of-body physical
by thought alone,. To technology reach that
point, artists are leading the way, but the message of their work lies
not in the technology, but in the psychological implications. The
artwork is metaphorical; it is meant to help people feel and under-
stand the new connections. What follows the artistic research is the
technological development, in other words, a literal a lication of
the remapped configuration of our psychosensory synthesis. Just as
Nintendopicked glove from another brilliant team of
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
computer artists, Tom Zimmerman and Jaron Lanier, when Nin-
tendo or another game producer picks up Ulrike Gabriel's or Oki's
installations, the art form will turn into a game and the heuristic will
lead into the normative.
l4'\ Luciana Heill's project is perhaps one of the most ambitious,
complex, and intimate of all the uses of Kahata's interface: she plans
to use an improved version of IBVA to download her brain-wave pat-
terns on the Net and mix them up in an orderly fashion with other
participants' patterns so as to generate an interactive display that
would be the combination of hers and the other people's thinking.
When we begin to do that wirelessly-as we undoubtedly will-we
will call it extrasensory perception and we will forget that ESP was
once the object of incredulity.
,-,s From such installations, a whole new level of philosophical spec-
ulations about person-machine, person-environment, mental-phys-
ical, electrical-mechanical, biological-technical relationships can be
reached. We may find, one day, that one of the most vexing philo-
sophical and scientific problems, which is to know how the
connects to the brain and the spirit to the body, is something rela-
tively simple ... a trick already performed for us by some of our
machines.
\0-,
- {I .jIY c.. s-v.JO'("\D
I" d\(,) ...... _\ [. u - _ i (c,
\- Ie'" ",/ --" "
-----
I ( '1 ' i.1Y' '() \, ""
CHAPTER THREE
,r---
PERSON,
l AND
VIRTUAL
\ EACH YEAR in Canada and the United States, more than a
million people voluntarily throw themselves off 150-foot-
high structures. Most, if not all of them, are attached by the
ankles to elastic bands which are measured precisely so as to arrest
their free-fall just before it terminates in contact with the earth.
This is called; Ui1gee jumping:, It is hard to say whether it is
or a form of (therapy, O'f- 5-O'th;\ or neither. Culture watchers- are
baffied. What driV;s people to subject themselves to such a bizarre
experience?
THE BODY IN QUESTION
)
For me, the thought of leaping off a cliff or out of a plane is not a
comfortable one. Even with the absolute assurance that all mishap
will be avoided, the mere idea evokes in me a gut-wrenching sensa-
tion, a generalized panic, a vertigo that begins in my stomach and
quickly expands to the tips of my fingers and toes. Perhaps thisJs
clue: ofbungeejYf!Pin.Ksurely must arouse every cell
in uns eakabl and generalized blow, _or)lke
the slap the doctor gave us when we were newborns.
:; With th-e interfaces, the distribution of
human nerve impulses-one's flesh, even-across man-machine
37
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
boundaries, we have good reason both to wake up and question
what's happening to our sense of self and to try to redefine the
boundaries of identity and personhood. Here is a quick sampling of
the kinds of impact interactive technologies can have on one's body
image and psychological envelope:
\.C -{, \Ql,l
\ Teleception: Interactive technologies, at least to the extent that they
give us a telesensory reach, add a new dimension to our biolo ical
sensor life, which I call telece tion. That means, the remote per-
ception of things outside the body, or, alternately, the perception of
things approaching or touching the body in some way from a dis-
tance. A teleceptive sensibility might be expected to be found devel-
oping on networks.
':: Expansion: At the same time, there may arise a sense of l<;>ss of one's
precise e.ersonal still .have and
trust it to a certain degree to tell us who (and where) we are, but as
we project ourselves -cii"giralfy, without in$ r:
mediaries, what else should we know about ourselves and where can
we find out? The whole planet is up for grabs.
Multiple personality: As A. R. Stone says, "Multiple Personality [MP
without the stigmatizing final D for 'disorder' ] is a mode that
onates the . virtual communities." Networks present
another challenge to the notion of personhood because they distrib-
ute self, thus greatly extending the body's reach and range. They do
this either in broadcast mode, or in a distributed way thaI is partly
self-organizing and pardy agent-assisted.
1. There is no horizon on only expansions and contrac-
tions, and our relationship to it begins with a formidable expansion
of psychological size. The loss of a of boundaries,
expansion of our mental frameworks by satellite, the on-line redis_-:-
tribution of our powers of action, all of these add up to a col1fus.ed
,Eody'" image. We cani we begin
and 'Fe end.
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
39

Proprioception: The a arent need eo Ie have to
with their bodies is exp,ressed in waxs calculated to increase their ac-
cess to physical sensations, just to know where they stand. People
pear to be testing the limits of their p'hysical identilli They do
different things to achieve the same result: many stop smoking, some
run, others play squash. Every year in Pamplona, the bulls are let out
of the ring and into the streets. The hardiest spectators try
to get as close to the horns as they can without getting gored. In Cal-
gary during the Stampede, some people ride wild horses. On the
cable sports networks, so-called extreme sports of all kinds are ptolif-
erating: extreme skiing, extreme boxing, even extreme cycling. They
share the characteristic of to __ an9: .limb. these
a ear to be t to remember that they have a body. I pro-
- "--"-"---
pose the theory that bun , ee an arguably desperate but rea-
sonably safe atteme.t at rioception. By
proprioception, I mean the sense of one's own body "being there"; the
of internal events. Proprioception is primarily a tactile per-
ception both of one's own internal sensation and of events and sensa-
tions in one's immediate or electronically extended surroundings.
(\ We are given little choice by electronic technologies but to in-
clude in the intimate recesses of out sensory a earatus larger, more
complex, and more diffuse realms of Elec-
tricity blurs the boundaries between our inner and experiences <
by being at the same time in the body as nerve impulses, and out of it
the
ously, as labor-saving devices and automated processes transmute so
many of the hardware realities oflife into software processes, those of
us who remain unaware of our proprioceptive sensations become
angel-like, minds without bodies, and we may experience a growing
sense of yearning for real feeling, for something substantial, like the
panic of free-falling, like bungee jumping. Thus, bungee jumping
may be the nineties' update on the sixties' ttend of "dropping out to
get back in touch": people trying to recover the immediacy and the
urgency of proprioceptive information.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
,lJ This is a line of argument that could be used in support of
McLuhan and other critics who point to the dematerialization of
human activities by electricity. In the Hegelian vision of maner
transmuted into spirit by technology, one might experience a sense
o(loss, of disembodiment amounting to a latent feeling of vertigo.
'-' \ MkYoI:r'"V
However, I am equally attracted to the opposite view expressed here
by Katherine Hayles:
\ Cyberspace, we are often told, is a disembodied medium. Testi-
monies to this effect are everywhere, from William Gibson's fic-
tional representation of the "bodiless exultation of cyberspace"
to John Perry Barlow's description of his virtual reality (VR)
experience as "my everything has been amputated." In a sense,
these testimonies are correct; the body remains in front of the
screen rather than within it. In another sense, however, they are
deeply misleading, for they obscure the crucial role that the
body plays in constructing cyberspace. In fact, we are never dis-
embodied. As anyone who designs VR simulations knows, the
specificities of our embodiments matter in all kinds of ways,
from determining the precise configurations of a VR interface to
influencing the speed with which we can read a CRT [computer]
screen. Far from being left behind when we enter cyberspace,
our bodies are no less actively involved in the construction of
virtuality than in the construction of real life. I
V1t YI" '('('11'C"" .
Propriodeception: The question is: "How much can we trust thOSE-
extended senses?" Hayles concludes her brilliant essay by addressing
the work of Canadian artist and critic Catherine Richards. In her
video Spectral Bodies, Richards, who first came to public attention
for a landmark exhibit on computer arts called The Artist as a Young
Machine at the Ontario Science Centre in 1984, _shows how different _
_ QfY!3- __ simula!Q..(s
__.J:an The basic notion Richards explores in
her experiments with blindfolded subjects is how a technology as
banal as a vibrator can invade the human body in its most intimate
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
41
recesses to remap our body image. Is propriodeception the hidden
wages of technology?
;
> Neo-Purztamsm: The most extreme posmon with respect to the
transfer of human characteristics to software is the "who needs a
_ body, ado ted by Hans Moravec, director of the
Carnegie-Mellon Mobile Robot Laboratory. He outdoes even Ste-
larc by suggesting that, in the future, we will not need a body at all,
as long as we can download our brain into a com utero I heard him
profess this and many other related notions in Essen, in 1993, an
experience that convinced me that I was in the presence of a classic
mad scientist. This is what Katherine Hayles, more soberly, has ro
say about him:
II, Traditionally the dream of transcending the body to achieve
immortality has been expressed through certain kinds of spiritu-
alities. Dust to dust, but the soul ascends to heaven. Moravec's
vision represents a remapping of that dream onto cyberspace,
with an important difference: reversing a long-standing opposi-
!i.9n between science and religion, he enlists technoscience as the
__ allY_9f To
one does_ n_ot disci2fu1e2. only a good robot s..!:!!"-
geon. Such a vision is nurtured by a cultural tradition that has
long dreamed of mind as separate from body.
2
t r., ' . (;.. II .'
THE PE R SON I N QU ESTION
(-)
Musing : boutevolution' r; Outo/Control Kevin Kelly writes: "Out
of nothing, nature makes something, I'd like ro be able to do that.
First a hunk of metal; then a robot. First some wires; then a mind.
First some old genes; then a dinosaur."
Il Speaking of old genes, I once found myself making a wild connec-
tion between the work genetic engineering scientists were doing on
DNA taken from an Egyptian mummy, and a computer scan of another
42
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
mummy at the Royal Ontario Museum. The scan allowed the arche-
ologists to penetrate the many layers of the mummy from the outer
sarcophagus right through to the skin and bones, without breaking
anything. The results of the analysis were so precise that it was possible
not only to determine the gender of the body, a woman, but also her
age, thirty-four, and the cause of her death, a large facial tumor which
had received an unsuccessful treatment. What struck me was that,
the com uter can reconstitute the whole from
to liviflg_cell a sam kQf !?NA, it is now
theoretically possible to reconstitute a mummy into a person, com-
bining the unique genetic material of the individual with a reasonably
good estimation of its shape at maturity. When it comes to resurrec-
tion, perhaps the Egyptians were not so far off the mark after all.
Artist Chico McMurtrie has a life-size companion called "Tum-
bling Man" which he made with scrap metal articulated by hydraulic
As in the Simon Says children's game, whatever Chico does,
Tumbling Man does too, and reasonably well. For example, if Chico
decides to paint a picture on one side of a board, Tumbling Man can
make another one on the other side. If you cOqlpare Chico and Tum-
bling Man's pictures, you might allow yourself to prefer the latter's ....
In some respects, Tumbling Man is the archetypal robot; man-
size, man-like, mechanically articulated and serviceable. In others, it
not. For one thing, Tumbling Man is not autonomous. It is tied to
:{its maker by a rather cumbersome umbilicus of tubes, wires, and
boxes. The value of Tumbling Man is that it proposes a theory
of robotics in action, so to speak. Robots are semiautonomous pro-
jections of human gestures. Tumbling Man's gestures are still
attached to its human controller. The willpower is still completely in
the head of the human. Tumbling Man is like all machines from the
wheel to the rocket or the nuclear power plant-an extension of the
human person. Their job is not to take over from humans, but to
amplify or multiply human energy.
\'\ From the legend of the Colem, through to the story of Franken-
stein's monster and all the way to Cyril Kapec who invented the
word, the concept of "robot" has been applied to hardware. Robots
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
43
have been conceived as being made of clay (like Adam), wood (like
Pinocchio), steel (like Tumbling Man), or any substantial material
deemed convenient. The issue, much fantasized over since Mary
Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, has always been how much
autonomy to concede to robots.
When Tumbling Man is detached from Chico, it goes limp. At
that point, it is somewhat less impressive as a piece of machinery
than a bicycle, because a bicycle doesn't need to be plugged in to be
ready to do its job. But autonomous robots are different. To go
beyond Tumbling Man and achieve autonomy, they have to take
two steps, one small, the other, huge.
,\ The small step is simply to get detached from the human, and
become self-powered, something achieved by any electric toy with
fresh batteries. The bigger step is to engage in autonomous activity
of some kind. Mark Tilden, an independent researcher attached to
the of Waterloo in Ontario, is world-renowned for the
h_e makes out of chips he in
carded greeting cards. One of his many critters, for example, is
trained to seek light to charge its minute battery. It has tiny, clumsy
little legs, more lever than leg in fact. If Mark places the light-seek-
ing robot in shadow, it will summon whatever energy it has stored to
get to the light. Once it gets there, it stops and recharges. Tilden,
Rodney Brooks at MIT, and others have created hundreds of these
ro ots which res on automatica ,in a Ii elike wa , to s ecific
-_. .-.-
of their environment. Robotic tinkering has in fact
become a worldwide new discipline somewhere between art and
engineering with "Robot Olympics" taking place every year. One
thing achieved by this level of robotics is to bring technology out of
the extension into the projection mode. When technology leaves the
condition of extension to become an autonomous projection, it
begins a new cycle which one could call a combi-
nation of ?l'UfOt;tiMon and a which is useful in
characterizing this new generation of robots.
1.1- Not all robots are hardware. A brilliant example of autonomy of
the digital, ephemeral variety of robotic creatures is Christa
44
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and Laurent Mignonneau's hauntingly beautiful installation called
jr.-Valve.: In this piece, you are invited to design a fish, tracing its
rough shape with your finger on a computer screen. You can thus, in
a few seconds, define in an approximate way its hydrodynamic pro-
file and basic speed and size characteristics. Then you press the
"send" button on the same screen. Within seconds, you will see your
fish appear in a video-tank, in 3-D and spectacular color, swimming
about according to the profile you have given it. Its lifespan is very
short, about a minute and a half or so. To extend that duration it can
opt between two strategies, either to gobble up any other fish already
in the tank, or mate with another fish. In the first instance, it will
increase its energy by the amount left in the creature it swallows-
excluding what is spent in battle-and in the second case, it will not
survive individually but will leave an offspring bearing the com-
bined characteristics of shape, color, and profile of its parents. You
can watch the offspring grow while the parents gently die by fading
away.**
* Exhibit Catalogue of Mimesis, Ars Electronica Festival 1996, September 2-6,
Lim, Austria,I4. Sommerer and Mignonneau's latest work is called Genma. As
they describe it in the catalogue of the exhibit: "Genma is a kind of a dream
machine that allows us to 'play scientist' and enables us to manipulate nature.
Nature exemplary is represented as artificial nature on a micro scale. Principles
of artificial life and genetic programming are implemented in 'creatures,' allow-
ing the visitor to manipulate their virtual genes in real time. The visitors to the
installation themselves function as randomizing factors, giving the artwork a
particular form and development. Their frequency of movement, body tension
or pulse are linked to image events on the screen and guarantee a great variety of
non-predictable image penetration."
** In his penetrating analysis of A-life and genetic artS, Kevin Kelly describes El-
Fish, a software program developed by the Russian team who produced Tetris,
now available commercially which allows the construction of fish from a total of
fifty-six genes defining eight hundred parameters. Kelly writes: "The colorful
fish swim in a virtual underwater world realistically, turning with the flick of a
fin as fish do. They weave berween strands of kelp (also bred by the program).
They pace back and forth endlessly. They school around food when you 'feed'
them. They never die. When I first saw an EI-Fish aquarium from ten paces
away, I took it to be a video of a real aquarium." In Kelly, op. cit., 277.
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
45
1:' These little virtual creatures have motivation (to survive and pro-
create). That's just a step away from having emotions. And it is emo-
tion that interests Patti Maes, working out of MIT on virtual
creatures which respond to the user's interactions with them. The
setup is a large screen which brings the image of the user together
with that of the digital creature. In her words:
In the style of Myron Krueger's Videoplace system, * the ALIVE
system offers an unencumbered, full-body interface to a virtual .
world. The ALIVE user moves around in a space of approximately
sixteen by sixteen feet. A video camera captures the user's image,
which is composited into a 3-D graphical world after the user's
image has been isolated from the background.
'i-') There, the user is surrounded by virtual objects and can interact
with "Hamsterdamer," the virtual hamster:
The Hamster avoids objects, follows the user around and begs
for food. The Hamster rolls over to have its stomach scratched if
the user bends over and pats it. If the user has been patting the
Hamster for a while, its need for attention is fulfilled and some
other activity takes precedence (e.g., looking for food))
* Long before interactivity had become the rather fuzzy buzzword it is today, an
artist called Myron Krueger, as far back as the late sixties, had been hacking away
at his Video Place system, perhaps the earliest and among the most aesthetically
satisfying of the interactive works of art. Krueger's special universe consists in
digitizing the image of the user and projecting it live into the screen environ-
ment where, by entering into contact with different kinds of dynamic designs, it
interacts with them. You stand in front of the computer screen, at the center of
the field of a camera which is pointed at you. The camera brings your image
right into the screen, but before it gets there, it has been digitized. This means
that it is not an ordinary video image anymore, it has become a movable icon,
like the pointer on any computer screen. Then, by moving your arms, your
hands, or your whole body, you can get the images on the screen to follow your
movements, dance with you, or make amusing or beautiful sounds. There is the
magic of childhood regained in experiencing this kind of power-at-a-distance.
4
6
I f.r;. h-<.4,- , V( .:,. It.,-J"
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
'1 [1..1"1.>- 'J' / 1 h'v\l:
> Our machines are becomin intelli ent and before long they will_
also ac uire a self. We know _a lot about "self," but we do know
it's 1!..0t veD-:': difficult one. Some of these personality
simulation machines have neural networks. I saw in Linz the ugly
but interesting "Neuro Baby," programmed by Japanese artist
Naoko Tosa to learn to speak in the same time scale as a human
baby. This is an electronic creature appearing on a screen: you talk
to it and it talks back to you. Within the next three years Tosa is
hoping to be able to have a conversation with him. She calls her
creatures "digital pets" and thinks that there will eventually be one in
every family. Neither from a graphic nor an acoustic design nor an
educational point of view could Neuro Baby be deemed a resound-
ing success. The point, however, is that the artist illuminates the
future.
'l.'b "Helpless Robot" by Norman White, a biologist by training, also
tests our propensity to grant human qualities to objects that behave
in some ways like ourselves. Helpless Robot talks to you. It asks for
your help. It wants you to move it around because it is helpless. But
as soon as you have begun to help, it starts insulting you. So you
move away. Then it calls you back, wheedling and begging your for-
giveness. As the artist confesses: "I have devised this silly scenario so
that I can experiment with the attractive, if probably impossible,
notion of simulating a human The robot raises another
question: how much independence and how much complexity of
thought do we need to put into our machines before we grant them
personhood? I once knew a Catholic priest who wanted to baptize
computers.
Many people, when asked how "real" is the communication be-
tween them and the computerized machine, answer that, of course
they know it's not real, but it sure feels real. Author Sherry T urkle, in
her book The Second Self Computers and the Human Spirit, reports
children who use the
_machines are "aliYLIn la,test book,LifiQtuhe Screen, Turkle ob-
serves that simply giving a name to a computer or a hard disk is
- enough to start the process a "self"-

PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
47
to the inanimate object. It is not unlike the medieval poet's practice
of allegorization, of giving a human name, an personality, to ab-
stract notions love, or peace.
--- - - --
')0 ,The more sophisticated the machine or the system, the more
complex our interaction is likely to be, and hence the more
gent" its response will ap ear. We now recognize the possibility that
it is not just humans who interact. Those strange new technological
creatures in the world out there are also capable of intelligence.
"L'Autre' ("The Other"), by Catherine Ikam, is indeed another pres-
ence, eerily there. The interface is almost transparent: as you move
into the room, your presence is "observed" by a huge face on a
screen. It seems to be looking right at you. As you move, it appears
to follow your path through the room, watching you. It has a tender
expression. A dreamy disposition. However if your movements get a
bit abrupt, it will become agitated and show fear or anger. You may
come out of the experience wondering what really constitutes the
"otherness" of others. Ikam remarks, "Since antiquity, there have
been hybrid beings that fall into a category between humans and
gods. The nature of such beings changes with time, yet chimeras,
automata, and androids still reveal our other faces to us."
3L We are about to step up the k"el [email protected]
amon robots from automation to autonomation; that is, the power
of among potentially vast arrays of environ-
mental variables. We will achieve forms of intelligence that
quire very exacting guidance and extreme reliability. True, the "self"
within these creations will be rather crude at first, responding to sim-
ple criteria and making uncomplicated choices. But this experimen-
tation will lead very quickly to embryonic forms of consciousness,
which will arrive via the weight and seduction of sheer complexity.
The quest for more complex interactions is an irresistible technolog-
ical drive nowadays. Soon enough, the political problems attending
the applications of complex neural networks in industry, medicine,
business, banking, education, and government services, will bring
about enough contradictions to require a fundamental psychological
restructuring of our connected and personal minds.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
AVATA RS AND AGENTS
),!- The development of robotics is also an emerging facet of life on the
Internet, but with an interesting new wrinkle: the robots are con-
nected, as well as being autonomous. As much as standard digital
computers can operate on strings of data in the absence of any other
form of context, the advanced neural networks supporting these
network robots will require-and get-massive inputs of contextu-
alized information, simply by being on the Web. The issue of iden-
tity or self is made more complex when robots go on-line
So so,
. fact, that the critters are renamed "agents," implying that they are
_ capable o(age.nc)Jor ;ctioi A of
digital robot found on the Net is the "avatar," a software
ou in the virtual world.
Both agents and avatars have a huge technological and commer-
cial future, but the boundary between them is not distinct. Given
enough autonomy, avatars can quickly turn into agents. It is not
always eas to decide which is which. *
According to the description given on the Web by the Media Lab
at MIT:
' .' An autonomous agent is computational system that a
complex, dynamic environment. The act
environment, and have a sc:..t of goals _or motivati<:Jns that
it tries to achieve through these actions. Depending on the type
* The simulation of personality by software goes back to Joseph Weisenbaum's
"Eliza." About a recent, much more sophisticated version of a MUD persona,
called "Julia," Sherry Turkle says the following: "Julia is able to fool some of the
people some of the time into thinking she is a human player. Mauldin [Julia's
programmer] says that her sarcastic non sequiturs provide her with enough
apparent personality to be given the benefit of the doubt in an environment
where players 'make a first assumption that other players are people too.'" From
Sherry Turkle, Lift on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1995), 88.
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
of environment, an agent can take different forms. Autonomous
robots are agents that inhabit the physical world; computer-ani-
mated characters inhabit simulated 3-D worlds; while software
agents inhabit the world of computer networks.
49
According to the same posting, there are three main categories of
agents:
"Software agents" provide active, personalized assistance to a
person engaged in the use of a particular computer application.
Software agents differ from software in that they
are: (I) proactive (tJking the initiative to help the user by making
and/or automating the more.1DJJndaneJ asks.the_user __
normally would have to perform); (2) adaptive (learning the
us_er's preferences, interests as they change over
time); and (3) personalized (customizing their assistance accord-
ing to what they learned about the user).
An avatar, on the other hand, is like a digital mask that you wear
to identifY and position yourself, in fuJI screen in _the new 3-D.
environments5.i.eated on-line under such names as ''Alpha-
words" and "Worlds Away." These environments are tours de force
graphic design made by the of a new
based programming tool called VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Lan-
In some of them: 'f:
, Participants select their avatar-human, animal or alien-and
--navigate Ttrhrough environments to -;iili
o; her people Unlike chat are text-based,
participants speak in real time using a microphone on their
home computer. The avatars closest to each other on the screen
will be heard the loudest-as in reallife.
4
" These worlds are stable and reliable enough to support 10I1g-term
communities. They are a step beyond text-only MUDS and MOOS
50
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
(on-line, interactive role-playing environments), which have been
building enduring communities and solid human relationships for
some time, but without benefit of the representation of either place
or person. The representation of person is the concern of the avatar.
'\'v In the world as we know it, personal identity, the you in "you," is
very much dependent on the habit of reading and writing. What
creates our separate and distinct identity in the world is the exercise
of processing information in our heads, organizing it in a space
where the images came from our memories, and the memories from
our senses. We have sculpted our selves, our identity, by reading
fixed words on a page. You might think: Why would the inherent
mobility of words on a screen change to that? Aren't you still pro-
cessing the information, translating an abstract series of symbols
into images that are creating your imagination? Of course, you are.
But the important distinction is that, on the screen which is access'-
ble to our in what we is a dialo ue, an exchan e th;g
goes back to an earlier time of preliterate orality when information
,was processed externally, through our interactions with the rest of
-the world. in of acti(;n t han
through It was wit h contemplation, with internal
processing of information provided by the fixed words of the
printed page: that the "self;' arose. *
L\\ On the Net, identity becomes very flexible. You can present
yourself in any way you like. As the dog in the cartoon typed to the
other dog working at a "The nice thing about the Net is
nobody knows you're a dog." The identities of people on the Net
are instantly changeable and routinely altered. There are many
_of Reople changing age, swapping nation-
ali ,changin even basi..!astes. According to Sherry
Turkle:
In cyberspace, hundreds of thousands, perhaps already millions,
of users create online personae who live in a diverse group of
* The Essays of Montaigne were essays in developmen t of identi ty.
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
virtual communities where the routine formation of multiple
identities undermines any notion of a real and unitary self Yet
the notion of the real fights back. People who live parallel lives
on the screen are nevertheless bound by the desires, pain, and
mortality of their physical selves. Virtual communities offer a
dramatic new context in which to think about human identity
in the age of the Internet. They are spaces for learning about the
lived meaning of a culture of simulation. 5
The message of the medium of cyberspace is touch, pody, iden-
tity. These are precisely the three areas of our being that pessimistic
critics say we are losing to technology. But isn't it clear, too, that to
put them in jeopardy is also to bring them out in the open? Until
now the body, as Stelarc often says with a devilish chuckle, is that
thing that we otten only get to know when it stops functioning. By
,l osing something of their physical presence on-line, people are made
aware of the fact that they have a b04x and i hat l uch to
identinr, Even as you project yourself
on-line through your avatar in the guise of your choice; even as you
disguise your gender, race, nationality, age, and physical condition;
even as you put this completely fabricated electronic mask forward,
you remain physically attached to a being-right then and there-
that you recognize as being uniquely yourself.
\'-1 Here, in the words of one of the creators of a world made for
avatars, is a description of how far the notion can be taken:
H' A few weeks ago the new TechnoSphere site from London
opened on the World Wide Web. The site represents a unique
exploration of the il)teractive potentials of electronic networks,
of ractical aspects of user interaction, and of the formation of
virtual communities. It offers the visitors access to a three-
dimensional virtual landscape which forms the natural habitat
of TechnoSphere's artificial creatures. The users design these
artificial life forms by choosing component body parts and by
selecting from a range of behavioral characteristics.
52
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
~ After a creature has been released into the TechnoSphere, it
begins to live there and to interact with the creatures that have
been designed by other users. The whole system is self-organiz-
ing according to the laws that have been set by the team of devel-
opers. The creatures have to find food-they can be carnivores
or herbivores-they join up with others in couples or groups,
they procreate, eat each other-all depending on their given
properties and needs. From time to time, the creature will send
its parent/designer an e-mail message with a report about its cur-
rent location, and about significant events in its evolution like
having created a tenth generation, or about its death. The users
can also request an image of the creature in its environment.
Already a lively exchange is developing between the Techno-
Sphere team and users who request new possibilities for interact-
ing with their creations .
.\'\.- The project raises important questions about the develop-
, ment of arrificiallife in electronic networks, and about the rela-
tion between art and technology. It tackles the widespread
cultural unease about computer simulations of nature and makes
a statement about possible future developments on the Internet.
6
Interestingly, two of the individuals most closely associated with
advanced simulation of human environments, Jaron Lanier, often
credited with coining the phrase VR,* and Mark Pesce, first developer
* Writer Julian Dibbell posted what appears ro be the definitive derivation of VR
on the Internet newsgroup "CYHIST Community memory: Discussion list on
the Hisrory of Cyberspace." It first appears in 1938 in an essay published that
year by theorist/playwright Antonin Artaud, entitled "The Theatre of
Alchemy." Dibbell reports that he conveyed this fact ro Lanier in person, evok-
ing the following reaction: "He was tickled. He insisted he hadn't been con-
sciously aware of the reference at the time he {re)invented 'virtual reality,' but he
did allow as how he'd read a lot of Artaud in college, so that who knows, you
know? He added, roo, that he liked the connection a lot, that he was always try-
ing ro convince his more anti-technological friends of the organic relationship
between technology and the arts, and that this might help do the job."
[email protected]
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
53
of VRML, have expressed deep reservations about the value of such
simulations. Both have felt enough concern over the issue of this del-
egation of our selfhood to agents to make their views known on-line.
Lanier posted a long message on the Net which included the follow-
ing explanation for his aversion to agents:
L. Here is how people reduce themselves by acknowledging agents,
step-by-step:
so Step I) Person gives computer program extra deference because
it is supposed to be "smart" and "autonomous." [People have a
tendency to yield authoriry to computers anyway, and it's a
shame. In my experience and observations, computers, unlike
other tools, seem to produce the best results when users have an
antagonistic attitude towards them.]
S\ Step 2) Projected autonomy is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as any-
one who has ever had a teddy bear knows. The person starts to
think of the computer as being like a person.
St- Step 3) As a consequence of unavoidable psychological algebra,
the person starts to think of himself as being like the computer.
",,, Step 4) Unlike a teddy bear, the computer is made of ideas. The
person starts to limit himself to the categories and procedures
represented in the computer, without realizing what has been
lost. Music becomes MIDI, art becomes Postscript. I believe that
this process is the precise origin of the nerdy qualiry that the out-
side world perceives in some computer culture.
_ ' Step 5) This process is greatly exacerbated if the software is con-
ceived of as an agent and is therefore attempting to represent the
person with a software model. The person's act of projecting
autonomy onto the computer becomes an unconscious choice
to limit behaviors to those that fit naturally into the grooves of
54
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the software model. Even without agents, a person's creative out-
put is compromised by identification with a computer. With
agents, however, the person himself is compromised.
(,', Mark Pesce fears that "holosthetic media" (as he calls total sur-
round simulations, whether VR- or vRML-based) are "the most otent
technology for mind control since the advent of human culture":
CJo The potentials for addiction and enslavement do not outweigh
the potential for creative play and communication, but to ignore
one and focus on the other is both shortsighted and foolhardy.
The decisions made today by the architects and designers of
holosthetic media will set the tone, defil)e the mythos, for the
coming community. We must do our best to construct a vivo-
genic cyberspace, one that supports both individual and com-
munity, where every person can extend their creative otential,
from pathogenic
<,: My own view of this begins with the observation that one of the
and VR com &!:.:lpD.ics
IS tunneIs."T roug out the multimedia e-nvironment there seems to
be an obsession with the seduction of going through a tunnel. It
could be attributed either to our memories of the passage through
the birth canal itself or an unconscious image of birth, but it seems
as though all these little creatures running through dark tunnels are
being born. Meanwhile, what is really being born is the cx:b0 rg-. a
Transformer-a weird creature who is half human and half mechan-
, ical and whom we find c:.() _'!ling_out ()f the other end of the tunnel,
weightless and horizon-less, in a state Qf wonderment the
wQrld. Ourselves.
" Something approaching an inversion of the relationship between
man and machine is under way. It used to be so comfortable to say
technology is an extension of the body: it is less comfortable to say
the body has become an extension of technology. Nevertheless, that
is what is happening, because there is more and more of it (the body)
PERSON, REAL AND VIRTUAL
55
out there, so much in fact that the balance between what is "out
there" and what is "in here" has changed completely. It is quite obvi-
ous that we are becoming the organic core or organic extension of
our own brilliantly sophisticated machines. We must ask ourselves
whether we want to go along with this.
'-> The more extensions we have, the more we cede to them, the
more we Jaron Lanier's diatribe is echoed in a
stunning work of art by Jeffrey Shaw which did not achieve the
recognition it deserved, perhaps because it was so critical of the very
technology it was using. The Golden Calfis a pedestal with nothing
on it, standing in the middle of the room. Around it, patrons will
find small, flat panel screens with instructions to hold them towards
the pedestal. If you hold the screen at a certain angle, you will see
something on the pedestal. It is the 3-D image of a gold-plated calf.
The high-ground, moral message of the piece is clear enough. But
Shaw has added an .extra twist, which he explained to me. He has set
up the installation in such a way that nowhere does the full image of
the calf appear sharply or fully. This forces those who approach the
piece to adopt all sorts of contortions to try to see the virtual calf bet-
ter, "as if they were in supplication," says Shaw with a wicked smile.
i,l But there is another interpretation of this work. We want our
machines to respond, which is part of the man/machineinversion.
This response is a new mirror, one which we need more than others.
It is the mirror of our feelings, the mirror of our interior. arc:
beginning to have an interior, an inside, again, which is why I call
__ cu.!.!; ure of interactivity "depth culture." We are only beginning
to find out that we are still human after the transition from an era in
which we felt the notion of "human" was attached to the literate per-
sonality. We lost that humanity during two world wars and we are
now trying to rediscover, or rather rebuild it. Sherry Turkle recounts
this telling anecdote:
G,\ At the end of the 1992 Artificial Life Conference I sat next to
eleven-year-old Holly as we watched a group of robots with dis-
tinctly different "personalities" compete in a special robot
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Olympics. I told her I was studying robots and life, and Holly
became thoughtful. Then she said unexpectedly, "It's like Pinoc-
chio. First, Pinocchio was just a puppet. He was not alive at all.
Then he was an alive puppet. Then he was an alive boy. A real
boy. But he was alive even before he was a real boy. So I think the
robots are like that. They are alive like Pinocchio [the puppet],
but not like real boys."g
bl- One of the early myths of industrialization, the story of Pinoc-
chio tells us something about this process of humanization beyond
the machine. Pinocchio was a puppet, that is, a creature made in the
image of the mechanical age. But the main ambition of Pinocchio
was to become a live boy. Mter going through the bowels of a
whale-riding on another myth of transformation, that of Jonas-
Pinocchio does indeed become a real boy.
(;S We are all electronic Pinocchios with our hands on our key-
boards, lying through our teeth as we try to pretend that, no, noth-
ing has changed, we are still the same, it's the technology that has
changed .... The wish to become human again, at the other end of
the technological metamorphosis, is what drives the intense research
into humanoids.
CHAPTER FOUR
L
PRESENCE,
REAL AND VIRTUAL
E
VERY YEAR since 1994, the McLuhan Program has organized
with the help of another institution a series of video conferenc-
ing seminars on culture and technology. The first series was
conducted with the University of New Brunswick, then with York
University in Toronto, with the University of Orleans in France,
and, in the fall of 1995, with three universities simultaneously in the
Netherlands. * The idea behind The World Series on Culture and
Technology is to garner the thoughts of the best minds available
in the world today in various countries, in various cultures, in vari-
ous languages. It is an extended worldwide benchmarking of the
state of reality. The World Series is also an experiment in distant ed-
ucation. We test different approaches to learning, including three in-
terlocking media environments: a global interactive classroom where
* In collaboration with the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam and the
University of Toronto's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology in
Canada, with the support of Origin and Telindus, among others, Acs-interac-
tive organized The World Series in Culture and Technology during the fall of
1996. The central theme of this series of lectures, which were held simultane-
ously in four different locations, was the interaction between modern culture
and new media technologies. A video-conferencing link with Toronra (the
McLuhan Program) enabled the audience at three different Dutch universities
(Amsterdam, Delft, and Graningen) ra "attend." Every week an artist was
invited ra perform an experiment using the video-conferencing link.
57
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
is on a person on a TV monitor instead of a black-
a site the w9rk in progress, bibliographies, resources,
and, of course, on-line forums and lists othyperlink:s(the Web is not
a tool, it is one o( the rime objects of stud ); finaIly, the series
produces documentary material in video and in CD-ROM.
L The interest at the McLuhan Program in video conferencing
goes back to 1985, when I learned of an experiment in long-distance
communication by artists Sherry Rabinovitz and Kit Galloway. It
was called Hole in Space: New York-Los Angeles, I980 and it consisted
of an unannounced, but very public video-conferencing link
between New York and Los Angeles. A camera and monitor were set
up in a storefront on a busy New York street, and a similar setup was
established in Los Angeles. People walking by would look into the
window and see other people in the monitors. Sometimes, the mon-
itor people would be waving. At first, the passersby wouldn't realize
these people were waving at them, but if they paid they
recognized there was communication going on. The next thing they
discovered was that those people on the monitor were not some-
where else in New York (or Los Angeles), but in Los Angeles (or
New York). On the first day of the experiment, people just ran-
domly got into contact with each other. By the second day, word had
gotten around and families got together to wave hello from Los
Angeles to New York and vice versa. On the third day the media
were there. And, of course, with the media involved, the whole art
event became pop culture fodder. The beauty of that simple experi-
ment was a kind of artistic epiphany and I began to understand that
distance video communication is a very significant development. *
* The McLuhan Program acquired its own video-conferencing equipment, a
Picturetel 4000, connected by two digitally switched telephone lines in the fall
of 1992, with help from BSO, Michael Paine, our benefactor from Boston and
direct suppon in the form of a sizable rebate from Adcom Electronics in
Toronto. We have never looked back. Eckart Wintzen is very fond of teasing me
about my passion for video conferencing. He has taken me to task publicly in
the Dutch World Series, but I am glad to report that both he and Origin have
taken leadership in the use of video conferencing in the Netherlands.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
59
PRESENCE AND TELEPRESENCE
') What is so magical about video conferencing? In spite of the poor
quality of the picture, the quirky jerkiness of the motion and the
awkward kind of hieratic posturing people are obliged to adopt in
front of the camera, the magic of seeing people instantly through a
void that could take hours to cross in a 747 never fails to stir me.
Then again, I must confess I still get a mild kick our of telephoning
across the Atlantic. Maybe it's just an Atlantic sensibility that goes
back to my early immigrant years. Regardless, it seems just plain
wonderful to add a living image to a living voice and to be in the
presence-or telepresence-of people who are so far away.
'-\ Which raises the question: What is presence? What exact!, is
"present" in a person you meet in the flesh, face-to-face (hf in the
J Ingo -;;-f Net)? Clearly, there is a body there, and a body projects
all kinds of information. Bodies talk to bodies at levels often ignored
or set aside by minds when they are busy saying or thinking some-
thing else. After years of continuous fascination with the issue of
presence, from the deeper spiritual sense of the total, absolute pres-
of being, and the stark "thereness" of the world to the ruu.n-
-lane i ssues of communications engineering, I have identifiei I
-.be.Jieve are four sense of presence to be
effective in telepresence:
1."> A clear and shared evidence of the source of the presence.
Nervous people often report experiencing ghostly, imminent
"presences" somewhere in their immediate vicinity. The sense
of presence may be as real to them as any!:hing..10u or I know,
lmtifi:he evidence of the source is not clear to anybody else,
experience. is not shared, nor then th sense
The evidence does not have to be visual-quite the opposi te;
. touch hearing are more reliable evidence of presence than
.the eye. However, it has to be shared.

Th f: h h h d b I
2. are space. e [act t at t e s are space may e pure y
electronic or "virtual" rather than real takes nothing away
60 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
,from the reality of the presence itself. This is critical to under-
standing the vast difference between virtual reality as a com-
device and just plain old VR. If is a real
behind the apparatus, behind the interac-
tion, then there is a real presence; otherwise
3: Shared time. On the phone, as during video conferencing,
people who co-mmunicate obviously s hare-ale- same moment
-. ill the same "time"
lished by their time zone. By contrast, while voice-mail does
give one the illusion of presence, there is no shared time
between the source and the receiver, hence there is no authen-
tic telepresence.
4. A clear evidence of the "interval." The interval is the most sen-
_S?ry as ect of telepresence. It is a sensation of the truly
being through real communicatiQg. It is
what makes live television reports different from video confer-
encing and it might almost be a tactile conclusion drawn in-
stantly from visual and auditory cues. In a live television
report, there is no interval because there is no shared commu-
nication: it is all one-way. The moment may be shared in "ab-
solute" space (our previous, literate way of understanding
space), but there is no two-way connection between locations.
'\ So what is presence? Ask a lover. It is something quite physical. It
more than the eye, the ear. It does not need to involve the
,Jand, but it needs the skin or something like it. It is entirely interac-
tive. It is a gentle form of pressure, or the sense of a person, an ani-
mal, or even, at a lesser degree, an a
field. I re-member a time when I distinctly felt the
presence of a rather nice and intelligent-looking dog as if it were a
big gust of warmth. As I moved in and out of the field of power of
that the difference was tangible. is
many times more complex _hu-t: -nevertheless all at once,
.- ---- - -----. -- - ----
witho..!:!t aflY It can be impossible to describe in
words. -
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL 61
Among persons all of this is easy to recognize. What
happens when machines get involved as intermediaries? Let us
ignore, for the moment, machines that do not fulfill the above four
conditions. There are only three distant communication svstems

that meet the requirements of evidence of source, shared space,
shared time, and the toom or opportunity for interval: they are the
telephone, video conferencing, and the nascent on-line virtual real-
ity. And incipient both in technology and in the culture, there are
two basic forms of telepresence, one using analogue communication
technology to extend the face-to-face interaction, and the other
using digital simulations to create shared envitonments
where real eo Ie meet in the uise of avatars. Each has different
business and social applications; both have inherent problems.
\\ Analogue telepresence is now
tech nolo ies rang!!! . from the humble tele hone to te1erobotics for
remote surgery. While some of these technologies are accessible only
.. to expert usersand only at great cost, others are available off-the-shelf,
such as, for example, the hackers' delight CU-SeeMe, appropriately
named in baby talk because it is really still an infant technology. How-
ever, it is neither infantile nor superfluous to see one's interlocutor on
a chat line or on a Web site, even if the image is black and white and
postage-stamp size, refreshed only every five or ten seconds. The expe-
rience is all the more impressive if you are also using a phone connec-
tion which gives you at least real-time audio. It is certainly enough to
reassure distant lovers who do not benefit from access to more sophis-
ticated video conferencing. CU-SeeMe is also useful for shar.j.l1g other
vi sual as charts, photographs, and designs, in a manner that
is more direct and intuitive than faxing or e-mailing the evidence.
1t Off to a very slow start, but now picking up spded, cheap and
efficient video-conferencing technologies are now in the process of
educating educators and business executives to the opportunities of
creating, offering, recording, and even reselling their own content.
The effect of this is to further weaken broadcasting's exclusive gate-
keeping prerogative on content and to help users to graduate from
consuming to producing TV.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
() Two people talking to each other from Vancouver to Miami on a
desktop video-conferencing system can establish such accurate eye
contact and lip synchronization that it feels as if they were really
face-to-face across a windowpane, even though both are aware that
they are thousands of kilometers apart. But what we see via video
conferencing is the result of a complex series of technical processes
which come close to simulating the processes of our own
These prostheses are- externanzations of neural processrng, a
technical continuation of our eyes and ears. The
for the ear and the voice, two baseline connectors ca able of real elo-
quence despite the limited bandwidth. Video conferencing adds
vision, a spatial sense, movement.
\ How do these synthetic "telepresent media" com are with the
"real thing"? Well, they are fun, they are helpful, and they can be
used to good effect in certain contexts. But where presence is con-
cerned, they are guilty of continuing the disastrous split between
body and mind that began with rationalism. What they are missing
is touch. Not the kind of banal conception ot touch as in people
holding hands; after all, you don't need to hold hands to
business meeting. Bu!.J'Qu need the sense of interval. The telere- '
sent technologies still come u short in the
enough, honin is more effective than video conferencing in terms
Qf interval because it is so intimate. The real-timeliness is more
on tl.!.e other adds
a substantial sense of presence. *
,':' Of course video conferencing, already perfectly adequate for busi-
ness and academic purposes, will improve. But are telepresent tech-
nologies going to be confined to business and academe? Telepresence,
* After the end of an interview, professional sound technicians usually record a
few minutes of silence. They call it "the room tone." It is used as reference for
editing purposes, and also to add gaps or blanks to smooth out editing. It is
qualified by a unique identity. There is a room-tone to video conferencing ses-
sions, something that you can verifY immediately by turning the "mute" button
on: the electronic silence is dead, but the human silence of an attentive audience
is full of life and energy.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
surely, is going to create new forms of human interactions, new forms
of presence, and who knows, perhaps new habits of ~ ~ e .
\(, At the McLuhan Program, our study of this areab-egail in earnest
in 1986, when I took a delegation of twelve artist-engineers from
Toronto to Salerno, Italy, and then to Paris for our first efforts at
transatlantic art. The Salerno episode was a riotous debacle. We
couldn't connect by phone from one house to the next, let alone
across the Atlantic. In Paris, because we were at the Canadian Cul-
tural Centre where the phone system is specially imported from
Canada, we had next to perfect communication and we could test a
few things.
\1 We discovered, for a start, that for tactile extensions requiring
ultrasensitive feedback, real time is essential. We learned this when
Toronto artists Doug Back and Norman White inaugurated the
Transatlantic Arm Wrestling Experiment between Paris and
Toronto, June 4, 1986. The idea was to create a force-feedback sys-
tem that would allow two persons to feel each other's physical pres-
ence by phone. In Toronto, at the now defunct ArtCulture Resource
Centre on Queen Street, Doug Back would apply pressure on a
mechanical contraption connected to a computer connected to a
modem connected to a phone and the pressure would be sent as dig-
ital data to another modem connected to another computer con-
nected to another mechanical contraption in Paris, where Norman
White returned the pressure. Because of a 250-millisecond delay on
the telephone line, it was impossible to get a true instant feedback.
Those of us who tried it had to be very creative in our interpretation
of the "interval" condition. Our whole being was required to fill a
250-millisecond hole in reality. Arm wrestling that way doesn't work.
Still, the experience, at this early stage in telepresence experimenta-
tion, was exhilarating.
\y Despite being a rather modest imitation of what has been avail-
able to telerobotics in industry and military technologies for
decades, this performance was breaking new psychological grounds
precisely because it had no other purpose than to make the audience
perceive itself in a completely new way, with an added dimension.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
\ For many people who witnessed the event, it seemed as if, for the
first time, they were beginning to understand that our human pro-
portions have expanded from the immediate to global surroundings
because we can now, with a simple electronic gesture, reach out and
touch someone on the other side of the ocean.
lG During the same event, we also tried to transmit by musical
sounds over the phone the complexity of bodily presence with
David Rokeby's Very Nervous System (described in Chapter 2, "The
Biology of Interactivity"). On the Canadian side, the installation
was in Ottawa, at the National Museum of Science and Technology,
where a dancer performed in front of David's camera and computer.
The sounds created by the dancer's movements were digitized and
sent via modem to Paris, where another dancer responded to those
sounds. This was a way of making the telephone "tactile," we hoped.
Like everything else we did in those pioneering days, it sort of
worked. While the movement-generated sound was indeed picked
up in Toronto and reproduced in Paris as continuous musical varia-
tions, what we missed was clear evidence of the source of the sound.
Our ideas were always slightly ahead of our technologies.
'L\) Graham Smith, another of the artists on the tour who was pushing
the limits of technology, is the person who first
taught me the * His transatlantic erformance
which bore that name of teleguiding three-wheeled
and slow-scan TV images back
and forth between Paris and Toronto. Besides having had to design
and build the two robots from scratch, and to test untried connec-
tions between modem and direction controls, Smith had to contend
with still-immature digital switching in the international telephone
system. The slow-scan TV was atrociously slow at the Paris end, and
the gray-scale images appearing on the Mac Plus sitting on the robot
were all but unrecognizable. You had to have been there to know
that, yes, that was indeed the general appearance of the ArtCulture
Resource Centre in Toronto. Today, the remote-control device that
* The first of many companies created by Smith was called Telepresence.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
comes with even moderately sophisticated video-conferencing equip-
ment makes such video snooping easy.
' \ Since then, Smith has been able to adapt his Telepresence
machine to the "Supply Student" concept. places in a class-
room a video camera which can be controlled remotely by a student
who is unable to attend school because of illness or other reasons.
and the-Supply S;udent is that it
allows these children to keep in touch with social and academic life
-In games,- the general ambiance.
- 1t.. Graham the world's masters of video conferenc-
ing. I don't know of anyone else who has tried as many variations on
this technology as he has. As director of our Virtual Reality Artist
Access Program (VRAAP) , Graham was the instigator of seemingly
endless new ways of exploring video transmission and total sur-
round video. At the McLuhan Program we also used video confer-
encing just to keep informed of what was going on elsewhere in the
world, inviting artists, engineers, intellectuals, business people, and
others to discuss what was current. Our regular collaborators in this
venture have been the people and guests of the Electronic Cafe in
Santa Monica, run by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. Gra-
ham became so accustomed to communicating with Kit and Sherrie
over (he video-conferencing system, that he felt uncomfortable
when he was just on the phone with them. "It feels like having my
back turned to them," he said.
Another group of artist-engineers connected with the McLuhan
Program is Toronto's Vivid Effects. With their interactive system
Mandala, Vincent John Vincent, Francis Macdougall, and Steve War-
rame have found to command events on a large screen without
even having to get close to it. * In this system, your movements are
recorded by an overhead camera and reported via a computer as a
* Vincent John Vincent, Francis MacDougall, Sherrie Cohen, and David
Maubray have all contributed to the invention of Mandala, an interactive video
system which enables the user to operate graphic and musical as well as roboti c
computer functions at a distance without touching the screen or any peripheral.
66 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
digital image appearing on screen. You can turn your image into a
giant cursor and discover that you have just become one big mouse
able to command and control whatever happens on the screen.
Graham, Vincent, and Steve used Mandala to do many delight-
fully silly things like playing Pong across the Atlantic to wrap up a
conference organized in Sophia Antipolis by France Telecom. Every
time Vincent would put a ball across his opponent's net, the two
hundred Frenchmen could be heard applauding. It was fun, bur it
was also serious work because what we were really trying to figure
our were some basic issues of telepresence.
'l., Such as: where is the ball, really? What happens to me when I see
this kind of experiment is a strange sensation of disorientation. I am
connecting the ball with the "other side." I "see" it get hit by the
other player's racket, and it comes back to "our" side. Somehow that
doesn't make any sense at all. Truly, where is the ball, and where are
we when we are together on that screen?*
'Lb It is worth exploring this process in some detail to bring out the
complexities of another video-conferencing experiment, this one, a
performance piece by Paul Sermon called Telematic Dreaming. In this
truly dazzling and puzzling piece, Paul has installed beds in each of two
galleries in Finland, 350 km apart, connected by video conferencing.
The image of the occupant of each bed is projected onto the sheets of
the bed in the other gallery. On the video-conferencing screens, the
* Technically, the ball is a simulation displayed on video by computer com-
mands at one source and simultaneously displayed by video conferencing at the
other location. The video images of the players on both sides are digitized in real
time into the computer program by a special coder/decoder card called Live!tm.
Chromakey, or blue-screen video-trickery, allows the separation of foreground
from background. You keep the foreground images (the players) and put each
one on one half of the screen. Then you substitute both backgrounds with the
display of the computer program and you've got it. The image of the move-
ments of both players can affect the course of the image of the ball because the
transmitted video image of that player comes as source to the real-time video to
digital decoder, just like the image coming from the on-site camera. But in the
end, the ball is nowhere, just like a thought experienced only by the people who
were there. And that, of course, is what interests the technopsychologist in me.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
images of both beds are aligned so that both distant occupants are
made to appear as if they were on the same bed. The entertaining
side of what you see at either gallery is that one of the occupants ap-
pears in the flesh, while his or her bedmate appears flattened out in a
2-D image. Both occupants can see the effects of their paradoxical
meeting on a large monitor placed next to each of the beds.
')"{ The people who meet that way can caress each other and see, in '
real time and total interactivity, the effects of each other's caresses.
Are they touching? Or are they not touching? If you define "touch" /
according to cause, then they are not touching; only their images are '
touching. But, if, by "touch" you mean the effect or response, then it
is quite evident that they are touching.
o 'b With Telematic Dreaming, Paul Sermon has created the first fun-
damental aesthetic paradox involving touch since the development
of trompe l'oeil in the baroque era. By bringing together two people
hundreds of kilometers apart on the same screen, and making them
interact in real time, he is proposing the central paradox of telepres-
ence: really touch someone by sight alone? This what Susan
Kozel, a professional dancer who has tested the installation, has to
say about it:
1tl Members of the public in the second gallery had the option of
joining [Paul Sermon's] projected image on the bed, braving the
social and personal connotations of being on a bed with another
person, even if this other person was an electronic image ....
The effect was astonishing: it was one of contact improvisation
_ an image and a person, between ghost and matter .. _ ..
Virtual materiality is what it's about, an interactive, physical
engagement with space, time, and meaning.
<,{) The point Kozel makes is at the core of the paradox of telepres-
ence, both real and virtual:
ATn his work Paul's body became virtual (i.e., a projected image),
yet the rapport between image and person was very real and
68 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
evoked a social and sexual dynamic familiar to us all. Paul
admits that his use of a bed in Telematic Dreaming was deliber-
ate, he fully intended for the sexual and social implications to
playa role. I
'l,'\.. Here, the evidence of the interval, far from being choppy and
evanescent as it is in standard video conferencing, is extremely
strong, stronger in some respects than the intimacy of the voice in
the privacy of the phone. Evidence of interval and evidence of
source coincide. That's a lot of presence.
I
o N ' (: Y B E R S EX
, It takes an artist of the calibre of Paul Sermon to pull off such a stunt
without generating jeers. I showed a video of Telematic Dreaming in
Hamburg, at the 1993 Interface Conference, to introduce the notion
of "electronic touch,"oEly to find in the following morning's papers
disparaging reports about aCanadia,11 professor who was promoting
"ersatz sex"! For better or for worse, die 'issue -oEsex in tele resence
. . . .------. .. "
cannot be avoided, nor should it be. The sexual encounter is, at least
in Western cultures, already such a rich mix of real and virtual,
body and mind, flesh and fantasy that technology can only play
right into it.
').. There is no doubt that with video conferencing, in particular when
the partners can be made to share the same virtual space, the age-old
sex trade will get a new boost. Safe sex to boot. One of our guests
at our Virtual Reality Artists Access Program video-conferencing
seminars was a very attractive and apparently successful phone sex
02erator who s oke to us from California. We showed her a tape of
Telematic Dreaming. She was amused by our suggestion that she could
set up shop with a video-conferencing unit like the one we were
using to address her. I don't think that she wanted to let on how far
she would consider getting into it, but she did give us a very proper
yet unquestionably erotic simulation of a phone sex conversation,
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
keeping her clothes on, of course. (By late 1996, sex by video confer-
ence had become a major industry on the Net.)
, Unfortunately, most of what passes for cybersex is neither stimu-
lating nor jnnovative. The on-line pornography that gets our regula-
tors so worked up is as dismally boring as its glossy counterparts in
paper magazines. There is a lot of it available, but all in all, according
to a recent survey of a search engine's most frequent queries, it
accounts for less than 20 percent of all data traffic on the Internet.
And that's almost the same proportion of sexual traffic you will find
in the average person's head. The really interesting sex on-line will
have to address touch, not vision. And, yes, there is a memory of
touch in even the most mechanical forms of interactivity, such as
dressing or undressing "Virtual Valerie" or helping her to reach
orgasm. While this activity is extremely limited, bordering on the
moronic, it is undeniably combining the thrill of voyeurism with the
surreptitious transgression of the other's privacy. But surely the sim-
plistic transfer of our old contents to the new medium is not that
medium's message. So what is?
' lOur visually biased culture has tended to think of sexual attrac:-
tion as an issue of appearance, not one of presence. In the world of
tele resence, lookin good is not ood enou h, you have to "feel"
,_ good, too. Many interactive tactile experiments are being done.
When they are merely interested in sex, they tend to be naive and
--)redictable. But some of this work is authentic research.
S For example, two artists, Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford,
worked together at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts on a system
that created a mild sensation a few years ago. The system called
Cybersex allows you to feel vibrations through electronic sleeves
placed on various parts of your body. These vibrations, transmitteed
by lines, are the movementsQ,ygur
the end. Whi.le Stenslie has continued to explore the mar-
ketability of the system, Woolford went in another direction. His
question was that of feedback. What is the point, he thought, of
touching anything if you have no idea of how it feels, if you have no
feedback. Woolford's point addresses the very nature of touch.
7
0
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
b_Touch, to be effective, must always communicate in both
simultaneously. Claude Cadoz, one of France's best researchers -in
virtual touch, has identified this condition as "transduction."* What
Cadoz means by transduction is the two-way communication_of
touch from feedforward to feedback in real time. Until recently, he
.< explained, people thought one of the )east articulate' of
the senses. Experimental work had shown that if you put two sharp
points on a blindfolded person's arm, at first the sensation will be
reported as two different points. However, if you move them closer
together, the body very soon interprets them as a single point. How-
ever, says Cadoz, the really interesting data are in the relatively unex-
plored areas of many varieties of pressures, temperature, and textures
that the human body is actually capable of distinguishing,
Cybersex is a field of such obvious potential for exploration and
even more obvious potential for profit that we can count on contin-
uous, rapid development in both serious and trivial applications.
DIGITAL TElEPRESENCE
",' Imagina, the Festival of New Images in Monte Carlo in 1993, fea-
tured a work called Le rendez-vous de Cluny, in which two people
meet by teleconferencing in the same virtual reality environment.
Using VR goggles and gloves, they enter into a digital reconstruction
of the old Abbey of Cluny which was destroyed in the late nine-
teenth century. Two VR platforms, one in Monaco and the other in
Paris, were connected to the same VR environment by a high-speed
data line. Madame Vincent, in the form of a digital representation,
* Claude Cadoz is the director of ACROE, a research center in tactile simulations
in Grenoble, France. Cadoz believes that we are only beginning to discover what
it is to touch. For example, it is far more complex than the simple issue of mak-
ing contact. It is only now that engineers like Cadoz are beginning to incorpo-
rate tactile sensation into technology that we can begin to appreciate that touch
is also made of pressure, texture, interval, and sensitivity to minute variations of
humidity and temperature.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
7
1
but with her real voice, was guiding Father Di Falco from Monaco,
also digitally imaged, on a rour of the digital Abbey. The three thou-
sand patrons of the Imagina festival could watch on a big screen the
two persons talking and walking into that imaginary space rogether.
r.;; One visitor is really in Monaco and the other is really in Paris,
but rogether they are floating or levitating in, above, and around a
construction in the nowhere land on the Net. This, of course, is
quite different from sending an avatar. You are not merely seeing
yourself in the picture, you are literally in the picture. * You can turn
around and see the digital world around and below you; you can
look at the person talking to you and see the expressions on the vir-
tual face change according to what is said.
\L'" Televirtualitl, another project of the Institut National d'Audiovi-
suel in Paris, allows people to carryon real-time conferences on-line,
using a lip-and-facial-expression graphic synchronized with their
real speech and expression as registered by an on-site camera. The
possibilities of extending one's living room are endless.
COMMUNITV, REAL AND VIRTUAL

Alpha Worlds are virtual cities on-line. Sherwood Towne, for exam-
ple, is a virtual city accessible to anybody with a PC on-line. ** It has
a population of 75,000 "immigrants," and at this writing, it com-
prises a few hundred buildings. These constructions are three-
dimensional and can be builtand/or visited from in the
--;-orld. build in an Alpha World, you alone can
destroy and reconstruct, and you cannot unbuild someone else's
construction. This is important because it ensures permanence and
* As you do when you remember yourself in given circumstances, such as taking
a bath: do you see yourself in the bathtub, or do you remember the feeling of the
water around your waist?
** This particular alpha world works on pc only, but a Macintosh version is
planned (http://www.ccon.org/).
7
2
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
reliability to the objective status of the virtual environment. Of
course, you can share a chat line conversation, either
cally or by Real Audio, with one person or more and with or without
the of an ava,t.'!r:, _. - - .
\"-- WorldsAway is a "cyberplace" Fujitsu and CompuServe launched
in December 1995, where on-line users create their own animated
representations or avatars and socialize with other users all over the
world in a Within WoridsAway, users can por-
tray their real personalities or create unique on-line personas. They
can also convey emotions through facial expressions and gestures, as
well as "talk" to one another in real time through text, as in tradi-
tional chat services. Objects in the virtual world also support per-
sonal expression and enhance world experience-for example, you
can give someone flowers, decorate a room with furniture, share
books, and use other objects to enhance your avatar's abilities to
express its (your) personality.
, ';' Alpha Worlds and WoridsAway are more than "graphic MUDS,"*
are another level of networking, within but also beyond the
Web - altogether. They or precipitates of
immateriality. a of space,
s the screens of the visitors They are pock-
ets of objective imagination in the networked synergy of tens of
thousands of people. They propose a new form of common space,
one that people have never before had the opportunity to share,
except perhaps during the far-off times of legend and magic halluci-
nations. Though still crude and limited by bandwidth capacity and
processing power, they already show the promise of a lot more to
come.
Il"'" Carl Loeffler's Virtual Polis, is a virtual community environment
which allows you to access your personally designed virtual apart-
ment complete with a virtual wardrobe stored in virtual drawers and
bought at a virtual shopping mall next to a virtual amusement park
in your virtual neighborhood. At some point in the not-too-distant
* Graphic, multi-user domains, a feature of the Web.
PRESENCE, REAL AND VIRTUAL
73
future, you will be able to don these clothes to meet real partners,
also dressed up virtually for business or seduction or any other pur-
pose you care to get together for. In such environments, everything
is indeed "virtual," except that the people who meet there are "real."
<11 <, The question is no longer how much, but what kind of presence
!here is in digital tele resence. In analoKue media like c()nfer-
encing, number sensory
made available, the quality of the transmission, the value and perti-
nence of usage. In di-gTral me,ii-ari1{:e VR, you cannot tell what is
the that with. The effect is like -
magic. A commentatoE has posted articles on the Web about the
"Super.rnan Effect":
The Superman Effect manifests itself in the extra powers given
to us without the aid of machines. Although most of us in Alpha
World design structures that look held together by gravity, the
absence of gravity enables us to realize our long-held and unful-
filled dreams of flying without using wings, or floating in
midair, or lifting (seemingly) heavy objects with ease. The abil-
ity to walk through walls, move objects from a distance (without
telekinesis) and travel at warp speeds are powers that in the real
world, we can only give to our fictional heroes. I see this combi-
nation of real-world familiarity and subtle superhuman powers
as our first shaky steps rowards a very different future."*
Are virtual cities just a toy, or can we expect new forms of socializa-
tion and community arising from this kind of experience? In both
analogue and digital media, for the sense of presence to occur, real-
time interaction is indispensable. But in digital media,
be extended to permit a sense of belonging to a virtual commu-
nity, in other of exten ded "presence." From tha t point
c>f view, a virtual community works like a normal city, which is an-
other form of human concentration. A real city brings together at
* From an on-line posring, aurhor unknown.
74
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
close range a great number of active human bodies and minds. It mul-
tiplies the points of people, that is, the opportunities
fOre -xchange of useful informatI on. But you don't meet more than a
the Zity's. inhabitants at anyone time. The remainder are
carried in what the poet W B. Yeats called "an emotion of multi-
tude." A similar human and social energy is exuded byvi; tual cities.
Bya predictable, but happy turn of events, real cities are transfer-
ring some of their status to the Net, first by creating flattering Web
sites, and second, by creating a distinctive Net image or metaphor
(Digitaal Staadt, Telepolis, Virtual Polis, International City-Berlin,
etc.). Digitaal Staadt, for example, was one of the first to appear, the
first certainly in the Netherlands. It began as a text-based Internet
service in Dutch and in English, a navigation system to help people
to find useful information about Amsterdam. Although you couldn't
really meet people there, you could go to different places such as the
Town Hall, the Kiosk, the Museum, the Coffee House, the Library,
and so on, where you could find information and leave a message.
Recently, it has added on-line discussion groups and chat, and a
richer, graphical interface.
2
However sophisticated and intriguing they may become, these
new forms of telepresence will always have more -to do-with actual
than with virtual experience. Despite that it is now
possible to add virtual dimensions to our communication via on-
' line technologies, it is reality and the targeted pertinence of on-
line communication that is its principal Just as people can
- never be reduced to machi;;'es, communications can never
be reduced to the appropriate distribution of content, nor can the
rich presence of people be excluded from the joyful task of making
sense together, sharing information, advice, and skills.
PA. R T 2
HYPERTEXTUA.LITY
CHAPTER FIVE
ALL ABOUT
HYPERTEXT
WRITING about Ted Nelson in Wired magazine, Gary
Wolf observed that the idea-monger had discov-
ered the notion-and coined the name-of hypertext as
a way to keep the productions of his scatterbrain mind under con-
trol, allowing each strand of an idea to carry on without suffering
from interruptions by the other ideas:
1 the ultimate hypertext information system, began as
Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hum-
mingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left
him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a film-
maker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic
multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great
inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep
track of all divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this
concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name
of hypertext. I
Hypertext was born out of a hyperactive mind. I think I know
something about that problem. Clinically, it is a condition some-
times dubbed by French psychoanalysts deiire d'interpretation.
While the severe cases of this delirium tend towards hapless rumina-
tion over obsessive themes, the milder forms enjoy associations for
77
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
their own sake and find a natural habitat in certain fertile minds.
One idea-a word or a certain turn of phrase-triggers another; a
memory calls forth a thought and vice versa, in swirls and swirls of
intersecting associations and panoramic mental vistas. In effect,
hypertext was a breakthrough borne out of the breakdown of the
linear mind, a condition often linked to television and blamed for
children's having trouble learning ro read. In truth, it is the whole
electronic culture that has gone nonlinear, and hypertext may be the
beginning of an answer ro the havoc this transition has wreaked on
the previous literate culture.
1I Nelson, who may have been treated more harshly than he
deserved in the Wired profile, is painted as a "Jack-of-all-ideas, mas-
ter of none." But the fact is that he did master the principles of
hypertext in his Xanadu project and, short of a few key applications
he is said to be still working on, the World Wide Web is, for all
intents and purposes, the realization of his dream.
S Nelson's own succinct definition of hypertext appeared first in
1965: "Non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links."2 The
basic principle underlying hypertext is that any part of any text stored
in digital form (text being made of strings of characters which are rec-
ognizable and addressable by a computer program) can be associated
automatically, instantly, and permanently with any other text stored
in the same way. Activating a hypertext link usually involves "click-
ing" on a piece of underlined text, which instructs the computer to
implement an address hidden "behind" the link, which in turn takes
you to the associated text, whether it is in the same document or in
another database in some other computer accessible by network con-
nections. As a way of dealing with the contents of one's personal
memory and imaginings, hypertext has the advantage of being com-
prehensive. Fully implemented, hypertext is actually more reliable
than a human memory because it allows comprehensive scanning of
all potential connections of all data present in the "search space."
, And the search space can be the whole world. The Web allows
people on-line to link up automatically to all sorts of digital content
wherever in the world it may be, in whatever database, by clicking
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
79
either on a key-word or a "button."* On the Web, you can ask a
question, and be transferred instantly anywhere in the world from
Ottawa to New York to Tokyo to Johannesburg. Ray Hammond
makes the point in perfect clarity when he asks readers of his book,
Digital Business, to slip the complimentary Netscape Navigator disk
into their pes and to click on the underlined words they come across
in the book as it appears in its on-line incarnation on the World
Wide Web. This is Hammond's mode d'emploi:
'i, You will have noticed already that quite a few references in this
book are underlined. This is not to emphasize the importance of
such text, it indicates that in the on-line version of this book,
these are "hyperlinks" on which you will be able to dick and be
transported around the Net directly to the company, person, or
resource to which I refer for the very latest information)
The principle of hypertextuality allows one to treat the Web as
the extension of the contents of one's own mind. Hypertext turns
everyone's memory into everybody else's, and makes of the Web the
first worldwide memory.
Hypertext would not be familiar to more than a handful of scien-
tists and academics today if the creation of Mosaic by Marc
Andreessen had not turned it ipso facto into "hypermedia," in
which not only text, but graphics, sound, and moving pictures may
be linked. People born and bred on almost fifty years of TV need the
sensory values that plain old text didn't have. (For the purposes of
this book, hypertextuality is taken to include hypermedia, as long as
whatever is identified by these often confusing terms is on-line.)
\0 Hypertextuality spells the future of all the traditional industries
of content or information, such as news and entertainment media,
statistics, and research. It also holds the future for many objects, such
as books, records, tapes, paintings, and sculpture, and the future of
* The Web's programming language is called HTML, which stands for Hypertext
Markup Language.
80 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
their storage and distribution centers, including shops, malls, libraries,
museums, and galleries. Hypertext will eventually affect architecture
as well, because it is in itself an architecture making new demands on
user access points, processing and distributing conditions, networking
environments, and many other cyber- and real-space combinations.
\\ Each time we invent a new medium, we seem to accelerate the
rate and volume of information processing. Writing introduced a
formidable acceleration of human processing abilities (Warp 1).
With their alphabet, the Greeks moved from nowhere in informa-
tion processing to an advanced state in less than three hundred years
between the seventh and fourth centuries B.C. And with the printing
press (Warp 2), the West was flooded with usable data, pushing
mechanization further along the path embarked on by the Greeks
and the Romans. With radio and TV (Warp 3), we had a force which
increased the volume of information to the point of swamping the
globe. Then, just when we were beginning to suspect that the reign
of the private mind was over, computers once again accelerated indi-
vidual minds at Warp 4 speed. We are now accelerating to Warp 5,
where text meets hypertext, interactivity, and multimedia on-line.
While the Internet allowed for the interconnection of contacts, the
Web moves the whole process one giant step ahead and deeper by
allowing for the interconnection of contents.
1- Hypertextuality creates the potential for new levels of accelera-
tion in the circulation, elaboration, cross-checking, and simulation
of ideas for commercial and scientific, as well as more playful, ap pli-
cations. Today, the Web is deemed to contain between thirty and
fifty million pages which average about five hundred words or seven
kilobytes a page. In May 1996 it was estimated that the Web con-
tained "somewhere between 200 and 330 gigabytes of text" and that
"these numbers [were] growing by 20 percent every month."4 By
the time this book is out and in your hands, the total content of the
Web could equal the "roughly 29 terabytes in the current Library of
Congress."5 Having at your fingertips the equivalent in current
information to the whole of the Library of Congress seems to be an
impossible dream. Or is it a nightmare?
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT 81
\j In one of his lesser-known plays, Moliere has a character say
mockingly, "A gentleman is a person who knows everything without
ever having had to learn anything." By this definition, by virtue of
having access to the memory of the world on the Web, we are all
gentlemen! But exactly what is it that we have access to? The answer
is "everything and nothing." In the big memory that constitutes the
Web, there is everything under the sun and most of it is of no inter-
est whatsoever to you, though of great interest to often ridiculously
limited numbers of other people. That in itself is a new wrinkle in
the economy: as with personal memory, there is a "direct address"
quality to this new environment.
~ The trend towards direct or random access through digital tech-
nology is irrepressible, because we experience it all the time as one of
the most precious of our mental faculties; that is, having instant ac-
cess to whatever we need in our own mind exactly at the time we need
it without having to go through a complicated routine to get there.
IS Nonlinear media or hypermedia share this quality and make their
linear predecessors seem clumsy and slow. However access is not all;
pertinence of access is. In the mass-customizing economy we are
now fully entering, every contact, every address can potentially be
made as precise as the human neural configurations that locate one
thought in a trillion. The law of the Web is the inverse of the law of
mass media: value is created in the relevance or pertinence of each
connection, its appropriateness to the need being addressed, rather
than in serving the lowest common denominator of a mass audience.
TIME AND HVPERTEXT
Real time is the speed with which, in our mind, we can summon an
image or a thought. That is the speed at which consumers will want
hypertext to operate. And that is what they will get from service
providers of the future. The only thing standing in the way of
instant distribution is the relatively low data-transfer speeds made
available by the carriers. The telcos control the spigot. But that is
82 CON N ECT EDI NT E LLI G E N CE
also changing. The talk about cable modems with their essentially
broadcast formats had hardly died down when "Web TV" arrived, a
box that for a few hundred dollars will connect you to the Internet
via your humble TV set. Sony, Philips, Mitsubishi, and others went a
step further by integrating the whole package in one box, a televi-
sion set with an extra channel for the Web. If that doesn't bring the
Internet to the masses, nothing will. Let us observe, in passing, the
irony of the Trojan Horse Internet breaching the walls where the
vaunted Information Highway couldn't go ....
1.- The latest trend throughout (he economy is to do more and
more of everything in real time, just in time: just-in-time produc-
tion and delivery, the just-in-time association, just-in-time learning
or just-in-time data processing. Indeed, thinking is a just-in-time
technology. Just by thinking, you can change the content of your
mind in real time with colors and motion and sound and texture
and all the other simulations we process every second of our mental
life in our private virtual reality. The flexibility of data processing we
experience in our mind is the standard that network media engi-
neering must seek to achieve.
' > It is the permanent availability of content that determines
whether it can be delivered just in time or not. While the storage and
delivery of traditional media content absorbs much of the time and
energy of conventional publishers and broadcasters, the content of
all digital, networked communications is potentially available any-
where, all the time, on demand. Being everywhere at once, the Net is
the ultimate decentralizing force. It suppresses all distances and all
delays other than those inherent in the transmission technology.
In principle, all media benefit from collective input, even radio
and TV where a small group of people process information for the
many. But radio and TV are called "time-based" because they follow a
linear and irreversible orientation of time. To conduct e-mail and
related Internet activities, one needs a different sense of time. The
difference is that the time in use is not linear. It is not real time be-
cause inputs or messages are not guaranteed an immediate response.
However, the exchanges are not really out of time like the content of
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
books, for instance, because they are almost as contextualized as a
conversation is. They are like a telephone conversation in slow mo-
tion (and, of course, in text). This is the "secondary real-timeliness"
of the Web. One might call it "expanded" or "nonlinear real time."
The time of the Net is expanded to include and accommodate the
same level of context as an oral exchange, but over multiple entry
points. This is critical to the improved processing of intelligence.
" The real time of the use of any content, whether in face-to-face
conversation or in complex media synergies, is predicated on the
level of urgency defined by the context. In many cases, there is not a
pressing need for immediacy. What I mean by "extended real time" is
the duration of pertinence of an exchange-in-progress. Or, in the
metaphor above, the time over which the "slow-motion telephone
conversations" (in print) take place. While the concept is not useful
in any face-to-face conversation, it becomes applicable in networked
communications. There, the duration of the "real-timeliness" can
outlast the moment locally, and transcend time zones across the
world. A further comparison between on-line contact and a tele-
phone conversation makes clear the virtues of extended real time. To
engage in a telephone conversation, two people have to be available in
given locations simultaneously. Their exchange is deemed, quite ap-
propriately, to be happening in real time. However, posting a message
(note that the word is not "sending" which implies travel, but "post-
ing" which implies immediate presence) allows the parties to connect
in the full context and urgency of the message without having to force
themselves into the constraints of simultaneous real time. The tele-
phone's pertinence of address and content remain, while the continu-
ity of our lifetime, our most valuable resource, is left untouched until
we decide to engage in the deferred communication. In the same
sense, even our own private mind is an extended real-time technol-
ogy: the information, in one form or another, is always there, always
available, but many things are worked out only over a period of time
during which, however, the fullness of thought and context remain.
The combination of instantaneous access to everything and syn-
chronous distribution of everything everywhere makes all contents
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and all activities on the Web simultaneous. A useful observation by
Paul Virilio, an astute French critic of today's technology, is that
electronic communication brings out a new quality of time, which is
depth. He compares depth of time to depth of field in cinema. In
film, depth of field defines how far back behind the foreground the
camera is able to keep objects clearly focused. The same idea can be
applied to time on the Web. Indeed, as we probe the Web to retrieve
information about this or that, we can decide how far back we want
to go, how deep in time, just as we can decide how defined, how
prepackaged or open-ended, that information should be. Depth of
time may well become a feature of digital product distribution.
'}\ The shape of time, once purely and exclusively linear, now
becomes spherical, like the operating milieu of bats. Bats are excep-
tionally well suited to act as metaphors of the new world we have
entered. To dispel a myth, b<J.ts are not blind. In fact they see better
than we do. However, they supplement their already acute percep-
tions with echo location techniques similar to radar or sonar. These
can work in different ways, either specifically aimed at a target in a
Star wars laser-beam fashion, or in a simultaneous probe of the
complete surround of the fast-flying mammal. This is the condition
of man today, riding full speed on the crest of the electronic wave,
surfing the fields of all expertise with the zapping precision of a
video game. The bat's real reference is not a point of view, but a
point of being. The Web brings up all information now.
SPACE AND HV P ERTEXT

What is a library? It is a place in a unique space with smaller spaces,
where you put books, which are spaces which have letters; neat little
spaces on pages, also spaces. A book is a real object because it is actu-
alized and made continuous in space. A text on-screen is truly
immaterial because it is nowhere to be found before or after its
appearance on that screen. The text on screen is merely virtual until
it is actualized. Hence, it doesn't need to be anywhere, while fixed
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
written forms are entirely predicated on classification in spatial
terms. To find them you normally have to go to a library; that is,
move in space, something which can be just as tiresome for some
people as having to deal with ordinary "snail mail."
'\.. The space of hypertext is, of course, cyberspace. People plugged
into the Net have different bearings than the horizon and the cardi-
nal points. These are substituted by URLS (Universal Resource Loca-
tors). URLS are addresses, not places. They are referred to via hyper-
textual buttons which work like triggers, just as a need to recall
something in your mind triggers a thought or an image. Instanta-
neous direct access removes time and space, duration and extension,
from the imagination of cyberspace.
5 The use of the word "posting" to describe what people do when
they put something on-line is paradoxical. A poster used to be some-
thing hyperlocalized. You would put it somewhere, say, on a tele-
phone pole, and hope that someone would pass by and notice it.
You would hope even more that the someone would actually read it.
Posting on-line is instantly universal . Whatever you post will be
accessed by others not through happenstance, as in real space, but by
pertinence. People connect to your message because they need. it,
and only if they need it, unless they happen upon it during surfing
sessIOns.
Publishing is an operation that requires large investments of mat-
ter, energy, and time, demanding in turn forms of rationalization
that lead to mass production and established, proven patterns of dis-
tribution. Publishing is p r ~ and parcel of what I call the "broadcast"
model of the economy. The standard relationship of publishing to
the public is one of persuasion or coercion, not necessarily perti-
nence or relevance. This is amply proven by the cable industry, a
typical "publisher" of audiovisual programs, which takes advantage,
wherever it can, of its de facto monopolies to impose content that
people only halfheartedly want because there really isn't much else
available. Posting, in principle anyway, is an open, noncoercive
mode of content delivery. It doesn't cost a lot so it does not require
economies of scale.
86 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
( ? Publishing, on the other hand, has to face all the resistance of
materials, hardware, storage, transportation, damage, loss, obsoles-
cence, cycling, and recycling, all of this misery for what remains,
ultimately, a hit-and-miss operation. If stores run our of a book
when it is in demand, chances are the demand may already be over
when the second printing finally makes it to the market. Posting,
though, is eternal as well as ubiquitous. While old posters on tele-
phone poles may fray and fade, your message on-line stays there
until you-or your sysop-remove it. The upside of posting for the
publishing industry is that it will eventually reduce the volume of
wasted production and bring back to books the value they enjoyed
in the manuscript culture. Posting will eventually turn all books, not
just the coffee table variety, into art objects. Their cultural content
will be carried in their physical embodiment to a degree made much
more obvious than is the case at present, because their literal content
will be available in plain vanilla form as text on the Net.
\, What will posting do to objects and their sacred status in galleries
and museums? Howard Besser fears that "people are likely to visit
museums less frequently":
"1As more and more people have access to digital representations
of museum objects without entering the building itself, the
authority of the museum (and its personnel) will rapidly erode.
In libraries, we are already beginning to see that the people who
have traditionally served as caretakers of on-site collections are
instead becoming designers of access to collections that may
reside either on or off site. 6
The reconstruction oflost or damaged or inaccessible cultural ob-
jects in virtual form in high definition supported by presentations of
pertinent learning is what will bring more people to the museum. The
objects themselves, when available, will stand next to their replicas as
witnesses to the substantive reality supporting the simulation-like the
bullion that once supported the dollar, only in full view. Far from los-
ing interest, people will develop a fetish for objects. They always have.
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
The ethereal aspect of cyberspace means that it doesn't leave
traces. Let us suppose, for a moment, that all the utterly wrong
predictions about the so-called paperless office had actually come
true, and that, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, or in Jean-Luc
Godard's Alphaville, the world is entirely without books or paper of
any kind. The first consequence of a world without physical books
or other printed text would be that, while writing might still appear
on our screens, it would exist only virtually.
, \0 And the distinction between the virtual presence of writing and
its real presence on the page is a radical difference not to be taken
lightly. Sven Birkets comments that the difference between the word
in print and the word on-line is the difference between a noun and a
verb. One is a static reference, a "product" as Birkets calls printed
text; the other is a dynamic appearance, a "process." Indeed, by po-
tentially becoming hypertext "buttons," words on a screen become
like icons, actors in a dynamic play of meaning. Just as icons them-
selves have shifted from the status of mere illustrations to that of
grammatical effectors, keywords in hypertext, like verbs, have power
of action'?
NAVIGATION:
THE GRAMMAR OF HYPERTEXT
Until recently, the most common complaint about the Internet and
the Web, after the fact that they were too often painfully slow, was
that they were impossible to find one's way around in, to navigate.
Indeed, as more and more sites were opened, supporting the private
and public agendas of more and more people and organizations
with little concern for how whatever it was they were posting would
connect, confusion threatened to make the whole Web enterprise
irrelevant.
i. Having done my share of aimless surfing, I will never forget how
I felt when I was told about Yahoo! and shown how it worked. It felt
as if access to substance and meaning that had been forbidden until
88 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
that moment had suddenly been authorized. Yahoo!, as a name, is a
delightfully silly way to express that thrill of release from a major
handicap. It is today's version of Eureka! The Web leaped back into
relevance. I began to use this early "search engine" (though it was
not yet called that) to find out about "Art on the Web" and I was
flabbergasted by the number of sites already available. My next thrill
came from trying "Virtual Tourist." The idea of clicking on the map
of the world to gain access to a precise point in that world was noth-
ing short of magic. Yahoo! was quickly followed by Lycos, Alta Vista,
Web crawler, Open Text, and a host of search engines usually work-
ing in collaborative modes, often referring to each other and recom-
mending each other for more specialized access. * Search engines are
a natural outcome of the urgent need to find one's way through the
maze of randomly accessible data. They make palpable the World
Wide Web's capacity to connect directly to a source, just as the mind
does in calling up a memory.
"j The groupings and connections in hypertextual information are
not organized according to a table of contents, as they are in a book.
On-line, the organization of information is predicated on the index,
which is a very different thing. The grammar of linking amounts to
reducing immense complexity to utter, machine-ready simplicity.
First base in this mass processing is what is called the "inverted
index." As Steve Steinberg explains in Wired'
L\ An inverted index is simply a huge table, where rows represent
documents and columns represent words. If document x con-
tains word y, there will be a binary I in row x, column y of the
table. To find all documents that contain a specific word, the
computer simply scans for IS in the appropriate column. With a
little added work, it is possible to do more complex searches:
Find all documents that contain the word "wired" and not the
* The way search engines work with each other is in fact a perfect example of the
kind of collaborative ness fostered by networked industries, as opposed to the
devil-take-the-hindmost competitiveness of traditional business.
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
word "amphetamines." The table helps speed up the process
because only the appropriate columns, instead of the documents
themselves, need ro be examined.
8
" However, as Steinberg points out, "operating just on words is too
low-level" to be consistently useful. To get to second base, a search
engine must go beyond the merely mechanical listing of words and
begin to emulate that exquisite capacity for placing in context that
which we carry in our minds. This, as Steinberg discovered, is a two-
step
I, The second base problem involves dealing with homonyms and
synonyms. Homonyms are words that share the same spelling but
have different meanings. Synonyms, on the other hand, present the
inverse problem of two different words having similar or closely
related meanings, for example, husband, spouse, companion, and con-
sort. Synonyms present a less difficult challenge to automated sort-
ing techniques than homonyms. To automatically differentiate the
meanings of similar words, a computer needs instructions to recog-
nize that word's meaning when it is associated with other specific
words in its vicinity. The way this is done is to classifY documents by
statistical analysis of the clusters of "semantic fields" making up the
contents. A semantic field is the cluster of words which are related
to, or likely to be found in association with, a given keyword. For
example, all the associated words in the various categories supported
by the single word line are part of the semantic fields of each use of
the word. Thus, the word line appearing next to "on-" in a docu-
ment that also mentions computer, hypertext, and data, will be
deemed by the search engine to belong to a text on networks and not
on fishing, since there happens to be neither rod nor hook in that
document.
-1 The third base challenge is enorn:ously more ambitious. It is to
get the computer to understand the text (and, from that under-
standing, to be able to guess the context). This, in Steinberg's words,
would be "a program that can not only analyze a sentence and figure
out information such as what the important nouns are and how they
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
are being modified, but actually understand the written word from
the reader's point of view."9 This apparently impossible task is in
fact being realized right now by Oracle's ConText research lab where
lexicographers-experts in word shapes and meanings-are enter-
ing comprehensive semantic fields of different words down to a very
fine tuning of real contexts. This Herculean task is reminiscent of
Balzac's mission to replenish the French language in La ComMie
humaine, by researching every region and every condition of life in
France in order to identifY professional or local jargon, so as to be
able to use it in his novels. Steinberg continues:
The result of all this effort is a nine-level hierarchy-with each
level offering increased specificity-that currently identifies a
quarter-million different 'concepts in English. The scheme also
includes approximately 10 million cross-references between
related concepts, such as Paris and France, roadways and death.
ConText uses this data when it automatically analyzes a docu-
ment and then decides which of the concepts best describe the
document's topic. 10
'\ Of course, a word, or a concept, or even a whole context, doesn't
mean anything in and of itself. People, not words, make meaning,
and as Steinberg also observes, ConText is quite incapable of dealing
with metaphors, irony, double entendre, poetry in general and small
talk in particular. This problem has plagued the dogged research
into automated translation for decades. Still, the results of research
on search engines will undoubtedly find a place in development of
sofrware agents and customized bogosity-filters, automated evalua-
tion systems endowed with fast neural networks and generations of
fuzzy functions.
Ie For example, Patti Maes and her associates at MIT are developing
search systems that are actually like viruses. Rather than destroying
what they find, they compete or collaborate for that information
with other search mechanisms to get the best out of specific assign-
ments in given search spaces. What is even more astounding is the
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
9
1
notion that these virus-like "agents" can be endowed with self-moti-
vation. Maes explains that they are equipped so as to ensure that the
maximum effort of intelligence and collaborativeness will be ex-
erted: the motivation of an open, free-wheeling system should al-
ways come from within the system, and not from without.
\\ "Bookmarks" and "hotlinks," that is, the easy point-and-click fil-
ing of useful or interesting Web sites, and the embedding of direct,
instant connections to assumedly highly relevant contexts, are two
more features of the Web that help enormously in navigation. Still,
hotlinks are little more than currents in an ocean. Surfing is the
Web's equivalent to the much-vaunted literary serendipity. Serendip-
ity occurs when I go to the stacks in the library and, instead of flip-
ping through the pages of the book I need, fall into ravished
contemplation of something in the next book on the shelf, which has
strictly nothing to do with the object of my visit. One wonderful
thing about books, which indeed could otherwise be lost in hyper-
textuality, is that they are information free-for-alls. By comparison
to the just-in-time, pointedly apropos information of hypertext,
books begin to look more like newspapers. When you open your
newspaper you seldom read only what concerns you. There is a ran-
domness or a serendipity inherent in the printed page which will
never be duplicated by another medium.
\1. But surfing on the Web is nevertheless a very aleatory thing to
do. You can flit from one button to the next like a butterfly, attracted
by pleasing design or the prospect of interesting, though not imme-
diately pertinent information. In its randomness, surfing carries
within it the hypertextual version of the serendipity associated with
reading a newspaper. There could well be a new industry in develop-
ing surf engines that create interesting connections for those whose
surfing seems to adopt a certain pattern. A useful surf engine would
require a good grasp of the user's mental routines, and might provide
a new heuristic device specially suited to hypertext, like a throw of
dice left not entirely to chance.
\1 You can already get enormous help from a little digital critter
called Personal Web Manager that gets to know your favorite topics
9
2
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and routes and can give you a traffic report on access condi tions
before you waste your time on laggardly connections. The results are
displayed in traffic-light red, yellow, or greenY
'l\ If ConText i h ~ ~ manages to get to third base, the home run
will happen when I talk to my computer, and I ask it to search for
the key developments in search engines in 1996, especially around
the summer, and to bring out information about why they were so
critical. For the moment, we must content ourselves with learning to
surf adroitly.
HYPERTEXT AND MIND
Digital and networked-based technologies are working on our
minds much more comprehensively than books and TV have been
credited with doing. The instrumentalities that assist our thought
processes in our multimedia, teleputer, on-line environment can
shape that thought much more thoroughly than TV ever did. For
example, anyone who has practiced word processing on a screen will
be aware that it is a mode of writing that comes close to the condi-
tion of thinking. * Thanks to our habit of reading, much of human
thinking is based on organizing linguistic structures in our minds.
* Word processing actually brings people into a very new and unaccustomed
relationship with language. It is as if writing had been invented with the sole
purpose of giving birth to thinking of a particular kind-a thinking that is
largely constructive; that is, made of constructs, with words ro label or support
them, interior voices to argue them, and a tendency ro trust (or question) words
rather than feelings. It may be useful to recognize in such a context that the
newly fluid nature of hypertext writing is getting closer and closer to the nature
of that specific form of thinking which was itself one of the major effects of
alphabetic writing. The relationship between thinking, the way we know think-
ing, rhe way we practice thinking, and the practice of writing is central, determi-
nate; ir is not an accident. I am not saying that humans cannot think without
learning to read and write, but I am saying that the kind of thinking that has
been developed in Western cultures is entirely predicated on the way we have
treated information by writing, and of course by reading.
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
93
ASCII files-whatever typographical garb and formatting they may
be given-are a kind of instant, fluid writing. There is no substantial
presence. It happens like thought. On-line, the immateriality of the
text and all its sensory accoutrements, say in VRML or in Real Audio,
is even more thought-like. At the same time, the private mind we are
accustomed to is also changing. Our individual capacity to engage
more than one stream of information at a time has been in training
since the first split-screen techniques in commercial cinema (The
Thomas Crowne Affair, 1968; The Day of the a c k a ~ 1973) through to
picture-in-picture (PIP) television and multiple windowing on our
pcs. Windowing can oblige the mind to configure itself as a hyper-
textual structure, handling several operations at once. Once familiar
with this process, we can code and decode our everyday environ-
ment with the tools we've learned to use from the supporting media.
Cinema taught us to split-edit ambient reality in split seconds and
VR is showing people how to live in two or three environments
simultaneously. 'C
; The relationship between language and thinking fs transformed
by the fact that the world of books is no longer yielding to television,
bur to the new screen presence of the written word. Pierre Levy also
sees in hypertext an extension of our reading habits:
Hypertext, hypermedia or interactive multimedia continue the
age-old process of virtualization of reading. If reading is a matter
of selecting, schematizing, building a network of internal refer-
ences to the text, of associating notions to other notions, of inte-
grating words and the images they evoke in one's personal
memory in perpetual reconstruction, then the hypertextual
technologies constitute a kind of objectification, externalization
and virtualization of the processes of reading. I2
'\ In principle, this should be good news for educators and literate
persons. Like books, screen-based literacy appears to allow each
reader a measure of individual control and mastery over language.
But it could be an illusory power. The present danger ofhypertextual
94
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
data links and computer-assisted reading is that the decisions of the
mind will not remain the exclusive preserve of the reader but will be
shared by the system, the computer or the text. The more the infor-
mation processing is interactive, that is, shared by the system, the less
it leaves to the responsibility of the reader, and the more it can control
the reader by the sheer power, speed, and complexity of its operations.
The judgment of Stephen Talbot on this issue is harsh:
The computer took shape in the human mind before it was real-
ized in the world. What we embed in the computer is the inert
and empty shadow, or abstract reflection, of the past operation
of our own intelligence.
The computer gains a certain autonomy-runs by itself-on
the strength of its embedded reflection of human intelligence.
We are thus confronted from the world by the active powers of
our own, most mechanistic mental functioning. Having recon-
ceived my own interior as computation, and having then
embedded a reflection of this interior in the computer, I com-
pulsively seek fulfilment-the completion of myself-through
the interface. I3
! Of course, Talbot is right on target for each point he makes and it
is a rare quality of mind that we see at work in his thinking. How-
ever, he is simply revisiting the same biased concern that Amon Ra,
the sun-god of the Egyptians, expressed to That about the invention
of writing: "You fool! It is one thing to invent a thing; it's another to
know the consequences. You think you have invented a remedy for
the failures of memory, but what you have made is something that
will make people lose it all. Having access to everything, they will
think they know everything and they will become insufferable bab-
blers."14 Neither Ra nor Talbot seems to have recognized that the
nature of memory and intelligence had just been fundamentally
changed by the innovation that concerned them so. Indeed, Talbot
equates the belief that there is some sort of extension of our minds
out there with the loss of interiority:
ALL ABOUT HYPERTEXT
The Net is the most pronounced manifestation yet of our ten-
dency to reconceive the human interior in the manner of an ex-
terior, and then to project it onto the external world. Look at
almost any aspect of the human being, and you will find its ab-
stracted, externalized ghost on the Net. The outer substitutes for
the inner: text instead of the word; text processing instead of
thinking; information instead of meaning; connectedness in-
stead of community; algorithmic procedure instead of willed
human behaviour; derived images instead of immediate experi-
ence. At the same time, by means of a ubiquitous metaphor of
mentality, popular discourse levitates the Net somewhere be-
tween mind and abstraction ....
95
'2 Of course McLuhan had predicted this inversion a long time
ago, suggesting that the effects of electronic technologies would be
to turn literate men and women inside out like a glove, exposing to
the world the innards of their central nervous systems. But Talbot
pushes the point further:
'\ We can only project those inner con tents of which we have more
or less lost awareness. It is the progressive dimming of our inte-
rior spaces that enables us to imagine them out there, objectified
in some sort of global, electronic, "central nervous system."15
I,' Yes, we have embedded the outlines of what we know about intel-
ligence in our computers. It is only natural that we would build into
those machines the things that we know best, and the things that we
know best are our most recently outmoded, and equally artificial,
methods for survival. All we have really done is to dump the contents
and the processes of the literate mind into this super-literate accelera-
tor we call the computer. Are we really losing that interiority? I think
not. I see more real presence in the generation of my own children
who are growing up with the Net than in many of my colleagues who
have grown up on books and TV. The interesting question is not
what we have lost, but what we have gained in the transition.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
,l Michel Bernard is a lot closer to the mark when he proposes the
idea that hypertext is the "third dimension of language"I6 and
reveals a qualitative progression from the inarticulate utterance
which he compares to a point, to hypertext which he sees as a vol-
ume in space. Oral speech he presents as a line and written speech as
a surface. If Bernard is correct, then the kind of mental concentra-
tion, the kind of acceleration, and the kind of social consequences to
be expected from this new modality of language should also be of a
qualitative order. An emergent order, to be precise.
"-
CHAPTE R SIX
THE F U TU R E o F
T
HOMAS DE QUINCEY, adventuresome opium eater but no
etymologist, wrote: "Mails from the North-the East-the
West-the South-whence [ ... J comes the magical word
NEWS."1 Ezra Pound offered the self-serving suggestion that "poetry
is news that stays news." Digital oracle Nicholas Negroponte insists,
"If your early morning flight is delayed, that fact should appear as
the lead headline in your personalized newspaper."2
'- McLuhan, who knew the future of everything, said somewhat
dismissively, "The future of news is old hat." Nevertheless, news is
having to respond to digital networks and hypertext just as it did to
the telegraph and television, and we would be well advised to moni-
tor the outcome if we value our democratic institutions. The basic
question remains: What's news?
, My own definition is that news is human utterances that can
be supported by any number of channels but have four things in
common:
newness
pertinence
publicness
- The condition of nowness-or currency-requires that whatever
is news is either happening now or is, for one reason or another,
made more relevant now. Nowness is something we assume we all
97
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
share in, because in real time we all move at the same time, in the
same direction, and at the same speed. Newness-or novelty-
means that whatever it is, the information is fresh and/or has not
occurred to you before, at least not in that form. Pertinence-or rel-
evance-is the quality of being of interest or concern. Then again,
news that may be of extreme relevance to us cannot be called news
because it is "private." In publicness, we find both the sense of com-
munity (beyond the gossip group) and a common or shared destiny.
(, Not all these qualities are supported equally well by all media.
News as a consumer good has been shaped by the media that sup-
port it. Whether you agree or not with the idea that the medium is
the message, there is no denying that the medium does modifY the
selection, the content, the display, and the distribution of news. The
balance of ratios between nowness, newness, pertinence, and public-
ness changes from medium to medium.
-:; Print reduces the news to silent words and invites the reader to
rebuild the scene mentally, select the text, provide the context, and
make the connections. Print news is simultaneously public and per-
tinent to a high degree, but nowness suffers: all printed news is
deferred news. The delays accompanying print processes are mea-
sured in terms of days, at best.
'0 Radio is instant and continuous. R(!.dio delivers on-the-spot
reporting and a connection to news that is otherwise impossible,
short of actually being there. Radio has a powerful voice that can
exhort to war or to consumerism. But unlike the newspaper, radio is
not interactive, and it presents its information in linear, one-at-a-
time fashion, which affects the ratio of publicness to pertinence.
Much of what is news on radio affects the individual listener only
peripherally, and the only options open to that listener are to wait
out the irrelevancies in the hope of finding pertinence further down
the newscast, or to switch off the broadcast, or change to another
station. The same applies to television, which delivers the news "in
the flesh," so to speak. However, while radio is a companion that
permits you to do other things while you are listening, television is a
dominatrix demanding your full attention.
THE FUTURE OF NEWS
99
i\ For a while, computers didn't provide news at all. Now, via the
networks, they can and they do. News via computer networks maxi-
mizes nowness, newness, and pertinence, but it doesn't do a whole
lot for publicness. The relationship of public and private is in fact
inverted. Publicly available news is tailored to private interests when
made to blend with the user's specific profile; p ~ i v t e news posted on
the Net becomes public domain. Public domain information, digi-
tized and delivered on-line, becomes private property if it is
processed through proprietary standards. Normally, rumors affect
the stock markets more than the real news which arrives just a touch
later. Even that is about to change. We can anticipate real-time,
fully-informed investing, because now the news is simultaneously
available with the rumor.
ic The new medium brings important new benchmarks to news
gathering, formatting, and delivery, namely continuity, versatility,
and ubiquitous access. Continuity, or in the current jargon, "stream-
ing," relates to the real-time flow of data available on-line; it equates
to the stream of the present. Versatility describes that quality of the
digital format that allows the transferring of the data to any medium,
any support.* Ubiquitous access arises out of the trend to mobile
communications, which is destined to achieve maximum dispersion
and decentralization of human receivers. Ubiquitous access and its
partner ubiquitous sourcing allow for maximum decontextualization
* According to Nicholas Johnson: "Digitization means, among many other
things, that any content (such as video drama, text or still pictures) can be stored
on any media (tape, computer disk, CD) or transmitted through any medium
(wire, ether, infrared, optic fibre). A computer hobbyist can send computer files
through the telephone system or, with an amateur radio station, through the air.
Srock market prices can come to a home screen from a computer database, or
through the air on the 'sub-carrier' of an PM radio station. A voice 'telephone' call
can go through a twisted pair of copper wires, a 'cable television' coaxial cable, an
optic fibre-or the ether ('cellular phone'). A remote-control device for a televi-
sion set can transmit instructions 'through a wire, or an infrared beam. A CD-
ROM can contain music, or a 30-volume encyclopedia." From a transcript of
"Television in the Electronic Supermarket: The Confusion ofInrerests," a paper
delivered at the Cologne Conference (on television and its market), June 7, 1994.
100 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and recontextualization of news, in other words, optimal customiza-
tion to achieve maximum nowness, newness, and pertinence.
' \ iOn George
Gilder calls a "global ganglion of computers and cables, the new
worldwide web of glass and light,"3 how will other media fare?
11. For example, how does the impending revolution in news deliv-
ery affect the newspaper industry? Says Warren Caragata: "Not far
down the virtual road, publishers fear that papers will lose their fran-
chise as one of the community's main sources of news."4 Many
newspapers have responded to the challenge by going on-line. This
allows them to offer customized services and charge for them. The
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the
Los Angeles Times have all secured gateways to the Internet. News,
tailored to your specific needs, is becoming ubiquitously available,
in a range from real-time satellite data to context-relevant, layered,
fully documented, and archived information concerning the tiniest
item in a want ad. The (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Canada's national
newspaper in the English language, has been one of the quickest to
take advantage of the new opportunities. It took its first, tentative
steps into on-line services as long ago as 1977.
,1, In its 150th year, having survived the busiest period in the history
of the world's technological transformations, the Globe and Mail
stands at the hinge of two eras, that of paper and that of electrons,
and it belongs to both. As the general manager of Globe Informa-
tion Services, Michael Ryan says, "If you think you're just a pub-
lisher, you will die; the answer is to create a universal database with
any number of output formats." The Globe has understood the
meaning of "mass customizing."
i ' In mid-1996, two media-specific news services appeared on the
Web and began vying for market share. One is Timecast, a Real-
Audio service that offers semi personalized, radio-like news. You can
register your "Daily Briefing Preferences" for an automated preselec-
tion of the news. It is extremely easy to use: just check the boxes next
to the sources of your choice and start it running with the click
of a button. If you are not interested in the item you are currently
THE FUTURE OF NEWS lor
listening to, you can instantly switch to another. You can also revert
to the standard programming of anyone of the radio stations listed
among the available choices, thus bypassing your briefing prefer-
ences and getting back to regular radio fare. The customizing
allowed by Timecast is limited, but the degree of pertinence of the
news delivered in this way from the familiar, conventional medium
of radio is much enhanced. It has the hypertext-based merit of
respecting the rule of real-time continuity. And, of course, that
exclusive advantage of radio over all other news media is retained-
i.e., the fact that you can keep on doing other things and still get
your news. It is like having your time and spending it.
II) The other news source is PointCast, a service that offers sub-
scribers a wide selection of text and news graphics in selectable cate-
gories. The PointCast Network (peN) broadcasts news and informa-
tion directly to the user's computer screen. Information can be
"pointcasted," or customized, according to interest. Pointcasting
combines the best aspects of traditional broadcasting-in which top
stories are identified, researched, and delivered to audiences by news
professionals-with the ability for each user to receive personalized,
up-to-the minute headline information.
Ib PointCast grants the Web surfer a much greater level of personal-
ization than Timecast. Here is a sample of the contents PointCast
lists in its Fact Sheet, posted on peN's. Web site in July, 1996: Reuters
national, international, business, and political news headlines. To
view the full text of any story, users click on a headline. Business news
includes access to charts with six weeks of stock prices, volume data,
and a scrolling stock ticker provided by Standard and Poor's Com-
stock, along with news from PR Newswire and Business Wire. Users
can select the companies they want to track. Current temperature
and precipitation readings from Accu Weather for user-selected cities
scroll across the screen. Satellite images, radar maps, and national
weather maps are also available. Sports are covered by a sport score
ticker and schedules for baseball, football, basketball, gol and ten-
nis. There are also categories for news specific to various industries,
special interest magazines, lifestyle, horoscopes, winning lottery
102 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
numbers, selections from Time Daily, People Daily, and Money Daily,
the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and for Canada, the Globe
andMail.
'1 It seems clear that this is television's future. The same streaming
technology used for Net audio presentation is also available now for
continuous streams of video images. Where once there was a need
for tedious, time-consuming downloading of bit-hungry video, it
now plays as you go. Interactivity is provided within the video by
"temporal annotation generators," or TAGS. TAGS, the creation of a
Canadian software company called Digital Renaissance, allows
viewers to click on objects within a video stream to get more infor-
mation from the vast resources of the Web. From a commercial
point of view, TAGS can be embedded in CD-ROMS so that catalogue
companies can change pricing or availability of products listed on a
CD without having to make and distribute a new disk.
.. Accessible by wi reline and wirelessly, with satellite and cellular
audio and video, all news will soon be as easy to receive-and
send-as radio news is today. Knight-Ridder, the U.S. publishing
consortium, is working on plans for an all-electronic, continuously
up-dated, personalized newspaper that will be accessible through a
flat-panel, legal-pad-size computer screen wherever you are, when-
ever you want It.
Magazines are also getting into the on-line act. Most magazines
are community building and support devices, but magazines in
print can accommodate only a minimal number of edited responses
from their readers. An on-line magazine such as HotWired, the digi-
tal companion to Wired, permits the posting of unlimited numbers
of reactions and comments on-line. There is also an innovation that
the magazine Interactive Age calls "real-time letters": a magazine will
select some articles to post on the Net or distribute via e-mail in
advance of publication. Letters are solicited on these articles and
published in the magazine, along with the article, in the same issue.
Needless to say, in the magazine's on-line version there is unlimited
space to accommodate any and all responses; the editing job
becomes one of sifting through them to highlight the best.
THE FUTURE OF NEWS
1') Let's face it, though: reading off a computer screen is no fun.
McLuhan said that you plunge into your morning newspaper the
way you plunge into a bath. Streaming electrons on a computer
screen won't wash. The letters are not stable and the light coming at
you through the screen is aggressive. Scrolling the data demands
more physical effort and postural adjustments than holding a book
or unfolding a paper. James Fallows' opinion on the matter reflects
accurately my own and those of many people I have asked:
Z \ Reading from even the nicest computer screen is so unpleas-
ant-and the expectation is so strong that the computer will
always be doing something more active than just displaying
text-that computers will remain better suited to jumping
from topic to topic than to the sustained intellectual, artistic, or
emotional experience that print can provide. People can read
books by the hour; it's hard to imagine anyone spending even
ten minutes straight reading a single document on a computer
screen. 5
".1. The only kind of reading I can stand to do on a screen is material
I am personally involved with-either incoming e-mail letters, or
my own work-in-progress. An understanding of this shortcoming of
computer screens is critical to the displaying of news items on a Web
site such as PointCast. Quite apart from the quality and precision of
the news the site delivers, it must package the text in concise, at-a-
glance formats which invite your reading to be ideogrammatic and
nonlinear.
g Trust and reliability are twin issues of real concern for news on
the Net. In the print world it is not uncommon for four editors to
handle a story; on the Net there is no stopping solitary semiliterates
from learning enough HTML to create a site. The problem of accu-
racy, however, goes well beyond the issue of orthography. It includes
the verification of facts, and that, on the Net, must be the job of a
trusted editor. The job of the newspaper on-line is the same as that
of the published book: to make authority.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
'_'-l. Another problem with Net news is, of course, that not everybody
is on-line. Not yet. The present estimate of Canadian households
with computers equipped with modems and using them to get on-
line is just over 30 percent. This is a very high proportion, consider-
ing that it represents by priority the socioeconomically advantaged
members of the working population and it is still on an upswing
curve. The major roadblock to even more rapid growth is the sus-
tained high prices of the ever-more-powerful computers needed to
handle the ever-more-complex software used for Net applications
such as browsers.
'); What will happen to the numbers of people on-line when Web-
enabled television sets and set-top Internet adaptors are widely avail-
able, making this investment either unnecessary or much reduced?
WebTV, for example, is a set-top box that sells for a few hundred dol-
lars and which provides high-speed Web access via cable modem bur
also allows the use of a regular TV set as a monitor thanks to software
that markedly improves screen resolution for text. Sony provides a
similar product adapted to telephone lines. This is the invasion of TV
by the Internet. It means that the market for Net users is going to
expand by orders of magnitude. The critical mass to trigger this
explosion is already there.
i Have printed newspapers, then, become irrelevant to social
needs? Not if we look back over the last eighty years. In spite of ever-
more-fierce competition from radio, television with its "people-
metering," in Canada, the ratio of newspaper readership to the
general population has hardly budged from 20 percent over the
decades from 1910 to the present. The odds are that personalized
electronic news services will no more eliminate paper than the
much-anticipated paperless office did. Once again, the medium is
the message, namely paper itself. Why? Paper remains the best, the
fastest, and the most democratic interactive medium around.
Recent polls conducted by Environics Research indicated that dur-
ing the last national elections in Canada, people routinely went back
to the newspapers for detailed information and opinion that they
could not get on TV. To put the matter succinctly, television may
THE FUTURE OF NEWS
give you the experience, but the newspaper gives you the meaning.
f\ Nevertheless, professional jeremiads have been lining up to
prophesy the end of paper as a medium. According to Russell Neu-
man, a communications professor at Fletcher University in Medford,
Massachussetts: "The current generation of professional journalists
and publishers who have ink in their veins will have to die off before
the next generation realizes that the newspaper industry is no longer
a newspaper industry."
',ol The fact of the matter is that we all have "ink in our veins" and
that it will keep flowing there as long as we prize our psychological
autonomy. The condition of our mental freedom is to have language
still in front of our eyes. Anything else is an invasion. When you are
given a newspaper to read, you do the scanning; you take control.
On-line, and especially with the help of agent-controlled, personal-
ized news services, the scanning is done by the program, and you
become a mere extension of the display.
"-'. The printed paper is the best "random-access memory" available.
I may think that I only open the Globe or the Times for the arts, the
sports, or the business section, but I wouldn't want to be stuck with
a screen that only reflected my previously known personal news
needs. No flickering screen will ever quench the insatiable thirst of
my peripheral vision, glancing sideways at a headline that catches
my eye.
";,L- The greatest advantage of the traditional newspaper is that it pro-
vides an all-at-once, random-access view of reality for the day. The
job of the newspaper is to sort out the items which are relevant to
public interest, over and above those which address purely individ-
ual needs. A major newspaper each day performs the task of boiling
down four hundred or more hours of reading material to an average
of three to five hours' worth. On the average, readers only find time
to read about fifteen minutes of that. The rest is that part of the pub-
lic life that your eye catches only subliminally.
,,\ In the immediate future, business, professional, and academic
news will in all likelihood trend towards the customized end of the
news delivery environment. But national or local news delivery is
ro6 CON NEe TED I N TEL L IG ENe E
better suited to the paper format, or to the radio and TV broadcast.
Indeed, the most significant difference between personalized media
and the conventional models will be the difference between private
and public application. This is not to suggest that public news can-
not be found on-line, which is clearly not the case, but to point to
the difference between the physically based community and the
just-in-time, on-line community. Personalized-or even commu-
nity-oriented-news arriving on-line is closer to the chatter of a gos-
sip group than to the formal quality of objectivity associated with
material objects like newspapers. By the same token, extremely per-
sonalized news can isolate individuals from a community, much in
the way that extreme specialization tends to isolate academics from
their colleagues. If the newspaper and news broadcasts were to dis-
appear for good, that public part oflife which defines the day-to-day
meaning of a community, or even of a country, might well disappear
with them.
\
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FUTURE
OF THE BOOK
J
UST AS THE DEMISE of the newspaper is regularly predicted
by prognosticators of our digital future, so is the book almost
daily declared obsolescent, if not obsolete. Bruce Powe has said:
"Yet we are the children of electricity, and post-literacy is our fron-
tier."I My colleague Robert Cook believes:
1The book has already been eclipsed as a storage format. It is
expensive to produce, to store and to circulate. It is hanging on
because of user interface. Does anyone really prefer reading text
on screen? The end of the book may not be nigh, but it is imag-
inable.
2
'; Their pessimism, if that is what it is, may not be justified.
What is a book? In French, I would say, "Un livre est un lieu de
repos pour des mots ecrits. )) A resting place for words. It sounds trite,
but in fact the printed page is the only place where words do have
a rest. Everywhere else, they are moving: when you speak, when you
see them on a screen, when you see them on the Net, words are mov-
ing. But a book is a restful place. The printed word is, and always
was, still. There is an old adage: verba volant, scripta manent-
spoken words fly, but written words stay. On-line, that is not true
anymore. Scripta are volenting, in fact, much faster now than the
verba.
108 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
S The effect of this acceleration of words is that we live much faster
today than we used to. Not only because we do more things or
because we have more access to distant places or because we have
more information coming our way, but because the segmentation of
textual information has changed. When Henry Fielding published
Tom jones in 1749, his public was reading by candlelight (not bad in
terms ofluminance, by the way!). That could give an average book
an active life of a month or more, at the rate of consumption of a few
pages each evening. And the book had little or no competition in its
field. Now, suddenly, as in the movie of Tom jones, you have a whole
book compressed to two hours. Furthermore, any single shot in Tom
jones that is sustained for more than five or six seconds seems end-
less, almost a bore. Movies have taught us to process and deal with
information at breakneck speed, so that, today, we have to look at
the screen as a measure of our time. We know, for example, that if an
advertiser puts together a commercial with fifty edits in a single seg-
ment of thirty seconds, that spot will not shatter the mind of the
viewer. On the contrary, the speed factor will work to very good
effect on the viewer's body, as well as his or her mind. Thus the speed
at which we process information today has increased because the
units of information processing have shrunk.
;) Today, words and images packed with distilled meaning zip
about everywhere as slogans, headlines, jacket logos, and so
on. Hypertextuality turns the content of books into sound bites.
The magical power of words in a hyperlinked computer program,
or the fluidity of writings on our electronic walls, turn information
processing into a quasi-mythical job (muthos was the ancient Greek
word for word). We seem to be returning to the habits of earlier
times when laconic people packed meaning into mottoes, sayings,
and proverbs, crunching information maximally in minimalist
vehicles.
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
THE DESTINY OF BOOKS:
IT'S THE REAL THING"
\ Today, only 35 percent of publishing involves books. The rest of the
worldwide flow of restless words and images ends up in less formal
vehicles for print, or on video, in CDS, and, of course, in electronic
databases of one kind or another. Beyond the confines of the library,
public or otherwise, the proportion of information on paper is
rapidly losing ground ro the amount of information on-line or in
other digital forms. According to The Economist, industry analysts
estimate that "by 2000, electronic products could account for up ro
40 percent of the turnover of the publishing industry as a whole."3
This amounts ro a kind of mass disembodiment of information
processlllg.
~ With the speed and flexibility of electronically processed infor-
mation and the sheer volume and complexity of the available data,
the role of hard copy will change. Paradoxically, the role of print will
evolve from its traditional use as a vehicle for "hard" information
(factual, theoretical, regulatory, didactic, etc.) to giving precedence
to the very thing that print has traditionally tended to spurn-
imprecise, fuzzy, judgmental information: in a word, opinion. Fac-
tual information will have to be automated and hypertextualized to
speed access, while opinion will require hard copy because advice is
not trustworthy if the original text may be tampered with.
Another way of looking at this is to suggest that we are evolving
different speeds for different types of information. Information trav-
els at different velocities in different vehicles. Some data need higher
speeds than others; for example, much stock market information is
worth a lot of money in the first twenty minutes of its appearance,
and then nothing at all after that. Literature, on the other hand,
while potentially benefiting from hypertextual links based on
thematic or content analysis, will not tolerate much tampering
with the original text. Literature, like most printed information,
travels at a slower, more meditative speed. The printed word is a
time-stopper.
no CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
'J.. The criteria for printing anything will center on whether or not
the content needs to be fixed. The fact of the matter is that, even in
our digital era, there remain plenty of words that benefit from being
fixed and well warrant the effort. Some information that needs to be
slowed down:
.'. Medical, scientific and legal facts, and processes that serve as
solid ground to knowledge.
Opinion, criticism, literature, and other content issuing from
people whose opinion has acquired value.
Manuals and textbooks which are addressed to educational
and professional communities for the transmission of step-
by-step, linear information unlikely to change much over the
longer term.
If the word "publisher" is still spelled b-o-o-k-s, it is with good
reason. The reverently bound copy of well-typeset text on quality
paper still carries the image of reliable, if somewhat austere informa-
tion. There is currently a real danger of inflation of the value of often
unreliable data posted on-line as opposed to being published in the
traditional sense. Indeed, one of the main problems of today's scien-
tific or professional on-line publication is a lack of enough time and
adequate staff for thorough editorial review, with the result that
much on-line scientific material is losing credibility. While many
scholarly journals are now simultaneously published in hard copy
and on-line, a growing number are put on-line only, to accelerate
delivery, reduce costs, and allow "instant" reviews and commentary.
Moreover, the appearance of authors/publishers who put themselves
on-line so as not to have to endure the orren capricious scrutiny of
an academic publisher's editorial board is a challenge to the whole
publishing industry.
c,; The real issue is authority. The book is destined to take on more
and more of the burden of credibility lost in the fluidity of electronic
data. The professional publisher may not survive on books alone,
but to survive at all, he or she will have to acquire the image of
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK III
authority. That way, publishers may continue to attract authors who
might otherwise be tempted to sell their works privately on-line,
rather than share the profits (after much inflated production costs)
with the professional publishing business.
\ Today, opinion has ro rule the roost in public affairs,
whether in the media with celebrity opinion-leaders, in courts oflaw
with expert witnesses, or, more formidably, at the stock exchange.
We are witnessing the return of doxa.* Thinking about the rise and
fall of market value McLuhan quipped, "In the electronic age ru-
mors are 'the real thing.'" Fiction, opinion, criticism, commentary,
empirical observations, expert testimony, statistics, heuristics-any-
thing involving the explicit or implicit expression of judgment will
require fixed forms appropriate to the new authority it conveys.
\\ The irony is that most of the efforts of the great publishers from
the sixteenth century onward, like those of the great encyclopedists,
have been devoted to arresting or fixing "the world on paper" (to use
an expression coined by my colleague David Olson), with a special
emphasis on facts, on historically and scientifically verifiable state-
ments. But when all information is available all the time, every-
where, it is the process of selection and analysis that gives it value
through relevance. If I were an ancient Greek sophist, I would be
able now to give many valid responses to Plato's criticism of doxa.
Plato railed against those whose advocacy was based on opinion,
rather than on truth; on provable-or disprovable, if you accept
Karl Popper's definition of a scientific truth-facts. ("Well, I know
all the facts, Doctor, now what's your opinion?")
But rather than picking a bone with Plato, who has already muz-
zled his critics by pointing out that the author of written words is
not there to defend them, I would like to address an argument of
another one of my colleagues at the University of Toronto, historian
Robert Bothwell, who writes:
* According to Plato, the mind has two faculties: knowledge of the real world
and belief in appearances, or doxa. Doxa denotes what "seems" to exist or to be
true or right. It falls somewhere between belief and opinion.
II2 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
I think there are too many books being published that nobody
wants to read. What we have in North America is a vast produc-
tion of theses and an academic promotion system that demands
publication. So we're communicating information that nobody
really needs and we're doing it because there is an expectation,
largely on the part of university employers, that their staff have
to produce these things. But in practice if you look at what is
produced, there is no sale, there is no readership. These books
are being produced for what I call "ritual purposes." I am
opposed to that and I think one way to start pruning the system
is to end book subsidies.
5
\...1 While I often feel that the grist of the mill of university scholar-
ship grinds impossibly fine, I cannot agree with Prof. Bothwell. Far
from being a mere ritual, the scholarly publication and all its atten-
dant modalities of checks and balances is what it takes for a society
to equip itself with information that is as reliable as it is humanly
possible to make it. I remember being utterly shocked by a state-
ment made by Jacques Derrida at a conference on the nuclear threat
in 1984: he said that the scandal of the bomb was not that it could
destroy all life, but that it could destroy all texts, all the archives of
the world. While I still think Derrida's statement, like the bomb, is
overkill, in the light of what Prof. Bothwell has suggested I am
beginning to understand what he means.
'-:.. Few people may ever be exposed to any given item of scholarly
minutiae, but its fixed presence in a library somewhere will serve as a
constant reference as against all the combinations and permutations
that the text could or will be subjected to by hypertextual manipula-
tions in electronic databases. The relationship of printed matter to
electronic distribution devices should be one that serves to support
the authority of information, just as gold bullion serves to support
the value of money. There is a cost attached to this, but, in the con-
text of current military budgets, it's not a whole lot and it, too, could
provide a line of defense against some future "enemy" intent on eras-
ing digital archives.
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
1I3
\& I do not for a moment want to imply that electronic data can
never be trustworthy. Rather, it has different uses and presents dif-
ferent opportunities for the publisher. Here, too, an interesting
reversal may occur. In the past, publishers looked for permanence,
for the definitive edition, the most complete description, the lasting
classic. Today, they have to be "just in time," attentive to the latest
developments. They have to remain flexible, and tolerant of con-
flicting approaches and interpretations. Two qualities make on-line
information closer to oral communication than to text on paper: on-
line information is as close to real time as writing can ever get, and it
is interactive. This means that what appears on screen, remaining
fluid and adaptable like the spoken word, is more closely bound to
the context of the information. delivered, than to the text of that
information. In orher words, while text-based information bolsters
credibility, context-driven information nurtures pertinence. Perti-
nence in publishing is a function of knowing your customer's needs
even as they change. Today, publisher Wolters Kluwer's slogan
"Partner in information and education" calls to mind that in the
new electronic environment, the professional customer has become
a full-time partner of the professional publisher. (The same could be
said of many other areas of industry and commerce.)
" This is the secret of so-called mass customization. The more spe-
cialized the customer, the more customized the product must be.
The more, too, it must be subjected to a constant dialogue between
the publisher and the client. The idea, at a certain point, is not to
think in terms of product at all, but in terms of service. Being a "pro-
fessional" more and more means having access at the right time-
just in time-to the right strata and the right blends of reliable and
contexrualized information. Economies of scale require, and actually
demonstrate, that what is less specialized, and therefore less time-
sensitive, is also less expensive and more appropriate to long-term
publication, while highly customized information is much more ex-
pensive, and, paradoxically, less durable and less widely distributed.
\ v A side issue, although not an unimportant one, is that ofintelli-
gent retrieval software that is now being developed to cut down on
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
human time consumed in basic data collection and sorting. Publish-
ers are known to scoff at the likelihood that these digital agents will
one day be sufficiently functional to compete successfully with
human librarians, journalists, and researchers. The fact is, however,
that sooner or later intelligent software will begin to nibble at the
edges of the domain of the publisher. Many private professional
users, rather than rely on the authority of a publisher, may one day
soon prefer to resort to computer-assisted scanning of the available
information on-line. The degree to which this happens will depend,
of course, on how much potentially pertinent information will be
available on-line in the future, having escaped the grab of prescient
publishers.
In an astute response to the decentralizing impact of hypertex-
tual access, and as part of the general trend to "just-in-time busi-
ness," digitally savvy Xerox is introducing a new concept, and a new
supporting technology it calls "printing on demand." Because hard
copy will remain easier to handle for many purposes other than elec-
tronic data, most documents will continue to benefit from being
printed at one time or another. The major problems associated with
printing are delays in production and delivery, and waste of materi-
als. Xerox's idea is to set up sophisticated printer/binder and packag-
ing units at various strategic points, just as many cities are now
well-equipped with photocopying centers, usually at walking dis-
tance in busy areas. The copy would be downloaded into the unit
from an on-line source and a finished, bound, and packaged book,
brochure, pamphlet, or "special edition" would come out at the
other end. When will Xerox add a shredder, recycler, and a paper-
waste maker to their wonderprinter? _
\Ju' i ~ ,
In brief, then, how should professional publishers respond to the
pressures of hypertextuality? They have to become as scientifically
and instructionally reliable as universities, but better able to cope
with immediate and urgent information demands. Why a univer-
sity? Because the on-line learning process accessible to their cus-
tomers will be constant, with benefits as real and tangible as a
diploma. In this environment, the professional publishers' level of
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
specialization and their collaboration with libraries and customers
will be what ensures that the information they supply is profession-
ally updated and market-worthy. Their close collaboration with
their customers will constitute an international, multidisciplinary
think tank of which buyers of information services will be proud to
be members.
Four recommendations summarize the issues of speed, authority,
pertinence, and content for publishers:
Connect, get wired, get bought by or buy yourself a cable
operation. Alternately, secure speedy delivery by multiplying
your contacts with printing-on-demand units.
Protect your reputation of authority in your chosen fields;
one of the university-like functions of the future publisher
may be to establish guidelines and review processes for what-
ever comes their way on-line, so as to sell or resell such infor-
mation as value-added with authority and pertinence.
Consider the professional client as being the defining para-
meter of the content of any publishing service.
Generate as much client-produced content as is market-wor-
thy (i.e. more than might ordinarily be published in book
form); it will create a sense of the connected intelligence asso-
ciated with the publisher's operations.
Just like Coca-Cola, the publisher, pointing to any of its books,
should always be in a position to proudly affirm: "It's the real thing."
THE DESTINY OF LIBRARIES
IN THE PU B LIC DOMAIN
The greatest challenge to public libraries-indeed, to the very no-
tion of public domain in the sense of the res publica of the Romans-
is the networked electronic data environment that is growing
up around them. Because of networks, the very nature of public
u6 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
information, not to mention information storage and distribution,
is changing.
1 In keeping with that country's tradition of excellence in every-
thing to do with the printed word, some of the most vigorous and
creative thinking about libraries is conducted in Holland. G. M. van
Trier is among those who have understood the nature of the techno-
logical future for libraries. He recommends: "Research should be
encouraged into issues of information retrieval techniques for large
full-text databases and multimedia information, focusing on the
application of advanced computer and information science tech-
niques such as artificial intelligence, linguistic technology, and
neural nerworks." His research recommendations read like a wish
list for a company like Philips to grant:
The use of electronic information should be stimulated through
research aimed at:
the development of a full-page size, high quality, flat panel
display;
the development of reading software, creating an electronic
display browsing capability, improved search and retrieval,
and spin-off to private files;
enhanced convenience, especially regarding system opera-
tions: data input, operating systems, and file management.
6
,) .... , t! - .
A great deal of the future of the communications industry is im-
plicit in these requests. Because they make communication devices
light and portable, flat-panel displays like those incorporated into
current laptop computer designs, are now the spearhead of domestic
product research in Japan. Reading sofrware, from optical character
recognition (OCR) for scanning and digitizing of text for use in com-
puters, to digital agents for automated filtering and sorting of infor-
mation, is the cutting edge of sofrware research today. Customizable
reading software will be the publishing phenomenon of the future.
We can already foresee that the combination of scanners, parsing
software, neural nerworks, and object-oriented technologies will bring
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
II7
us something like "computer-assisted reading," wherein texts will be
scanned and partly judged in a man-machine dialogue at very high
speeds. * And van Trier adds: "The government should create the
conditions for the development and use of a differentiated telecom-
munication infrastructure for the benefit of information services.
Broadband communication for the transport of images and multi-
media databases is especially important."
<) The potential for cable delivery of library holdings has caught
the attention of others, as well:
... Not too far down the line, local library resources will be fully
incorporated into your cable service. You'll have access to all the
automated indexes, full text, and multimedia that the library has
collected. Conceivably, you could see something on a TV show
that baffles you and just zap over to the library channel to look it
up.?
So predicts James Larue, outspoken director of the Philip S.
Miller Library, Castle Rock, Colorado. The future of libraries is
circumscribed neither by time nor place. Access to information on-
line-provided that there is sufficient bandwidth capacity-is
instant. And it is the mountain that goes to Mohammed. This is
the defining distinction between the old concept of dissemination
and the new one of delivery, according to the director of the San
Francisco Public Library, Kenneth Dowlin: "Basically, dissemina-
tion has meant: come to the library and get the information. I am
talking about delivery of information to your desktop or your
home-instantaneous delivery." Pursuing this train of thought,
Dowlin urges librarians to change their approach from that of
banking to that of connectedness: "Essentially, this is moving from
* With the help of the appropriate software, a reader can conceivably scan vast
amounts of data, cull the relevant items, sort them in automated judgment cate-
gories, distribute the results instantly in pertinent locations, all as part of the
process of consulting the original books and databases.
II8 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the just-in-case collection syndrome to just-in-time information
delivery. "8
\ The fact that references to banking pop up regularly in library dis-
cussions is no accident: the history of the two institutions are closely
related. In banking, as with the library, content (in this case, money)
arrives, is logged and deposited and then redistributed. The rate of
circulation of the content is what determines the institution's produc-
tivity. Today, electronic phone transfers are making banks go through
the same digital hoops as libraries, striving for connectedness.
". Indeed, the existence of a global network suggests the notion of a
global library. While communication on the Net has mostly devel-
oped through private and individual initiatives, a new concept of the
public realm could well develop out of it. Alluding to the "big pic-
ture" of libraries' operational and institutional frameworks, Colin
Steele, the university librarian of the Australian National University,
suggests that one of the technology-driven changes affecting his pro-
fession is the shift of emphasis from "local storage to global access."9
In fact, with improvements in the functionality of the Web, and
with multiplication of library access points via that route, the
inverse relationship, i.e., "local access to global storage," may turn
out to be a m o r ~ accurate depiction of the future.
.. t' ' . ." _' ". \ r , ~ , . . . - ~
Once the public libraries of the' world become interconnected in
what visionaries such as Steele and others are calling the "one library
concept,"IO the notion of a "global public domain" to which all the
public libraries contribute their resources can be entertained. How-
ever, to make this fundamental shift possible, the contents of the
archives have to dematerialize. This means enormous expenditures
of energy and money to convert our hard-copy universe to software.
It also means, at a deeper level, a profound change in personal and
social psychology.
In a networked world our autonomy as individual people needs
to be defended on two levels. In order to ensure a reasonable amount
of individual autonomy, we have to resist the temptation to auto-
mate everything, including our mental responses, by excessive inter-
activity and hypertextuality. At the public level, it is the responsibility
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
II9
of governments everywhere-and soon the condition of their sur-
vival-to protect the public domain from takeover and conttol by
private industry.
iZ) The urgent question is: How can we protect the public realm
from privatization by huge "consciousness industries" (to borrow
Hans Magnus Ensenzberger's brilliant phrase)? Under the pretense
of improving competition, telecommunication and cable indus-
tries, often controlling large publishing interests and media, are
pushing for acquisition and mergers. As this is written, the most
recent in a continuing series of strategic mergers and takeovers by
corporations wishing to secure market dominance is Disney's acqui-
sition of the American television network ABC. The earlier acquisi-
tions of CBS by Sony and NBC by General Electric and, in Canada,
the acquisition of the publishing consortium Maclean Hunter by
the giant cable operator Rogers Communications are leading to
vertically integrated monopolies and oligopolies that deserve more
than the polite expressions of deferential concern they've elicited
from government.
IG Mictosoft's Bill Gates has been courting museums and galleries
of the world to secure exclusive rights to distribute the i g i t i ~ e
images of their collections. In their material reality, these public art
treasures will remain accessible to their usual publics, but their digi-
tized versions, soon to be more in demand than the real thing, will
only be accessible for a fee, paid, of course, to Microsoft and its dis-
tribution licensees. The paradoxical outcome of this can only be that
the existing communities of users of public domain material will
become smaller and smaller as against a growing proportion of users
paying for the same services in their virtual form. The saga of the
cable industry tells pretty much the same story: "How we got the
public to pay for what they used to get for free, i.e., broadcast televi-
sion." And the cable story tells us as well that the issue is not only
that we may have to start paying for what was once free, but that the
integrity of what we are provided with in return for our money is
threatened by the priority of profit over service and the slatternly
trend to "infotainment."
120 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
..., U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey saw the danger arid urged Congress to
consider a bill for state-based electronic libraries:
While we were asleep, the late twentieth century public library
has been eclipsed by video stores, cable televisions, and the ever-
expanding world of entertainment .... For the sake of our
culture, our democracy, and our economy, we urgently need to
turn this around .... I believe the State Electronic Libraries
could be the resource needed by communities grappling with
this challenge. II
But far from shoring up the public media, whether in printed or
audiovisual form, governments are drawing back. According to John
Blegen, there is evidence of an historic pattern of much reduced
funding for public libraries in the u.S.:
To read the annual reports of the major public libraries during
the 1920S, 1930S, and I940S is to see the functions of a vital infor-
mation resource, much supported by public use and accustomed
to the importance of its role. Budget problems are there, to be
sure, and staffing is never sufficient. But there is a confidence
that begins to weaken in the 1950S, and to disappear in the
I960s. By the 1970s, the large urban public libraries that lead the
public library profession are without any question the suburban
systems.
I2
On the other hand, the idea of using libraries as public access
points to the Net is catching on, at least in Canada, where the
School Net Program will see all of the country's 16,500 schools and
3>400 libraries on-line by 1998. However, the vision is still not
always very clear. The imagery of transportation, the dominant
technology of a previous age, peppers government reports and
ministerial speeches. It began with Vice President AI Gore and his
unfortunate "Information Highway" metaphor; in Canada one of
the recommendations of the 1995 Access Subcommittee of the
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK 121
Information Highway Advisory Committee to the federal govern-
ment reads:
" - ?" .... t. ~ . , . : I ~ , ~ ... ,
> To make sure that all Canadians have the opportunity to exploit
the economic, social, and cultural benefits of the Information
Highway, there will be a need for low or no-cost access centers in
every community. Affordable community access could be made
available in a variety oflocations such as schools, libraries, shop-
ping malls, airports, or other transportation terminals.
: ') To bundle transportation terminals along with schools and
libraries as potential access points seems to imply that, in these cir-
cles at least, "access" is defined as "oudet." This view does not pro-
pose a radical departure from industrial age, broadcast distribution
psychology, which is primarily the mind-set of business. The
pipeline remains the principal image of the day.
2Lj Why should we care? If, while governments battle deficits and
sagging economies, industry is ready to pick up the tab and install
the most important public infrastructure ever, shouldn't we be
thankful it is happening at all? Or should we, as taxpayers, clamor
for public electronic highways, public access to vital information? A
growing number of people are asking for governments to establish
something like a charter of information rights. Mark Surman, cre-
ator of the concept of the "electronic commons," a public arena of
social and political discourse, warns:
: We must constantly remind ourselves what this whole grassroots
media thing is about-human beings and community .... If
access to the new systems does not include literacy and the
demystification of technology, we will have created a system that
makes class barriers and cultural exclusions bigger rather than
smaller. If we leave people in the South to sit on the periphery of
the Net, getting sick as they build computers for the rich, the
electronic commons is a failure. As we build a movement for a
new electronic commons, we need to remember the primacy of
122 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
all these things, to remember why we care about information
democracy in the first place.
13
The future of democracy-assuming that democracy is still a
valid concept for technologically assisted human behavior-lies in
maintaining the difference between public and private, not elimi-
nating it. Because of their twin commitments to the written word
and to public service, public libraries are among the primary arenas
where this critical contest of humanity will be played out. The pub-
lic library may be the place where democracy takes refuge against the
complete electrification and digitization of our connected mind .
. Why, in the era of hypertextuality, do we still need books?
Because hypertext is not a book. The book is fixed, and that fixity is
crucial. Why? Because today the challenge is not to accelerate infor-
mation, but to slow it down. Information is already going fast
enough by itself. Because our culture is absolutely hell-bent on
accelerating to the nanosecond every aspect of human activities and
how we relate to them, what we need is to decelerate and make sense
of our relationship to information, to deal with it in a rhythmical
way. And the book is a consummate decelerator.
.' ~ The nanosecond generation takes its shoe and hits the screen
because it isn't booting fast enough. Each new generation of com-
puters has to be faster and pack more processing power than its pre-
decessor of three or four months earlier. Time is on fast-forward and
out of control. To control time, you have to play golf, or read books.
, Thought is stopped ~ a book; thinking is laid bare as if on a dis-
section plate, revealing its inner structure. The structure of thinking
is nowhere in evidence on the Net. As in all computerized media,
the structures of thinking are imposed in the guise of programming,
but you don't see them. . .
Books will remain necessary for two main reasons:
They are decelerators of information (and subsequently accel-
erators of thought). The inversion of the previously existing
relationship is worth considering here: in a predominantly
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
oral culture, books played the role of accelerators of collective
intelligence; more people could benefit from the contribu-
tions of thinkers and discoverers. Each major book read and
discussed by key people and shared by larger groups made an
impact on the collective lore. Culture was thus accelerated
continuously to this day. However, in an electronic environ-
ment, the role of books is to decelerate information, so as to
give people the time to think about it and turn it into service-
able knowledge.
They are distillers of information and resist manipulation by
the new "hypertextual/interactive" reader. The fundamental
polarity at issue, one often ignored by educators and publish-
ers, is that of the complementary objective/subjective realities
of the book and the reader. Reading and writing give the liter-
ate person individual control over language. In turn, this spe-
cial control over language gives that person a separate
identity. This kind of separation between the individual and
the social group is quite impossible in an exclusively oral soci-
ety. The fundamental condition of mental-and political-
freedom is that the "objective" world outside be stabilized,
while the subjective mind is free to roam within it, picking
and choosing according to one's needs and personal plans.
This power of control is greater if the text is fixed and the
mind of the reader takes all the decisions regarding the elabo-
ration of meaning.
12
3
;n Unlike either networked interactive or oral communications,
books hold up a fixed mirror to individual development. Thus, the
printed book is indeed a necessary condition of the existence of pri-
vate identity. Education and government need to inform themselves
about the relationship between literacy and the privacy of mind.
Every medium is what you could call an epistemological option.
"'; Epistemology is the science of how we know things. It is the
study of how we relate, globally as complete human beings, to the
environment and to other human beings. It is the study of how we
124
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
structure our own thinking, our own bodies, our own feelings, our
own sensations in relation to information "out there." Books and
writing represent one of the few fundamental epistemological
options offered by the history of our civilization. Hence, the idea
that books could disappear forever without leaving a trace is out of
the question; it is just impossible. Educators should understand that
books are not going to be replaced by television or multimedia or
computerized information or virtual reality or any interactive sys-
tem, including the Net. We should all realize that they must not be,
that it is critical to maintain the presence of books not just as tech-
nologies of information processing, but as technologies of being.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MUSEUMS, REA L
AND VIRTUAL, A ND
THE TVRANNV Of
~ ~ POI N T o f V lEW ~ ~
1M USEUMS AND GALLERIES are statements abom the
cultures they represent. The Musee du Louvre, the first
museum co go on-line in Europe, was also the first large
public museum in the West, an unlikely child of the French Revolu-
tion. It opened its doors on August 10, 1793. Not only was this
public collection mostly composed of objects which had belonged
to the French monarchy, but fhe building itself was part of the
king's city palace, where much of the affairs of state had been run. It
made sense co show "the people" the objects which had delineated
the differences between them and the previous ruling class. It was a
secular temple, a mausoleum for past artifacts, but, as an expression
of the psychological revolution underlying the political one, it was a
concrete representation of the contemporary mind.
~ Now that our revolutions have become more technological than
political, what should our museums say about us, and how should
they say it? As retrieval systems for the significant concerns of a liv-
ing culture, museums are fairly coherent representations of value
hierarchies, and in their changing nature we can find clear reflec-
tions of the shape of our own evolving psychology.
12
5
126 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
The cognitive processes of nineteenth-century man are well repre-
sented by the stately architecture and the orderly interior compartmen-
talization of museums since the opening of the Louvre. Toronto's Royal
Ontario Museum, London's British Museum, Brussels' Musee du
Cinquantenaire, to give only a few examples, are all well-dressed gen-
tlemen with huge quantities of objects stuffed inside them, all properly
labeled, in what is essentially an anal-retentive archival classification
system. Information appears in the guise of objects, rather than as re-
lationships or constructs: a sort of obsessive literalism is at work.
! '. But the most striking characteristic of these institutions was their
unconscious commitment to the Victorian ideal of mental privacy.
Though meant for the general public, they were closed in on them-
selves, like the human mind; a world within a world, a quiet place of
meditation where history, learning, and culture would connect with
personal dreams. Their walls were heavy and deep, their ceilings
high, and many rooms had no windows. Like the mind of Western
humanism, they seemed to be built for eternity. Visitors would find
themselves sharing a collective model of their own private minds.
c" Today, however, museums are built of glass and steel, as we move
from the Holy Roman Empire to the empires of the multinationals.
As art historian Helen Searing points out:
From the temple you have the museum becoming more like a
loft building, or an office building with large open spaces which
then can be supposedly rearranged with ease. I think the extreme
of this point of view is found in the Ideal Museum project of
Mies van der Rohe, a project of 1942 for a museum in a small
city, which simply has a floor, a roof, columns, and glass walls-
where paintings float, as it were, in space, where the sculpture is
placed throughout this flowing universal space ... a museum
truly without walls.!
Changes in architecture reflect changes in psychology. One of
the effects of electronic media has been to open up people's mental
space for all to see, as multiplying communications systems cross
MUSEUMS, REAL AND VIRTUAL... 127
all boundaries, personal and collective. Consequently, as Marjorie
Halpin, curator of the University of British Columbia's Museum of
Anthropology, observes:
Museums have been in an identity crisis that began in the I960s.
And what we do at all of our professional meetings and in our
literature is ask the question: What is our purpose? What is our
goal? What are we doing here as professionals? We're still doing
it the way we did basically in the nineteenth century. So what are
we about?2
" Halpin's concern is echoed by art critic Thierry de Ouve who,
reflecting on the status of Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou
("Beaubourg") at a retrospective of the previous decade in art, pro-
posed that "every museum curator knows that the two principal
functions of museums, conservation and exhibition, are contradic-
tory; hence the two ideal forms which haunt the imagination of the
museum architect: the coffin and the showcase."3
C:J t" . ' " !, (, ( r Ii r . (( ,
" De Ouve goes on to explain that the Beaubourg architecture
resolves this dilemma by inverting the proposition of cultural dis-
semination. Indeed, by treating the plumbing, heating ducts, and
the structural features of the building as ornaments, Beaubourg pre-
sents the image of a momentous reversal: instead of bringing people
to culture as so many prime cuts from the contemporary carcass, this
museum treats culture as a kind of bouillon made up of all the bacte-
ria and germinations of our daily lives. "Do not expect the museum
of tomorrow," warns de Duve, "to create a protective barrier
between the inside and the outside, between the sacred space of art
and the profane space oflife; rather be ready for it to treat all the cul-
tural signs, be they art or not, as instant art, for the time of their
appearance, at the time of your appearance ... "
Beaubourg, as it were, wears its technological heart on its sleeve,
showing outside what is ordinarily inside-and showing inside,
ordinary life, i.e., the outside world. This could be seen as a direct
consequence of technology itself: when electricity invades buildings
128 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and our lives, older mechanical forms are taken over and pushed
out, so to speak. With electricity, it is the hidden, the personal, the
intimate that is drawn outside of structures and institutions.
Beaubourg is like a lady appearing in public in her underwear.
'1 By comparison to Beaubourg, Toronto's very dignified Royal
Ontario Museum could be suspected, in its recent and decidedly
restrained renovations, of "trying to keep up appearances." The ROM
has become deservedly the benchmark for excellence in a country
which is beginning to acquire a reputation for th/high standards
and the innovative spirit it brings to protecting its But th-e--
ROM has its problems, not the least of which is the question of what
to do about our condition of galloping "reality" and the masses of
artifacts and information this frantic accumulation of experience
churns our. Objects in a multiplicity of categories have been pour-
ing into the consumer's cultural environment ever since industry
discovered mass production. How can museums handle so much
information in so little space? Some answers have begun to appear.
Indeed, another Canadian institution, the Ontario Science Cen-
tre,* is nowadays doing its best to rapidly and continuously renew its
exhibits, treating culture as a passing parade, a monthly magazine of
artifacts. This is a dramatic change from the earlier inclination to
wrap up the new, and make it old immediately: "Freeze the bloody
thing before it gets out of hand." Just as Beaubourg picks up the feel
of the Zeitgeist, standing at the interface between cognition and
recognition, the osc and other science and technology museums
around the world are more and more committed to the exploration
of the present. They go beyond the coffin and the showcase contro-
versy to become cultural accelerators.
The modern confusion over interpretation, including the prob-
lem of deciding whether a museum is a coffin or a showcase, starts
with a basic misconception about who we are today as people. Like
* The Ontario Science Centre has often served as an example for European imi-
tation; its influence can be seen for example in the Paris Museum of Science and
Technology, LaVillerte.
MUS E U M S, REA LAN D V I R T U A L. . . 129
the Beaubourg museum, we too have changed inside out: we have
been unfolding outwards like a rubber glove does as it's removed. As
McLuhan pointed out, with electronic technologies, our central
nervous system is pushed outside our own bodies: we ask electricity
to do, externally, everything that we used to do within our bodies,
including thinking, counting, imagining, dreaming, and so many
other intimate processes. Who knows, one day we may ask it to do
our loving for us. On the other hand, with telephones, radio, and
television, and first videotex technologies such as Minitel in France,
now the Internet and the Web, all of which reach into our homes,
the world is invading our interiors! 'The world is pouring into our
souls via electronic media, and we in turn are looming high and
wide across the globe by dint of the same Can we seri- ;
ously ask the new museum, that image of our developing psychol-;
ogy, to reflect, enhance, and clarify that condition? . !
. The problem is that, although our way of handling information
both collectively and personally has changed, our image of ourselves
_ has llot. We remain helplessly stuck in the Renaissance outlook on ,
reality, which is: "I stand here, and I embrace all that my eye can see;
I judge and select, I order, I classify, I use it when I need it, I store it
when I don't; I am reluctant to throw it away because it surely has a
reason to exist and it might be useful someday." This attitude, which
is unquestionably commendable, has been translated into a vast real-
ity tidying-up operation which has spanned four centuries, and
which became science, law, history ... and museums.
. The "':p...9int view: was a cognitive used to cJassify
and set out in hierarchies of objective categories all personal infor-
mation, which would furnish our of
view is also a technique to which many curators of museums are
deeply committed because it reinforces their idea of as a
box, of artifacts as inert matter and of public as innocentgawk-?
whose education must in It is
probable, however, that as a psychological referent, the point of view
is obsolete. We may have to begin exploring different ways to sort
o.ut our relationships to reality. ,r
130 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
11- With a point of view, you can only be at one place at a time, just
as you can occupy only one position at a time in a theater, in front of
a painting or a photograph, or in the local landscape. With the new
media, you are everywhere at once, a mode of reality which is con-
tinuously supported by r;dio, and computer networi<s:_
they bring the Earth and the moon to your living room. That this
condition ought to find a reflection in the museum of today seems
to have been understood by the developers of Cologne's Media Park,
and the more modest Peterborough (Ontario) Artspace, each of
which incorporates in its own way the notion that a museum should
be technically as well as metaphorically a kind of cultural accelerator
taking information in and sending it our again into the community.
In fact, my quarrel with the Renaissance point of view amounts
to an objection to the way it puts blinkers upon an otherwise fasci-
nating possibility: we can replace the notion of the museum as a
repository, whether coffin or showcase,* with that of the museum as
a central node, a grand central station of intense interactions coming
and going rather than simply going in and staying there. All muse-
r urns, whether of art or natural history or science and technology,
\ ought to be cultural amplifiers which give a spin to the visiting pub-
\
lic, sending it our again energized with a new understanding of the
present. Museums of the past and of the present differ only in their
, labels: the ideal function is the same-to make all times now.
lOx Paul Virilio points our, correctly in my view, that the most impor-
tant current issue in technological matters is not the management of
space, but the management of time.
4
We are the nanosecond genera-
tion. If we seem less attentive than ever, it is not because of a shortage
of time, but because we are processing information faster than ever,
and our attention span is that much reduced. If the average gallery
patron's pause before an object is limited to a duration of eight
seconds, it is partly because that is all the time it takes to discover
what there is to know about most of today's artwork (unless you are a
* The new entrance to the Louvre, a large glass pyramid, seems to turn the con-
tradiction between coffin and showcase into a monumental pun.
MUS E U M S, REA LAN D V I R T U A L. . . 131
specialist), and partly because we are taught by TV advertising and by
the increasing speed of home computer activities to capture informa-
tion in quick glances, leaving it up to our internal cognitive processes
to synthesize whatever it is that we might have missed. *
T h ~ s iii- roday's' man-made environm'ent, there are very few
things that merit looking at for any length of time, except computer
and video screens, which, like autonomous mirrors, reflect in instant
feedback loops the powers of our own intervention. Interactivity
appears to be a necessity in the retooling of museums and galleries
because today's patrons are more and more accustomed to partici-
pating, as opposed to judging from a safe distance.
).: Museums must also deal with the fact that even simple objectiv-
ity is threatened: the status of objects as objects is no longer secure.
When matter was everything, as in the eighteenth-century view of
things, objects were revered. But mass production, planned obsoles-
cence and the multiplication of reproduction techniques (as Walter
Benjamin has explained in his oft-quoted book, The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction), have devalued the status of
objects. We have been moving in the direction of what Jean-
Franyois Lyotard has cleverly dubbed the "immaterials."5 In high
technology research and marketing, the movement from matter to
non-matter follows the chain of priorities that places design above
substance. Well-made fakes are about to be on a par with the real
thing. The trend in all technologies to achieve perfect simulation
may have been nothing but an unconscious, quasic.Hegelian attack
on matter to better control it by transmuting it into program, i.e.,
non-matter. But how do we then know what's the real thing?
Virtual galleries with digital displays might, on the other hand,
cause us to reevaluate the worth of unique objects. When everything
is available in digital form, it is the real object which becomes the
* Television expert Herbert Krugman has suggesred that children exposed to
television before they have learned to read might have learned to see wirh quick,
recursive glances, in a way which does nor conform to rhe sustained attention
required of the written page.
132 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
rarity. Assuming that the future economy of abundance does not
reverse all the values of scarcity, uniqueness might well be "in" again,
in the not-too-distant future.
~ It takes a visionary to know even slightly ahead of time the
changes that perceptual faculties are about to experience. Artists
were the first to discover the formal, "natural" rules of perspective as
it would be accepted during the aftermath of the Renaissance. Just as
television was a technical realization of the Pointillists' understand-
ing of light as emanating from an object rather than being reflected
from it, today we are invited by holograms to remember the lessons
of Cubism, to explore simultaneously the inside, outside, back,
front, top, and bottom of any object. Holograms are currently being
investigated as an appropriate method for conservation. They are
faithful to the original, next to indestructible, and they don't take up
any space.
1..' One more thing soon to be available to us, and to curators, is the
precise and intimate sensation of touch and sound at great distances.
In the classical museum, we were not allowed to touch the objects.
Their visual presence, authenticated by the label, was supposed to be
truth enough. Kids wanted to touch anyway, because that's how they
get to know things. There were all kinds of good reasons not to allow
touching, not the least of which was the (Platonic) notion that true
intimacy was deemed to be obtained not by direct contact, but by
holding the memory of the object in the privacy of one's mind. In
the modern museum, actual touching may become impossible
because most objects will be presented as images, holograms, screen
ghosts from video disks or Web sites. The desire to touch, however,
will remain a gnawing void in our psyche. How can we verify any-
thing without knowing that, if we really had to, we could put our
hands to it? Because, in its essence, electricity is really a tactile
medium, we can confidently anticipate technologies which will deal
imaginatively with touch.
e <; Finally, there is the question of reach. Why go to the museum
when you can bring it home? Or why stay within the mental, emo-
tional, and cultural confines of your own neighborhood when you
MUSEUMS, REAL AND VIRTUAL... 133
can have access to the best information from the four corners of the
globe? The computer terminal at the end of a telephone line has
become the output appliance for the senses of hearing, sight, and
touch. We might reasonably expect at some point to be able to col-
lect images and objects on-line in real time, by scanning the object
exposed in a museum or a gallery.
'.f Among the first institutions to establish sites on the Web were
museums and galleries, with scanned images and navigable itiner-
aries. Perhaps Nicolas Pioch's private posting of treasures of the
Louvre in early 1993 can claim to have awakened people to the possi-
bilities of the Web. Today, a simple tour of art-based Web sites via
the Yahoo search engine opens up access to so many sites that it's
already too late to hope to visit them all. Sites and home pages
devoted to art galleries and museums, public or private, famous or
unknown, number in the thousands. *
':' It is as a distributor of simulations and the purveyor of informa-
tion that I see the role of museums in an age of networked informa-
tion. Some of them, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, are already
equipped with storage facilities for videos, image databan,ks, and
videotex networks. Others are considering equipping themselves
with simulation rooms for displays such as those devised by MIT'S
Spatial Data Management system, or any number of virtual reality
programs depicting in high-definition simulations of ancient cities,
such as Karnak, c;atal Huyuk, and Pompeii, not to mention St.
Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Abbey of Clunya, and the Tomb of
Nefertari.
* For individual artists, creating a home page has the advantage of providing a
venue for showing their work at virtually no cost. As a means of distribution to
art patrons and collectors, the Web is unparalleled: it guarantees targeted,
instant, and even participatory distribution. Thanks to the global nature of the
postings and the sites, the potential buying public is hugely and instantly
enlarged. While much of the conventional artwork seen on the Web is little bet-
ter than sidewalk painting or graffiti, it is also possible to access and preview art
collecrions and antiques auctions. On-line bidding and payment by credit card
makes the whole process easier and accelerates the circulation of the art market.
134
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
'1 {, Baudrillard observed that, in the baroque age so absorbed in
exploring all our senses in the light of new learning, stucco was the
simularor of all textures, all materials, all substances.
6
In the same
way, it is becoming apparent that digitization is the simulator of all
previous technologies. However, regarding this practice of simula-
tion, to which many a museum curator will have to resort, there is
an objection, made by gloomy moralists, which ought to be
acknowledged. This is the idea that technology today increasingly
replaces experiences, substituting ersatz for the real thing. Television
thus is seen to replace private imagination, video games to replace
dexterity skills, computers to replace thinking, and so on. The possi-
bility of simulating any environment has even led some to suspect
that the entire Apollo space program with its lunar landing was in
fact scripted and shot in an isolated desert studio.
;!. I would like to suggest a brighter possibility: every time a technol-
ogy simulates a human activity, it is not to replace it, but to enhance
it and to bring attention to new potentials and new areas of interest.
Our musical instruments now produce more complex sounds than
ever before. To what extent can we say that they are merely simulacra,
or devalued techno mirages? To anybody who would argue that the
intense psychological reactions engendered by the novelists of the
nineteenth century, or the filmmakers of the twentieth, were in some
way synthetic, I would respond that the emotions were both new
and authentic, apd thus enriched people's lives, .
(- .', "" .1(, " ,- IlJ .......k' -:: u'- - c ' _
. 0 Acknowledging thit patrons are-more interested in special events
in at the museum, the Art
Gallery of Ontario's marketing director, Liz Addison, suggests that
"it's part of a trend towards participation. A lot of museums are try-
ing to get the visitor to have an interactive experience. People are not
content to have a contemplative experience. They want to have ac-
tion.''? Under the conditions created by the emerging psychology,
chances are that the satisfactions derived from the conventional
highbrow cultural values will not continue to support museums' at-
tractive needs. It is difficult to be simply a consumer today. Most
people-except for couch potatoes-want to be part of the action.
MUSEUMS, REAL AND VIRTUAL... 135
They have recently become doers and producers, rather than con-
sumers. The computer has presaged an end to the promotion by tele-
vision of mass consumerism. People turn to their video recorders,
their computers, and their modems with their own programming in
mind. They are rapidly recovering the autonomy they lost by being
exposed to TV without remission.
Just as microscopy has helped us to experience directly, by
extending our vision, realms of unsuspected beauty and complexity,
the results of artists' explorations in the digital world are inviting us
to perceive levels of sensitivity and integration that we would other-
wise never have known. The role of the museum thus may be first
and foremost to help artists to make .new experiences available to
ever larger audiences, even if it be under the guise of simulations.
-,' One of the great trends which distinguishes Victor Hugo's nine-
teenth-century ideal of"arr as chosen reality" from McLuhan's twen-
tieth-century ideal of "culture as our business" is the shift from
selecting the best examples of reality (for storage in museums) to
simply quoting reality as it happens. This "quoting of reality" may
be precisely what is required from museum Web sites today. Just as
news media-radio, television, cable news, etc.-highlight the per-
sonages and events of experience, the museum's role is perhaps to
probe and cite the context of experience, just as postmodern archi-
tecture reveals hidden context by advertising historical allusions on
the exterior walls of structures.
- , There is simply no way to interpret today's multisensory, techno-
logically extended reality through the traditional box-bound
museum. When your whole nervous system is outside your body,
tied to everybody else's nervous system, it is ludicrous to hope to
perceive the complexity of the environment's interrelations by cut-
ting a pie-shaped piece out of it, labeling it and putting it on display
in a glass case.
~ Of course labels have long been among the principal means
whereby a museum curator would help fix the public's point of view;
nothing helps to resolve the anguish of ambiguity in front of an
abstract painting like- a label describing it. As Tom Wolfe observed in
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
The Painted Word, you can take any logical abuse from a painting as
long as it is properly labeled. The meticulous researchers timing the
dwindling duration of a patron's stay in front of gallery paintings
have determined that, on the average of eight seconds, five seconds
are devoted to leaning forward and reading the label. Trying to avoid
the tyranny of the text, Marjorie Halpin experimented with an
exhibit where she and her colleagues at the VBC Museum of Anthro-
pology presented objects without any labels. She recalls with excite-
ment that people would find their own rules of unity and form in
their absence: "If there's a unity, where does it come from? Well, I
think it has something to do with our bodies, with our receptors,
with the way sensory information comes in ... what I'm clear on is
that there's a unity."8
Halpin's experiment may itself have found inspiration In
McLuhan's suggestion to museum curators in New York:
The senses that are relevant to most of the artifacts In the
museum are those of what we would now call an extremely
backward country, in which they used, not their eyes in our way,
bur their whole sensorium. They would practically live in a
world of ESP. When your whole sensorium is in action you don't
really use anything except ESP. The whole skin of man, when it is
acting as a perceptive agent, is intuitive. It doesn't need any spe-
cial message. It gets the message very quickly from just the
slightest change in the environmental pressure.
9
.., Another issue facing museums and galleries is that of classifica-
tion. In established urban environments, museums specialize in a
given line of artifacts, or in a given period. This may run contrary to
need to have access to many different sources of information at once.
Libraries have moved quickly to adopt electronic techniques of in-
formation retrieval and have established international networks
among themselves. Museums are also, tentatively, taking part in such
networks; but they may be required to do so systematically in the fu-
ture. Networking will inevitably tend to overshadow specialization.
MUS E U M S, REA LAN D V I R T U A L . . . 137
We rack our brains to make museums more attractive, more rele-
vant, more showy ... but is that the way to go about it? We should
attend to the public's intuition that a museum is not exclusively
about past memory, but also about present cognition. Peo Ie go
there not so much to see what was, but to seek answers as to what is
hae eni ng Halpin: "Museum are norm-;I1y about
- - ... ' " ._-
answers, and the answers are always about differences. But it's much
more exciting to pose questions."IO
PAR T 3
CONNECTIVITV
CHAPTER NINE
WEBNESS
I
N TH E DAYS before electricity, technology was tame and obedi-
ent, a ~ ~ li.fe ,:as :venly paced. There was ~ real world out ~ h e r e
called obJective, there was a real person nght here called sub-
jective," and there were a lot of printed words to bring order to their
relationships. Things were clear, at least in the industrial countries
founded on alphabetic literacy, because a strong polarization distin-
guished individual humans from the world beyond them. One pole,
the human self, was constantly evolving and adapting within the
confines of a private conscious realm, while the other, the world-
wide world," remained stable-and conveniently dumb. There was
no mind in it. Or at least it appeared so. This was the blessed time of
noninteractive media: time and space were fixed, and private minds
and bodies were free to roam without losing their bearings or blur-
ring their boundaries, or sharing with machines the responsibility
for making up their minds.
Today, thanks to technological change, we are faced with the
potential for a major psychological watershed. The social and psy-
chological conditions of humanity have always been closely related
to technology and this is true more than ever today because of the
electronically driven, exponential increase in the numbers, power,
and reach of technologies invading both the social landscape and the
intimacy of the physical and psychological being. Because major
new technologies have demonstrated their power to seed chaos in
the existing social and psychological order, the challenge is to make
141
142
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
sense of the changes and discern the new conditions for stability and
social order. Among the principal features of today's technological
wave to consider are:
I. In the realm ofhypertextuality:
over the past 150 years, since the development of the tele-
graph, the world has seen the proliferation and accelerating
growth of a global infrastructure of layered, interconnected
and integrated networks; the present condition is a still pre-
carious bur gradually more unified environment of increas-
ingly complex and precise communications;
over the past fifty years, since the creation of the first digital
computers, the digitization of as much material as possible
has promoted both the homogenization* and standardization
of inputs and that has in turn permitted infinite customiza-
tion of outputs. With networks, access to digital processes
has the potential to be ubiquitous-but there are new kinds
of barriers rising in intranets, firewalls, and other virtual
enclaves that threaten to hamper or prevent open access;
over the past five years, since the invention of virtual reality,
the virtualization and convergence of the sensory values, tex-
tures, structures, and properties of hardware are turning tra-
ditional hardware contents not merely into software but more
radically into "mindware."
2. In the realm of interactivi ty:
the recent development of improved interfaces, by allowing
more intuitive and user-friendly interactions between the user
and the computer, are introducing a shift from internal to
external processing of information. This may be changing the
* The paradox of digitization is that by reducing all inputs to a lowest common
denominator, air, it allows for maximal differemiation and targeting of outputs;
so what is meam here by "homogenization" is directly opposite to what people
used to mean by that word when it was applied to the effects of television.
WEBNESS
primary orientation of the private mind from within the body
co without;
rapid progress in intelligent software is opening avenues for
the migration of psychological processes such as memory and
intelligence from the inside of individual minds co the out-
side world of connected-knowledge media;
the increasing effectiveness of sensory interaction in multime-
dia, hypermedia, and virtual reality, i.e., in direct-connect
mind-machine interactions, is approximating that of our own
mental processes, presaging a shift in emphasis from static
memory-based media co the media of processing-dynamic
and self-adjusting, intelligence-based media.
3. In the realm of connectedness:
the increase in human interactions-personal, social, and
institutional-through integrated networks is concentrating
and multiplying human mental energy;
the gradual self-organization and increasing auconomy of
agent-supported databases is providing tools for emergent
problem-solving skills;
consequently, the degree of collaboration among individual
people's minds is about co become vastly increased, tucored
and focused by mediating software and hardware.
143
All of these changes are happening simultaneously and are inter-
dependent. My hope in bringing them together under the banner of
"connectedness" is to place the entire transformation in its proper
perspective: not only is connectedness a principle that governs them
all, but it appears co be an inherent goal of what is a largely self-orga-
nizing process. How else co explain the complementarity of trends
in innovation, research and development, manufacturing, market-
ing and media, organized labor, and government behavior?
The evidence suggests to me that a diffuse and shared self-
consciousness of the whole is arising in bits and pieces here and
there, with people, like many of those who appear in this book,
144
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
pushing hard the limits of their own minds, or like Bill Clinton
suddenly deciding a month before his reelection that it might be a
good idea to earmark half a billion dollars to improve the infrastruc-
ture of the Internet. * At this diffuse but effective level of semicon-
scious organization, what you know, what you don't know, what
you don't know that you know, and what you don't know that you
don't know, all seem capable of invoking a Lorenzian "butterfly
effect" of the mind. In the predominantly software environment
that technology is building for us, every thought connects, immedi-
ately, in some way.
What is "connectedness"? It is the tendency for separate and pre-
viously unrelated entities to be joined by a link or a relationship.
Connectedness may be a property of electricity, an analogue to con-
duc- tivity. The electronic industry as a whole could be thought of as
a technological simile for our organic, internal communication sys-
tem. The continuity between the two domains, the technological
and the biological, is established by the fact that there is electricity
both within and outside the body, just as there is language both
within and outside the body. It is worth noting that the telegraph,
which was the very first electronic metaphor of our central nervous
system, was from the start a carrier or a processor of language. The
telegraph was the first outward projection of our central nervous sys-
tem, but more importantly, the telegraph was the system which for
the first time translated the alphabet into electricity. Thus, in the
telegraph, there is a simultaneous and combined externalization of
language and electricity. The telegraph took the first, albeit modest,
step towards the present ubiquitous externalization of information-
* This is the toughest consequence to evaluate and predict because our literate
grounding has tended to make us associate any thinking process with an origi-
nating point in an individual self; it is very difficult to imagine self-less, distrib-
uted, connective, emergent information-processing going on, as in the
metaphors of beehive or anthill. The French philosopher Michel Foucault
attributed to language itself, "Ie discours, "the power to self-organize into institu-
tions and rule people's lives without them knowing about it (unless, of course,
they were clever French philosophers).
WEBNESS
145
processing from the intimate recesses of thought to public, com-
puter-assisted and multi-user connections.
There is an uncanny continuity in the wiring of the planet since
the discovery and first applications of electricity. The telegraph, the
telephone, the Internet, the World Wide Web have followed upon
each other as if they were stages in a single technological develop-
ment. Each new stage brings new features which integrate with the
previous realm and vastly increase the communication potential of
the multilayered system. The telephone added real-time bidirection-
ality and voice to the telegraph, the Internet added multipath com-
munications to the telephone, the Web added multimedia image,
sound and color to the Internet, and so on. All of this could be inter-
preted as mere directionless progress, the blind elaboration of a tech-
nology according to its inherent possibilities or, on the contrary, it
could be seen as a groping towards a purpose. What we are dealing
with here is a hugely intelligent but mostly decentralized system that
appears to be organizing itself, without a whole lot of people know-
ing or even having to know what's going on.
Technological networks have demonstrated a tendency to grow
in bursts like the biological ones in our nervous system do soon
after birth. Just imagine the Atlantic, bridged first with the tele-
graph's thin lines, then with a burst, by telephone cables and even-
tually with mega-capacity fiber lines snaking along the ocean floor.
At the same time, radio signals had begun skipping from continent
to continent, carrying information in war and peace. The next big
burst was the era of television feeding back live images to millions
in huge networks of information-processing systems. At the same
time, the integrating machine, the computer, had been growing
up in awkward isolation. Computers went from single-purpose,
data-crunching mainframes (industry-controlled)-big, lumbering
half-wit machines-to the personal computer (user-controlled),
training you and me to connect our biological systems to the tech-
nological Web in ever-more intimate association. The last big burst,
the one we are living through now, is the infiltration by computers
of the worldwide telephone system. With this development, the
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
process of self-organization has steadily accelerated through data-
processing and e-mail and local area networks, to the Internet, and
soon after that, to the linked retrieval system called the World Wide
Web.
The interesting difference between the Internet and the Web in
terms of the growth patterns of a connected environment is that the
Internet is a web of addresses, nodes, places, but the Web is a net-
work of contents. In the same way, the mind needs the connection
of various lower-level functions in order to have the ultimate capa-
bility of connecting contents themselves. The linking of content is a
second level of articulation of the network environment. Thus, the
Web is an order of complexity beyond the Internet, a fact its com-
mercial competitors, the BBSS (Bulletin Board Services) like America
Online and broadcast networks like CBS and CNN, are beginning to
appreciate.
There are still deeper parallels between the burgeoning of net-
worked communications and the growth of organic human intelli-
gence, especially at the childhood developmental stages. The Inter-
net is growing connections exponentially like a brain in full learning
status. As in the neurosystem of a growing organism, there seems a
kind of demand-pull on the Net for more development, more pro-
duction of contacts, more connections, and, eventually, more ideas.
Indeed, the most baffling aspect ofInternet history is the formidable
demand. Everywhere in the world, even in developing countries,
there is a clamoring for access that is undiminished by the very real
technical, financial, and cognitive hurdles that must be overcome.*
Millions of people spend hours on-line using their brains at top
speed, suffering the agony of waiting for the data to download with-
our worrying about who is going to pay them for all that overtime.
* People do not always really want telematic technology this badly. The case of
Minitel is eloquent in that, while it did become a resounding success in the end,
it had to be force fed to the French population for several years before it took off.
The reason for the Web's more immediate success is twofold: one, that it was
enhanced by the colors of Mosaic; the other, that its universality makes it closer
to a total rather than a partial milieu.
WEBNESS
147
The phenomenon is completely counterintuitive. In the past history
of radio, television, computers, or even simple literacy, there is no
precedent for such a rush to acquire what is still a fundamentally im-
mature technology. Television, to give the most banal example, took
more than thirty years between the time the technology was mature
enough to be mass produced and the time its penetration reached
critical mass in the world's households (1928-1958).
While it is still too early to know what is really happening, the
recent proposal for the "embedded Internet" is one that points to an
almost teleological thrust in the technology. In the words of David
Kline: "The next big thing to hit the Net will be wiring together mil-
lions of tiny computers embedded into everything we use. This is no
future vision-the products are hitting the market now." The mere
idea, let alone the actually nascent industry of the embedded Inter-
net is the summum of connectedness:
Only the Internet can serve as the infrastructure for a truly con-
nected world. As a medium, it is much cheaper than the phone
network. It provides standardized interoperability between all
types of disparate devices, networks, and systems. The Net is
also a better platform than the phone system for adding intelli-
gence and agent technology. And the Net's distributed architec-
ture makes it more efficient at rerouting communications
around damage and bottlenecks. But perhaps more importantly,
the Net's packet-switched approach to handling communica-
tions is simply better suited to handling the billions'----or even
trillions-of relatively shorr data transmissions likely in a future
connected world than is the phone network, where each connec-
tion essentially requires a dedicated link for the entire duration
of the transmission. I
Embedded Internet's appearance on the scene is as if technology
were discovering a way to emulate the physical, biological body
within the social, technological realm: every part connecting to
every other for an integrated functioning of the whole. If there is
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
merit in this notion, we can count on industry to carry it to comple-
tion, and sooner rather than later.
One of the main effects of digitization is to make "liquid" every-
thing that is solid. Anything that can be digitized can be translated
into anything else that can be digitized. Just as the alphabet once vir-
tualized sensory data to be reconstituted in the reader's mind into
sensory images, our sensory modalities are now translated into digi-
tal data, virtualized and extended on-line. This very flexibility
makes matter, once perceived as consisting of mutually heteroge-
neous and impenetrable substances, seem now as fluid as thought
itself. By reducing all matter and all shapes to olI, the lowest com-
mon denominator of everything, digitization is a new meeting point
between the material and the conceptual. As fewer and fewer mater-
ial conditions present resistance to the storage and delivery of infor-
mation, the fluidity of digital data brings it as close to the condition
of thought as anything we experience in our own minds. Oigitiza-
tion turns hardware into software, and, by extension, into some-
thing close to a mental image, i.e., "mindware."*
EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS
Electronic technology is changing the fundamental orientation of
the consciousness of the literate mind. The consciousness of the
reader is in its essence the world inside the mind; the body looking
inward. The thinking process is carried on by an internal eye
looking at an internal field or stage where the information is
processed. Have you ever observed how you position yourself in
your mind when you read? Are you in the midst of the action, as in
a dream, or in front of it, as you would be in a cinema or before of a
television set? Do you "see" the scene at eye level, or from above?
O "h'" " 11" h f fT' "" o you ear VOIces, sme t e scent 0 co ree; can you taste
* What I call "mindware" is software based on knowledge media, that is, soft-
ware closely connected to processing by people, not merely machines.
WEBNESS
149
Proust's celebrated madeleine? Whatever your answer, you will have
to concede that the experience of reading, even when you actually
foel something, is entirely internal. In fact, most people would agree
that it is more like an interior stage than a flat screen, hence the
close association that has existed between alphabetic literacy and
theater. The Greek invention of the theatrical institution was but
an external, standardizing means to facilitate the integration of
sensory inpurs coming from within the self during the reading
process.
But we do not process information in our minds alone anymore.
With interactive and screen-based electronic technologies, the ori-
entation is reversed: it's the body looking out. With television, for
instance, the screen is on the outside and replete with sensory infor-
mation. The eye of the TV watcher is not turned inward, but out-
ward. The place where the information is processed is out there, on
the screen. All meanings are controlled by the outside source and the
critical role of the viewer is merely to integrate the meaning as sen-
sory inputs, much in the way the physical body makes sense of a sit-
uation in context. Even with computers, in spite of, or perhaps
because of, the interactive nature of the process, there is an interme-
diate stage of information-processing between what is behind the
screen and the mind. There is consequently a considerable inversion
of our psychology as it is moving from within, outward.
Virtual reality can be considered mindware in this context. VR is
constructed to represent the world more or less as we see it, but the
VR decor is in fact an externalized mental decor. The human mind is
itself a virtual environment, designed to process information in sim-
ulations and pre-enactment. The mind and its experiences are exter-
nalized by VR machines which extend our sensory inputs (touch,
vision, and hearing) to reconstitute an artificial consciousness which
is truly outside our own mind and outside our own body. VR pro-
vides a world of extended mind for education, for work, for play,
for love, and for health. Professionals will increasingly use VR to
make decisions, the way they play out scenarios in the privacy of
their own mind; architects and medical professionals already use VR
15
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
for test-driving the environments they create and for rehearsing del-
icate surgery.
VR is your imagination "out there" in front of you. You can "walk"
in it. And so can other people. Once you are in it, you cease to be in
front of the object of consciousness-you are in it, immersed, as you
are in sound. As in Tron, the prophetic movie about a programmer
cruising into his own program, with VR we not only talk back to our
screens, we enter them. And with networks, we are now able to link
these imaginations, one to another.
CONNECTED IMAGINATION
Let us compare two mental operations, one private, the other con-
nected. When you think privately, when you picture something in
your mind, you focus your attention inwardly and what you "see" is
a more or less unified and flexible image. There is no particular
"place" for the object of your attention, but you know that it is
"there" somehow. It seems to be suspended at some central point,
slightly forward, and slightly below eye level in your mind/brain.
This suspended image is the result of the collaboration of millions of
brain cells interconnected by contact points called synapses. In your
mind, therefore, the collaboration of millions of activities can pro-
duce a single dynamic image. In the same way, the object of atten-
tion of hundreds or thousands of people in a network is a unified
and flexible live construct.
Alone in front of a screen, especially in a text-based environment,
you may not always be aware of the extent of the memory and activ-
ity behind it in the netherworld of the Internet. However, if there is a
common image that every participant shares, for example, a group-
ware screen for collaborative work at a distance, or the 3-D stage of an
Alpha World, then the paradoxical communality surrounding the
object of attention surfaces quite readily. Each participant's screen
becomes both a portal and a tool for connected thinking. What is ac-
cessed on the Net is the content of other people's imagination and
WEBNESS
memory. The screen of each individual user becomes the place where
one's own imagination and memory meet the imagination and
m m o ~ y of many other people.
The art of the Web is the art of connected thought. For some
people, it is nothing but a kind of shared hallucination. But for
many others, it is a real live experience. In Andrey Tarkovsky's
magnificent sci-fi film, Sofaris, a tearn of astronauts falls under the
influence of an unknown planet which projects thoughts in the
shapes of objects and people that the protagonists believe ro be real.
The "projections" of people's thoughts on the Net are equally
substantial and much more real than those of the movie. To gain
some measure of the psychological and epistemological complexity
of Alpha Worlds,* for example, it is only necessary to imagine their
opposite: suppose that, in your own mind, there were fixed forms of
thoughts that were put there by other people, with your consent.
Whenever your circumstances would bring up these thoughts, they
would appear fully formed, unchangeable and perhaps foreign. You
could alter them peripherally but not fundamentally. They would
be internal objective/subjective thoughts. Similarly, Alpha Worlds
are objective/subjective realities, but instead of being internal, they
are external.
Personally held beliefs are thoughts which are at the same time
your own and shared with other people. They are things that you
have learned from others and that you hold true. But, however
deeply fundamentalist your approach ro such learning may be, in
the privacy of your mind, you still have rotal control over the shape
of the imaging you choose to give ro your beliefs. This kind of con-
trol is not available to you in the external realities of 3-D networked
communications. But you do have an access (0 those external reali-
ties which is personal. Alpha Worlds are not beliefs, they are con-
nected realities.
* These are virtual communities created collaborativdy in the Web, featuring
virtual environments such as buildings and open spaces in which visitors or
"dwellers" can interact.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
EMERGENT PROPERTIES
NEW COGNITIVE
BEHAVIORS
Among the most valuable insights in her remarkable study Life on
the Screen is Sherrie Turkle's identification of the "quality of emer-
gence."* Emergence of a new order of integration from the simple or
complex interactions of individual units is indeed a kind of "qual-
ity." Intelligence, typically, is an effect of emergence, and the expec-
tation created by the Web could be that new kinds of intelligence are
beginning to emerge. Connected intelligence is something that is
most easily demonstrated by pointing to the Net. The Web, with its
formidable linking ability, is a forum for real-time interactivity
between tens, hundreds, or thousands of people looking for some-
thing. The pressure of human minds focusing on the same issues
and the self-organizing abilities of the network create a potential for
a great unity of purpose. All these organic minds can be assisted by
digital media which vastly increase their power of synthesis and clas-
sification. The significance of the Web is not that it is yet another
distribution system, but that it is a distributed system. The fun and
the substance of the Web is in its ability to connect living minds at
work in all manner of purposeful configuration. The minds on the
Net are connected and they behave like liquid crystal in stable but
fluid formations.
The so-called virtual community is more than just a large num-
ber of people involved more or less directly, more or less constantly,
* Turkle refers, for example, to the fascinating "connectivist" theory of the mind
and the ego proposed by psychoanalyst David Olds: "For Olds, connectionism
challenges ego psychology by providing a way to see ego not as a central author-
ity but as an emergent system. Through a connectionist lens, says Olds, the ego
can be recast as a distributed system. Consciousness can be seen as a technical
device by which the brain represents its own workings to itself. Olds likens it to
the 'monitor on a computer system: underscoring its passive quality"; Lift on
the Screen, op. cit., 140.
WBNESS
I53
in a common activity. It is also a real-time,* immediate, and contin-
gent presence, like a mind at work. On-line communications have
created a new category of mind-a connected mind, to which one
"plugs in" or from which one pulls out, without affecting the
integrity of the structure. The worldwide connections of "mind-at-
work" are in their own right active, learning, self-organizing, and
thereby growing in size and precision. So, let us concede that these
new categories of mind, states that have both the permanence and
the flexibility ofliquid crystals, are a reality. They are here now, and
growing. Many people believe that the whole postindustrial culture
is being absorbed by the phenomenon of networks, a supposition
made all the more plausible when we see that business and govern-
ment are now looking at all of this with voracious eyes. There is an
urgent need for artists to explore this new psychological condition,
so that they can begin to prepare the antidotes to potential traumas,
and reveal the extent of the new possibilities that we are offered.
WE8NESS
"Webness" is a term created by the jurors of the Art on the Web
category for the I995 Ars Electronica Prize, to make artists and their
critics understand a feature which is quite specific to the properties
* What is "real time"? Technically, it is a term to designate the instantaneous and
continuous response of a machine to a command. Metaphorically, the notion is
an oddity: just as we never before had to distinguish between real and virtual
space, we haven't had to think in terms of more than one "time" (unless of
course we were post-Einsteinian physicists). The reason this question deserves
attention is that, for the practice of connected intelligence, just as for esti mating
operative durations of the Internet; you have to allow for a kind of "extended" or
"virtual" time. On the Net, there are strictly speaking no time zones, although
there are specific times of day for rush hours and traffic jams. The real time of
connected intelligence on the Net is the time it takes the communication to
connect, mature, and produce a result. There is no precise limit to that kind of
time. It is a sort of continuum; it has unity and purpose.
154
CO NNE C TED IN TEL L I G ENe E
of the World Wide Web. What, the jurors want to know, is specifi-
cally "Web-like" in a Web application; what character distinguishes
it from other sustained colloquy on networks? The distinguishing
difference is that it derives its power and qualities from optimal
exploitation of network connectedness. The property of webness
lies in the interconnecting of human intelligences by purposefully
conceived connected interfaces, for purposes of innovation and
discovery. While the Internet by itself has a little bit of webness, the
World Wide Web is much more "webby" because it adds hypertex-
tuallinks to networked communication. Something like connected
thinking in slow motion is going on our there. Webness is also an
aesthetic criterion in that there is beauty in patterns and qualities of
interconnections.
For example, Firefly is a rather brilliant and innovative marketing
tool. It provides you with a personal digital agent to seek and recom-
mend entertainment items such as music or movies according to
your taste. To train your agent in recognizing what you like, you
must first indicate your preferences by entering on the site a precise
evaluation of a sample of musical items. As it is described on the
Firefly home page:
Firefly brings personalization and community to the Internet.
Your agent belongs to you and whenever you use it, it intelli-
gently navigates through the entire Firefly community space to
discover the information and people who would be of most
interest to you. In fact every member of the Firefly community
has his or her own personal agent, so interacting with Firefly is
like automating the word-of-mouth process. When you tell
your agent what interests you, it goes out and locates those
tastes, opinions, preferences, and idiosyncrasies most similar to
you so it can suggest new music and movies that you might like
or even people who you might like to meet. The more you train
your agent, the more useful and accurate it gets. The more other
people train their agents, the smarter the Firefly community
becomes.
2
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155
The Ars Electronica jurors recommended Firefly-or rather its
prototype which went under the name of RINGO ++-for a top prize,
not so much because of what is described above, but for another
feature which seems to have been left out of the latest version. That
feature, the truly connected one, is that after having made an evalua-
tion of his or her tastes in a sampling of twenty musical items, by
clicking on a button the user could call up a map of the "taste com-
munity" that showed the statistical range of people from those who
were closest to those who were the furthest away in musical taste
from the user. Firefly is a kind of "connected taste bud," the first in a
generation of connected sensory scanners which, if combined and
cross-checked, could profile communities much more precisely and
usefully (han the best psychographic analyses in existence today.
While many Web sites process information, i.e., the content of
human taste, thought, and imagination, other sites also process in-
telligence itself, in a kind of epistemological factory. This other as-
pect of webness is best illustrated by Idea Futures) This site allows
you to invest digital dollars in an idea or a hypothesis that you either
post there yourself, or that you can select from an index of previously
posted suggestions. As you might in a worldwide Monopoly game,
you receive fifty digital dollars every week to invest. You can also
connect with the idea's originator(s) and contribute to the content.
Day after day, you can see the value and the complexity of your cho-
sen idea grow before your eyes. Group mindware like Idea Futures
weaves a seamless tapestry of intelligences.
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
There is a growing body of theory and evidence that there is no need
for intelligence to be centralized or even localized in any particular
way to function coherently. According to Kevin Kelly:
Parallel distributed computing [the linking of several or many
computer processors] excels in perception, visualization and
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
simulation. Parallelism handles complexity better than tradi-
tional supercomputers made of one huge, incredibly fast serial
computer. But in a parallel supercomputer with a sparse, distrib-
uted memory, the distinction between memory and processing
fades. Memory becomes a reenactment of perception, indistin-
guishable from the original act of knowing. Both are a pattern
that emerges from a jumble of interconnected parts.
4
While Marvin Minsky evokes the notion of a "society of mind"*
and Kevin Kelly brings out the metaphor of the "hive mind,"s exper-
imental work in digital agency dem,onstrates that given certain con-
trolled conditions the association of many individual, single-
purpose agents can collaborate in unified and purposeful activities
by rapid trial and error and instant reconfiguring. For example, MIT'S
Patti Maes is working on developing societies of agents that reduce
work and information overload, a "multi-agent system that discov-
ers, monitors, and filters information resources." Maes explains:
Instead of constructing a large complex agent that will have to
solve the whole problem, we are creating a society of smaller and
simpler specialized agents, that try to solve the problem collec-
tively. We introduce an artificial ecosystem of evolving informa-
tion filtering and discovery agents that cooperate and compete
in a market-like environment.
"Kasbah," for example, is an "agent marketplace for buying and
selling goods":
The goal of the Kasbah system is to help realize a fundamental
transformation in the way people transact goods-from requir-
* "This theory (society of mind) explores how phenomena of mind emerge from
the interaction of many disparate agencies, each mindless by itself"; from
a review of current research at the MIT Media Lab, posted on the Net at
<http://www.media.mit.edu>.
WEBNESS
ing constant monitoring and effort-to a system where a soft-
ware agent does most of the work on the user's behalf. A user
wanting to buy or sell a good creates an agent, gives it some
strategic direction, and sends it off to the agent marketplace.
The Kasbah agents proactively seek out potential buyers or sell-
ers and negotiate with them on their creator's behalf. The agent's
goal is to make the "best deal" possible, subject to a set of user-
specified constraints, such as a desired price, a highest (or low-
est) acceptable price, and a date to sell (or buy) by.6
157
Strange new breeds of consciousness have begun to flourish
outside our heads on the Net: real-time, self-adjusting databases;
distributed parallel processing of converging data structures; inter-
mediate, anonymous, synchronous, and asynchronous mind collec-
tives on MUDS and MOOS; intelligent avatars meeting real humans on
2-D and 3-D Webs; enduring, cross-referenced, indexed, and auto-
matically updated conferences and discussion groups on usenets
and newsnets; self-adjusting expert systems with neural networks.
CONNECTING CONSCIOUSNESS
The development of intermediate stages of conscious processing is
happening not only in terms of our personal relationship to com-
puters, but also in the dynamics of computers within the electroni-
cally networked environment. Indeed, this artificial consciousness
can be shared, and this sharing possibility allows virtual reality access
to the principal characteristic of conventional, objective reality. VR
pioneer Jaron Lanier rightly observed that in his invention RB-2
(Reality Built for Two), for the first time in human history, a world
had been created where people could experience a form of subjectiv-
ity as ifit were objective, without it being a dream. Five years before
people even conceived of 3-D "worlds" on-line, Lanier predicted that
VR would someday join the telephone and become what it was
always meant to be, a communication system. The Internet delivers
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the promises of virtual reality, which is to make real-time, instant
imagination "objective."
There are a number of developments in telecommunications and
VR that point to a new tendency: reality is reconstructing itself virtu-
ally, no longer simply with the naive simulations of media park envi-
ronments, but with real data. When the virtual serves to augment
rather than to replace the actual, it becomes a form of "augmented
reality" (AR), especially when it is endowed with real-time telepres-
ence. Video conferencing is a sort of entry-level augmented reality. It
does more than add visual cues to the voice on the phone; it extends
space. The sense of the reality of the space at the other end of the
video-conference signal is very strong, almost as concrete as in face-
to-face presence. AR generates an active link between perception,
technology, and world. As a significant and reliable extension of our
sensory access to the world, AR may very well be the true destiny
ofvR.
Perhaps the most representative of these developments is T-
Vision, Art + Com's magnificent geographical information system
interface. * It allows users to travel digitally from outer space all the
way down to the street level of a city, say Berlin, and connect seam-
lessly with data arriving in real time from satellites, or from film
archives, or even from live video c m e r s ~ T-Vision is the projection
of planet Earth on a screen in 3-D.
As you "fly" over Tokyo or Berlin, you can call up real-time satel-
lite data about the city's weather conditions, or connect with one of
its TV or radio stations for the latest news, or go to its stock exchange
board, and so on. What you see, if you choose to "land," is an ana-
logue image, in 3-D, of the streets of the ci ty. If you want to enter one
of its virtually constructed buildings, .you can fly into it. You can
even enter a virtual office, sit at a virtual computer, and perform real
* Although it is not quite out on the Net at this writing, T-Vision is one of the
prime candidates for today's best interpretations of webness. It was granted the
prize for the art form with the most significant potential impact on society at
the I995 Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles.
WEBNESS
159
data processing, if you so desire, taking advantage of the specific per-
formance capabilities of the real computer represented by that simu-
lation in that virtual office. If, perchance, you would like to see what
is happening at that very moment in the real street outside the vir-
tual office, just check the output of one of the video cameras looking
out the virtual windows onto the actual street.
It is but a modest step beyond this to imagine that we might one
day transport ourselves anywhere on the globe and land there in a
"live" environment. In the same way, we would be able to travel in
time via recorded or simulated data. T-Vision accomplishes the
exact opposite of what Star Trek's "beam me up, Scotty" transporter
technology purports to do: instead of dematerializing the traveller, it
dematerializes the whole world. The effect, however, is the same:
you get to where you want to go. In that regard, T-Vision as a con-
cept is closer to television, its namesake, than to the computer
because TV brings you the world, while computer networks bring
you to the world.
The T-Vision interface puts the world in the palm of your hand,
so to speak. In doing so it may be indicating the point at which the
new, digital media and the Net are merging because it is the interface
par excellence for internalizing in each one of us our new body
image, that of the globe itself. Of course, with the imminent rapid
growth of high-bandwidth network pathways, students, engineers,
entrepreneurs and professionals of every stripe could soon have ac-
cess to a kind of instantly available Macro-Web of the real world.
This would facilitate finding and processing of records, checking in-
ventories, giving demonstrations, consulting and diagnosis, as well
as multiplying the points-of-sale for business. But the destiny ofT-
Vision, though it will certainly need the support of business to be
fully developed, is not to sell more stuff. (That it will do this goes
without saying.) The deeper message is that instead of sending peo-
ple off down yet another escape/fantasy byway like television, T-
Vision, while being the summum of simulation, in fact brings the
user back to the real. It establishes the potential for a direct person-
to-planet continuity. In that regard, the T-Vision interface is without
r60 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
question one of the most important on-line creations, short of the
invention of the Web itself.
PlANETIZATI O N
The development of nerworks and connectedness have given birth
to a powerful new technological metaphor, which affects everyday
space-time perception. The principal technologies of communica-
tion have until now tended to affect people's perception of their en-
vitonment in terms of size, layout, texture, and, of course, limits. If
literacy and print, by externalizing and focusing attention on local
languages in visual form, created a consciousness of "the Nation" and
the need to specify and control its "natural" boundaries, electronic
media have tended to blow these boundaries away and thus expand
the size of the mental representation of pertinent space. Television,
for example, began the "planetization" of consciousness by giving its
audience live access to various parts of the world. Satellite images, by
highlighting the contours of continents, redefined geography for the
average TV watcher checking ou t tomorrow's weather. What nerwork
connectedness is adding to these unconscious media influences is the
opportunity for spectators to become participants.
The entire world can be perceived as an input-output environ-
ment. We are continuously projecting ourselves via all our senses,
and with the electronic extensions of our hands, eyes, ears, and
voice, we have acquired the ability to project ourselves far beyond
the limits of our bodies and to receive the projections of others as if
we could "wear" them. Our new skin is very sensitive; it is made of
the millions of interactions of computers and electronic webs all
over the planet. This is a tactile world. Indeed, the world is not "out
there" anymore, it is right here, under the skin of each of us. Now
that we are extended beyond the boundaries of our biological being,
it follows that eventually our psychological makeup will be modified
accordingly.
CHA.PTER TEN
THE CON N E C TED
ECONOMY
T
HE TELECOM GIANT AT&T reports that its network set an
all-time record during 1995, by handling a phenomenal 61.6
billion calls, an increase of 10.8 percent from the previous
year. On an average business day, the network handles more than
200 million voice, data, and video calls. The network is 100 percent
digital for all switched traffic and includes more than 2.75 billion
circuit miles of transmission lines. Other telcos such as the new titan
British Telecom, now augmented by MC1, have similar resources in
place. If this is the planetary medium, what is the message? More
particularly, what is the economic message?
Unsuspecting people think that the economy is a concrete, tangi-
ble reality describable in facts and figures. Of course, it isn't. Gram-
matically speaking, the economy is just a "collective," a general term
used rather loosely to include all the events, activities, and behaviors
related to the way people earn a living and spend their earnings. It's a
figure of speech and, more often than not, there may be little if any-
thing of substance to justify the ways we speak about it. Neverthe-
less, "the economy" has become, over the last few decades, a
powerful concept that has a constant feedback effect on the behav-
iors it is supposed to merely describe. It sticks in people's minds in a
generally vague and abstract way, but wisps of hearsay about its
machinations often motivate their career and employment choices
and their most valuable investments.
161
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Globalized and networked, endlessly commented upon by the
media, the economy has now become a conscious reality unifYing
the purposes of business, government, and society at large. In effect,
the economy is pure mindware, a mainly-though by no means
exclusively-self-organizing entity that often materializes out of
rumors.
In different parts of the world and at different times, the state of
the economic mind fluctuates between open and closed, bull and
bear attitudes. As can be observed any day at any stock exchange, the
economy is highly susceptible to moods and feelings. As Robert
McIlwraith, a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba
and a Senior McLuhan Fellow, suggests, "Increasingly, economic
data are psychological data." We are. now, he says, entering the era of
the "feelings economy":
Today, feedback about consumers' behaviors, audiences' reac-
tions, and voters' opinions is nearly instantaneous, and the outgoing
messages themselves are just as quickly modified by those responses,
the two in constant dynamic interplay or dialogue. Among the
advances in feedback technology, I include: constant public opinion
polling (including "push" polls, which help to shape attitudes or
raise the visibility of issues, rather than simply recording existing
attitudes); feedback on consumer choice via electronic cash register
and inventory control technology; electronic mail; fax and the Inter-
net. All of these contribute to making the public reaction to any new
development almost instantaneously available to the marketer, the
corporate decision-maker, the financial manager, and the govern-
ment policy-maker.
McIlwraith concludes:
Feelings used to be an epiphenomenon or a reaction to things
that happened in the areas of finance, industry, trade, and gov-
ernment. Now, feelings are the primary commodity of this speed
economy. Feelings are the main data and the main products of
the electronic economy. Major economic events don't need to
happen, except in the "virtual future" which is constantly modi-
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
lYing the present. The instant, electronic economy is, to a large
extent, functionally detached from and independent of tangible
goods and services. Financiers, businesses, and governments
contend with each other to produce a certain psychological
result, a product, in the consumer: optimism, economic anxiety,
hedonistic euphoria, caurion, which feelings will enrich one or
another sector financially. There's big money to be made (or
lost) if you invest in the right (or wrong) feelings. I
There is an "economic unconscious" in most of us, which drives
our decisions much more than rational examinations of our finan-
cial assets and situation. Even impoverished people budget what lit-
tle they have in response to hearsay. For those who have money,
investment seems to work by averaging hearsay with advice and
hunch. There need not be a connection between the real and the
invested value. The recent fortunes of such' stocks as those of
Netscape last year and more recently of Yahoo! , which jumped to 154
percent of its initial value in the first day of issue, bear witness to this
emotional dimension of investment, and hence of the economy gen-
erally. The trust that people put in promising, but immature, tech-
nology can never be underestimated. That trust endures in spite of
endless, highly publicized disappointments, perhaps because so
many of the technological advances we've experienced in our life-
times have arrived suddenly and exceeded expectations.
Noah Kennedy has observed that "the modern world has reached
the point where industrialization is being directed squarely at the
human intellect."2 One of the striking features of networked com-
munications is that while they may appear on the surface to be so
much hardware and software, in reality, they are supported by a
great deal of biological activity, namely, the people sitting at the
computer terminals. It is really people who connect through net-
works, not just their machines. Bur they connect with the immater-
ial products of their minds. Business consequently has become
accustomed to consider such imponderables as "intellectual capital"
and "knowledge-based industries" as important assets.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, more and
more consciousness has percolated through the activities that give
rise to the economy. For example, during the heyday of television,
the main driving force of the economy was not goods and services
themselves, but, via advertising and packaging, information about
those products and services. The primary effect of this early form of
dematerialization of industry was to accelerate the production,
delivery, and turnover of goods. The secondary effect was to accel-
erate the circulation of money. The tertiary effect was to include,
accelerate, and render more complex the role of consciousness in
the economy. Today, as the ratio of services over manufacturing in
the economy increases continuously and as more and more material
goods are digitized, the total ratio of "mindware" over hardware is
also increasing rapidly. It is the increasing ratio of conscious to
unconscious drives in the production, packaging, and delivery of
goods and services that shapes much of the thinking about the
"N E " ew conomy.
The law of network connectedness is that a simple linear curve of
connections leads to an exponential multiplication of interconnec-
tions. In turn, this multiplication of interconnections gives rise to
emergent markets made of new configurations within the network.
One of the effects of instant communications networks on new
forms of business developments has been spotted by economist W.
Brian Arthur under the name of "increasing returns" which "are
mechanisms of positive feedback that operate-within markets,
businesses, and industries-to reinforce that which gains success or
aggravate that which suffers loss." Arthur sees this new trend as
something inherent in knowledge-based industries which, unlike
the goods-based industries of the industrial era, are capable of indef-
inite expansion.
As the economy shifts steadily away from the brute force of
things into the powers of mind, from resource-based bulk-pro-
cessing into knowledge-based design and reproduction, so it is
shifting from a base of diminishing returns to one of increasing
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
returns. A new economics-one very different from that in the
textbooks-now applies, and nowhere is this more true than in
high technology. Success will strongly favor those who under-
stand this new way of thinking)
The phenomenon of increasing returns depends on two things:
one, the unlimited expandability of software; the other, the instant
feedback of current information. The idea could become one of the
first principles of a new economy based not on scarcity but on
plenty. As Arthur explains:
Increasing returns generate not equilibrium but instability: If a
product or a company or a technology-one of many compet-
ing in a market-gets ahead by chance or clever strategy, increas-
ing returns can magnifY this advantage, and the product or
company or technology can go on to lock in the market. More
than causing products to become standards, increasing returns
cause businesses to work differently, and they stand many of our
notions of how business operates on their head.
4
Kevin Kelly also includes "increasing returns" among the twelve
main features of the New Economy and explains it this way:
Them that has, gets. Them that gives away and shares, gets.
Being early counts. A network's value grows faster than the num-
ber of members added to it. A 10 percent increase in customers
for a company in a non-networked economy may increase its
revenue 10 percent. But adding 10 percent more customers to a
networked company, such as a telephone company, could
increase revenues by 20 percent because of the exponentially
greater numbers of conversations between each member, both
new and 01d.5
The basic theory is that while the old economy was constructed
on material objects and the ultimate scarcity of resources, the new
166 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
one is being built around the unlimited abundance associated with
the production and distribution of ideas or mindware. The control
strategies implied are very different: to manage growth in an envi-
ronment of scarcity is to allocate limited resources among compet-
ing demands. To manage mindware growth is to multiply connec-
tions, checks and balances, applications, trial and error, in order to
optimize uptake. Another "New Economist," Paul Romer, draws
similar conclusions from the shift to software industries and the
inexhaustibility of ideas. Inspired by Robert Solow's observation
that 80 percent of economic growth comes from technological
change, Romer proposes that "new ideas, embedded in technologi-
cal change, drive economic growth and allow us to escape the gaunt
future economists have so often imagined."
Today, an important business strategy in software development is
to make it available for free so as to develop a client base, and then to
cash in with ancillary services. The basic problem, as seen by both
Romer and Arthur, is the risk involved in the front-end investment.
In the economy of software, the price of market entry is very high.
For Arthur, the whole exercise is one big gambling act. If you are
clever and lucky, your idea catches on, finds associates, and snow-
balls to a critical mass of users before the competition has found the
time or resources to undercut you .. Even if your software isn't the
best available, it can become the industry standard, as so many
Microsoft products have. You have then hit the jackpot. However,
you have at the same time become an ipso facto monopoly, so that
when you think of, for example, buying out Quicken to secure con-
trol of all financial transactional software, antitrust regulation raises
its democratic head. When the risk is so high, where is the incentive
to invest?
The solution proposed by Romer might be called time-release
monopolies. He suggests that regulatory authorities provide for
"monopolistic competition," by which he means that in a given
industry, say telecommunications, a company is licensed for a lim-
ited period of monopolistic privilege in the market until its product
has been fully developed and pardy distributed, at which point the
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
protection is lifted and the competition is allowed to enter. * While a
danger of this strategy is that it can allow industry complacency to
set in, one way to moderate the risk might be to subject the monop-
oly holder to regular "creativity assessment" checkups, as a condition
of license.
Money, of course, pioneered the trend from hardware to soft-
ware. It is now shifting from discrete and batch-mode to continuous
modalities. In fact, the intelligence of money parallels that of net-
works. Automatic banking machines created a unity of purpose and
a seamless functionality worldwide long before anybody had heard
about the Internet. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express went a
step further in connecting banks both to people and to services and
goods providers: their cards "hypertextualize" transactions, just as
the Web connects not just databases but also the contents of data-
bases. The next step is to emulate the "embedded Internet," that is,
to go fully digital . Money is indeed migrating to the networks, as
evidenced by almost monthly announcements of new on-line bank-
ing and payment services-CyberCash, Netbill, DigiCash, Milli-
cent, First Virtual, etc.
Electricity and digitization allow any sequential process to be
measured, scanned, priced, tracked, and debited or credited contin-
uously. The ideal currency of the digital economy is the bit itself. In
McLuhan's jest, "Currency is current," there are two-maybe
more-layers of puns: one is that, what is actual and newsworthy is
valuable and can be exchanged for currency; but the more profound
pun is that electrical current is the latest form of money. Where cash
was discrete, credit cards, debit cards, and "smart cards" are leading
to continuous streaming of transactions. Where money was static
and purely representational, on-line accounts will be dynamic and
directly active. This could eventually change the status of money
* This is what de facto has occurred with Bell Canada, protected by regulation
from competition by the cable industry for the delivery of telephone services,
and with most of the European tekos, protected from each other until 1998 (or
2003 in the case of Portugal).
168 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
from a tool to represent value to one which actually is value, i.e.,
energy. You will plug into your digibank much the way we plug into
the electricity network. Like the lives of a digital character in a video
game, the infusions that you accumulate in your smart card, or your
digital "mint," represent direct payment. You transfer power and
energy from server to server.
Pierre Levy, Nicholas Negroponte, John Perry Barlow, Don Tap-
scott, and scores of other observers note that the character of the dig-
ital economy is that its products can be given out without either
losing their quality of originality or leaving the possession of the
original owner, which is another key aspect of an economy of plenty.
There can't be a conventional economy at all if expensive informa-
tion, digitized and on-line, becomes both available for free, and
open to perfect reproduction. Digitization, convergence, and public
networked communications bring enormous copyright manage-
ment problems to information-providers from the tiniest indepen-
dent software creator to the biggest publishing corporation.
Anybody and everybody can get the data on the fly and redistribute
it either free of charge, or for a profit that is shared neither by the
publisher nor the author. This is a very complex question and solu-
tions will require collaboration and understanding on the part of
governments, publishers, authors, communication industries, and
banks.
One part of the answer to the copyright question may be offered
by the digital technologies that caused the "problem" in the first
place. In principle, all information can be labeled digitally and thus
made traceable wherever it appears and is incorporated into a prod-
uct, hard or soft, on- or off-line. This is done with encryption, a
coding instruction system that writes a constant signature on the
digital data stream. *
* To encrypt or label digital data, all that is necessary is to add a coded pattern in
the combinations of air pulses that constituce the sequence of bits. This pattern
is invisible, but ever present and impossible to remove without destroying the
object data.
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
Encryption has three very important features that could pave the
way for the introduction of a new payment system:
1. The encryption codes allow automatic monitoring, account-
ing, and copyright payment distribution.
2. The code is always present, even in the smallest segments of
the stolen material, and thus will make fraudulent use trace-
able and actionable.
3. The digital data stream will never have to be stored in anyone
particular place. Libraries, for example, would simply be
instructed to redirect on-line queries to the appropriate pub-
lisher's database, and they could even be allowed to collect a
minor toll fee for the service of redirection, if their server was
queried and prepared for precisely that configuration of data
searches. This could generate a form of collaboration between
authors, publishers, and libraries which would solve some, if
not all, of the vexing problems of copyright infringements in
the networked environment.
The inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, concedes that the Web is
a rough approximation of what he had in mind-with one critical
difference: the Web does not allow for automated copyright man-
agement. Nelson's Xanadu, the Web's prefiguration, goes a big step
farther than simply organizing a way for people to receive their roy-
alties. His notion of "transcopyright" is that any material used by an
independent information-provider can be debited at the user and
credited to the source through automated billing systems. In turn,
the new content or framework given to the borrowed material is to
be considered, in essence, to be new material. Any further use of the
new combination of old content and new framework would bring
revenue to the new user. This model of transcopyright would serve
as an inducement to a collaborative rather than an exclusively com-
petitive model of the economy.
Like the market, the corporate culture will change profoundly in
the New Economy. Joel de Rosnay coined the term "coopetition" to
170 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
express this new combination of competition and collaboration.
While the existing one-way market psychology will continue, partly
by the force of inertia, pardy because there is still a real need for it in
slower cultures, the leaders of the new industry will be those who
have understood that the mood and the mode have changed. Some-
thing like a mutation is happening to the edges of innovation and
communication. The electronic tribe is younger, less politicized,
more interested in collaboration than competition, less hung up on
short-term profits, and more aware of the needs of the whole ecosys-
tem. They don't like war; they neither profit from nor by it. They
can handle any culture in any number of combinations. They are
connectors and networkers.
Knowledge-based businesses, from content-providers to software
developers and media, need to consider decentralizing their opera-
tions if only to keep their best people interested enough to remain
with them. Intelligence is not a hierarchical process, but a connected
one. Nothing paralyses the individual mind more than a single
obsessive concern, i.e., a top-down mind-set. Brian Arthur points
out that the basic people-management strategy for ensuring increas-
ing returns is different from more traditional approaches in process
industries. For example:
Competition is different in knowledge-based industries because
the economics are different. If knowledge-based companies are
competing in winner-rake-most markets, then managing
becomes redefined as a series of quests for the next technological
winner-the next cash cow. The goal becomes the search for the
Next Big Thing. In this milieu, management becomes not pro-
duction oriented but mission oriented. Hierarchies flatten not
because democracy is suddenly bestowed on the work force or
because computers can cut out much of middle management.
They flatten because, to be effective, the deliverers of the next-
thing-for-the-company need to be organized like commando
units in small teams that report directly to the CEO or to the
board.
6
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
171
In fact, the new trend is not merely to create small, efficient
teams intramurally, but to go OUt and seek ideas from nonresident
"wild men" and women, that is, nonexperts and consultants with
far-out ideas. In an environment in which information is available
all around you, it isn't what you know that is worthwhile, but what
you don't know. The wilder the merrier. Properly framed, ignorance
is truly bliss.
In one of his lesser known books, Take Today: The Executive as
Drop-Out, McLuhan identified three main characteristics of the
economy unfolding in the early seventies as:
a general shift from hardware to software
a radical decentralization trend affecting most economic and
social activities
a general shift from jobs to roles
The most original observation here is the one that concerns jobs,
which are now becoming a dwindling resource for keeping people
busy (i.e., for employment), and are being replaced by an attitude
characterized by a general readiness to drop out and face any new sit-
uation as it turns up. Convergence of media is also leading to con-
vergence of skills and abilities. McLuhan also predicted that women
would be better prepared than men to face the requirements of a
just-in-time economy, due to their wider-ranging skills and more
generalized abilities.
In the late sixties and early seventies, many executives dropped
out to "get a life." They wanted more out of their existence than
the humdrum of the rat race. Today, I know many cases of people
who, far from waiting for the ship to start sinking, jump overboard
on the rising curve of their capabilities to start a consulting relation-
ship with the very company they have just left. Even top executives
frequently leave prominent or protected positions at the pinnacle of
their careers to strike out on their own. The economist David Foot,
a colleague at the University of Toronto who recently published a
best-seller on current demographics, has created a chart which
172 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
compares different "Career Paths and Associated Characteristics."*
Career Path Job Mobility Occupations Organization Reward
Steady State none one rectangular tenure
Linear upward two tall pyramid power
Spiral lateral five + flat pyramid skills
Transitory lateral many just-in-time IOterest
The number of jobs available in the first two categories ("Steady
State" and "Linear") are dwindling as the enduring deficit-fighting
economy is motivating closure of government services and the merg-
ing of companies and industries. As jobs become scarcer, profession-
als de-specialize to take on different roles, readying themselves for
any circumstance. They have learned that beyond a certain time in
one's life, too much expertise can be a liability. People dropping out,
both those who have jumped and those who have been pushed, have
to consider retuning themselves and creating their own job opportu-
nities. It is from the last two categories that the new consultants are
spawned, with highly developed skills and their own networks of
business and government contacts. The connected economy pro-
vides them with more tools for survival than ever before.
The new connected economy unfolding is not one of clearly de-
fined consumers and producers; it is an economy of networks. And
the jobs of the future will involve creative and applied thinking on
the part of everybody, not just the experts. These jobs will involve
shaping, processing, editing, distributing, and treating information
as a source of income and deep growth. They will involve connecting
people at the right time in the right configuration for the right pur-
pose. The connected responds best to autonomy and self-organizing
principles. The Internet is not a mass medium: it is not a one-way
medium. It is not even a two-way medium. It's a "my-way" medium.
* Reproduced, with permission, from a conference slide shown by David Foot at
the CIBe Learning Centre, July 23, 1996.
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
173
When everything and everybody is on-line, everybody has some-
thing to say about what's worthy to be read, seen, watched, and done
on-line. That means that the user, not the ptoducer of information,
is in the driver's seat.
The incipient trend is already plainly visible, away from the con-
ventional broadcast model of production, distribution, and delivery
towards a more flexible, personalized, and empowered network
model. In the mass media market model borrowed from the old mil-
itary-industrial complex, big corporations would identify or gener-
ate average tastes in goods and services, promote them by advertising,
and deliver them in uniformly packaged products and deals. Today,
thanks to the versatility of computerized data-retrieval and specifica-
tion-design, it is possible to "mass customize" products. But the ac-
tion is already moving elsewhere in small, fast, easy-to-assemble and
disassemble units of production and consumption. Yesterday's cus-
tomer was a docile consumer: today she has become an aggressive
just-in-time producer, thanks to ever greater access to means of pro-
duction. Karl Marx said that everything would be all right when the
means of production were finally in the hands of the workers. What
is in the hands of workers today? Desktop management, tools of in-
formation production, and network management or distribution.
Paradoxically, while so much of the overstimulated media cover-
age of the vaunted Information Highway is about the carriers and
the infrastructure, ultimately the sectors of the economy which
stand to gain the most are not the carriers, but the content suppliers,
publishers, and users-that is, you and me, provided that we are
given the means to put ourselves on-line (and "on-the-line"). It is
user demand that will finally prevail in the rewiring of nations, not
the industry's internal priorities. And it is the user who will provide
most of the content that will eventually be bought and sold in the
economy of mind. McLuhan suggested that if the medium were
indeed the message, then the user ought to be the real content of his
or her engagement with the medium. This is never more true than
with connected media. It is quite obvious that anyone who speaks
on the telephone provides the content of that medium. However,
174
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
carriers who now vie to become content-providers don't quite see it
that way, because they hope to make money from offering the con-
tent as well as carrying the data. The mistake being made by both
big business and government regulators is in continuing to treat the
general public and the potential networker as a consumer, rather
than a producer. They continue to think in terms of numbers
instead of configurations, to worry about controls instead of search-
ing for new forms of collaboration with that public they often take
for granted.
What is needed, and as soon as possible if we are to develop an
authentic and durable connected economy, is access to "bandwidth
on demand," controllable not only by the producer but also by the
user of information. The quickest way to educate and retrain a whole
population of workers is to give them access to network bandwidth,
the way they have access to TV and to the telephone. They will pro-
duce their own content and find their own networks, and soon
enough be able to live off these new relationships. Depending upon
how radical the effects of computer education will have been on the
present and the next generation, people with more brain and less
brawn (dixit Don Tapscott) will grab control of their own economy.
It has often been observed that on-line, David and Goliath, you
and MGM, are on a par. It's a great thought, and a great hope for a
radical restructuring of the economy, but it is certainly not a given.
Critics have been prompt to remind us that we have heard all of
this before; we were to be liberated in turn by the invention of the
telephone, of radio, of television, and most recently by cable. As
Allucquere Rosanne Stone puts it so wittily: "Cyberspace can be
viewed as a toolkit for reconfiguring consciousness in order to per-
mit things to go on much in the same way." The example of the
cable industry is a particularly apt one in that few communication
industries have been better and quicker at breaking promises and
making money doing so. As late as 1973 a cable industry spokesman
claimed that "cable can become a medium for local action instead of
a distributor of prepackaged mass-consumption programs to a pas-
sive audience."7 Of course, it didn't work out that way.
THE CONNECTED ECONOMY
175
Democratically equitable and economically valuable access to the
worldwide networks will eventually depend on how weLl big business
and government collaborate to manage its distribution. This is as-
suming that governments stay in the driver's seat long enough to have
a say in the matter! The present reality is that national sovereignty is
threatened by global corporations as the multinationals of yesterday
are replaced by global corporations. The very idea of nation fades
away. Then again, the nation-state was itself a ptoduct of a defining
technology, the printing press. With the ascendance of electricity,
there is a consequent overriding of the print-inspired hierarchical
management of precise geographical boundaries. The consequence
of huge mergers such as that of British Telecom and MCI could be
that the tole of the corporate global state is no longer so much to es-
tablish and maintain national sovereignty, as to provide the unified
infrastructure necessary for a renewed localism. The era of the single
global village-the time of television's visual representations of a sin-
gle, unified, real geographical space-is over. The concept best
adapted to the networked condition is "global villages"-that is, real
space locally, but virtual interactions globally.
The thinking of government in the advanced industrial states
remains by and large stuck in the worn-out groove of apportioning
scarce resources, whether in terms of bandwidth allocation or licens-
ing of content delivery. This defensive posture is inherently weak.
The assertive approach would be to do everything possible to opti-
mize the connectedness of the nation. That translates, first of all,
into encouraging and supporting-financially, if need be-cable,
telco, and even hydro joint ventures; second, combining these ini-
tiatives with educational programs that put the power of creation
and idea development in the hands of the people, rather than exclu-
sively under the control of established developers and information
providers; third, maximizing access to copyright-free public domain
material. The people of democratic nations pay for cultural content
through the tax dollars that go to educational and cultural, as well as
national media institutions. Assuming that a suitable way can be
found to compensate the original creators of content, the availability
17
6
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
of such content to the people at large for reuse in new contexts
should be unfettered. If every time I had a new thought in my mind,
I had to rebuild and pay for all the bits and pieces of thinking I had
done and stored before, I would probably never have another new
thought at all.
In short, if governments the world over understand where their
future lies, they will come to the inevitable conclusion that they
should assume the leadership in promoting connectedness rather
than leaving it to international corporations, as they tend to do
today.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
P LANETIZATION
T
HERE IS A LOT of loose talk in business, government, and
education circles about "globalization." McLuhan is quoted
knowingly and incessantly about the "global village." Hardly
anyone, on the other hand, talks about "planetization." Though the
word smacks of New Age babble, I find it useful in differentiating
the inner from the outer point of view of the Earth. Globalization is
the process of technological and economic expansion from here to
there. Planetization, on the other hand, is the view from above, from
the satellite. When people look at satellite images of the Earth on the
weather report on TV, what they are watching is planet Earth. Thus
planetization is an issue of human consciousness, namely the con-
scious integration of the Earth's dimensional reality, while globaliza-
tion is an issue of geopolitics. Ecology, and the ecological sensibility
which is now much in evidence among the newer generations in the
advanced postindustrial countries, belongs to the "planet" side of the
equation, since the fundamental reality of any ecological considera-
tion, is, of course, the planet itself.
NETWO R KS AND DEVELOP M ENT
While it is clear that the Internet is growing faster than any tech-
nology in history, according to Dan Schiller, there are three sobering
statistics to consider:
177
17
8
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
I. At the end of 1995, the total number of computers in the
world was still under 200 million, against a global population
of six billion which puts at 3 percent the maximum access to
networks by individuals.
2. At the same time, over 75 percent of the world's main tele-
phone lines served less than 15 percent of the world population.
3. A typical wired family in the U.S. (more than 40 percent of
the total) earned over $75,000.
And, as if such obstacles to universal access to a unified net-
worked environment were not enough, Schiller points out that there
are four times as many closed networks, i.e., intranets, usually
reserved to people with means, than there are open access networks
within the Internet. His prognosis is not encouraging because he
predicts that excessive privatization and crude commercial interests
will tend to further limit network development to larger concen-
trated markets rather than expanding access across the board.
The University of Montreal's Michael Carter is no less pes-
simistic in his assessment of what's in store for the developing world
in an era of networked communication:
The question of national sovereignty is related to the ability of a
nation state to cope with transnational mega-mergers which
have less and less national loyalty. If the global market paradigm
holds, even in developed countries there will be some second-
tier and second-rate players and in the rest of the planet a vast,
information-dependent Third World. *
By and large, Carter is right about the fact that, in the present
transitional state from the Industrial Age to the new era of informa-
tion processing, the governments of the world have tended to dele-
gate their responsibilities to big business. That is an unsettling
development. Among the G-7 nations, for example, Italy and France
* From an on-line discussion about cultural and technological hegemony.
PLANETIZATION
179
stand out for having decided to protect cultural interests locally,
while every other country seems willing to delegate that responsibil-
ity to the market. But in a world of networks, which is where we as-
suredly are headed, whether or not the implementation of new
technologies in the less developed countries is a happy experience is
dependent on the degree to which people in authority understand
the potentials and the pitfalls. The outcome cannot simply be aban-
doned to the machinations of corporations and the market.
The patterns of implementation of network communication dif-
fer from country to country. In the developed world the approach
has tended to be "put in a backbone," analogous to the central spine
of a nervous system. This is normally done by the telephone system.
The backbone, however, is not typically the way less developed
countries go about it, because they seldom have the required infra-
structure in place. Funhermore, they seldom have the required cash
or the ability to attract adequate outside investment.
One alternative is being pioneered in South America under the aus-
pices of the Organization of American States. U.S.A. International De-
velopment, the World Health Organization, and several other United
Nations agencies are putting together, with regional collaboration, the
rudiments of networks and the rudiments of connections. Anywhere
that it's difficult to make the connections because wires are lacking, a
start is being made on packet-radio switching to close the gaps.
While institutional initiatives like this one are to be welcomed,
the fact is that in network development, the hard work of individu-
als can make an enormous difference. Committed people are the
hormones of this global nervous system. This is what I call the
homeopathic value of communications: where there is a will, there is
a way. Even in remote areas, people connect among themselves and
then move ahead to create local networks.* For example, Africa
* These embryonic networks often run on pre-Internet software known as FIDO-
net. FIDO-net is authentic grassroots technology which allows people to establish
networks by connecting from one computer to another through existing tele-
phone lines and in some cases using packet-radio links.
180 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Online is the realization of the dream of a single Kenyan visionary.
Its server has to deal with store-and-transfer problems and all kinds
of obstacles at the technical level, but it's there. And a lone professor
from the University of Rhodes in South Mrica is largely responsible
for wiring the whole of the south of that continent.
Bill Buxton, once my colleague at the University of Toronto, and
now a consultant with Alias Research, is one of the most interesting
thinkers on development issues and new technologies. However, we
rarely agree on how to interpret trends. He says: "Fifty percent of the
world's population doesn't have access to a telephone and here you
are talking about the Information Highway in Mrica! Who are you
kidding?" He argues that there are three fundamental access issues in
any country, developed or less-developed, when it comes to the
communication infrastructure.
The first issue is technical, relative to the existing infrastructure
in developing countries. This is a well-known problem in Mrica,
where telephone lines are what they are. Furthermore, the technical
support for that infrastructure is often lacking or inadequate. The
hardware needed for terminals, the required software, and software
management and maintenance are also unevenly distributed. Where
equipment is in place, it is often obsolete. There is no denying these
very real difficulties, and so it is all the more heartening to discover
that there is in fact anything on-line at all in Rwanda or Somalia.
There is evidence that, at least in some African countries, the situa-
tion is improving.
With the rapid development of wireless technologies and the
continuous drop in the price of mobile telephony, technical or infra-
structure issues of access may not remain intractable problems.
Wireless satellite communication is still in its infancy; eventually the
technology will be ubiquitous and cheap. The technology has al-
ready made significant inroads in China and India. Among the uses
oflow-bandwidth data communications via satellite or cellular tech-
nologies, data transmission (i.e., the Internet and other networks) is
beginning to move ahead of voice communication in line of priority.
People now want a phone not just to talk, but also with which to do
PLANETIZATION 181
their work. The infrastructure obstacles facing the Third World may
have a wireless solution.
As for the distribution of hardware, the solution is already evident
in mass production of increasingly powerful and sophisticated com-
puter chips. When we talk about media, communication, computers,
and the technoculture that is just over the horizon, we should never
forget that over the last twenty years motor cars have gone up in
price and only marginally improved in utility, while during the same
period, computers have plummeted in price and soared in service. It
should also be borne in mind that rapid improvements in computer
hardware and software render the previous generation obsolescent,
and not obsolete. Used appropriately, older equipment can be of great
value. One can even imagine a computer industry geared specifically
ro the needs of developing regions, producing robust, inexpensive
equipment, perhaps from recycled components, for network access.
Buxton's second issue is financial. This is in fact a sticky problem,
though not just in the developing world. Europeans, and not just the
less developed countries, have traditionally used their telcos as cash
cows. They constantly fiddle with rates and surcharges and oblige
users to pay through the nose for what North Americans get very
cheaply. As an example, university Internet access in North America
is virtually free, while in France users are billed by the minute.
This is an exceedingly shortsighted strategy on both sides of the
development gap and one that can cripple an economy vis-a.-vis its
worldwide competition. The only sane policy is to maximize use
(and revenues) by making access universal and inexpensive. In prac-
tical terms, this is about a three- to four-year cycle oflegislation, reg-
ulation, and implementation.
A related question is being asked in both developed and develop-
ing countries: where will the jobs of tomorrow come from? It's clear
that government won't supply them, and business won't either-cer-
tainly not traditional business in any case. However there are
employment opportunities in the information sectors of the econ-
omy and these are increasing in both number and scope as the Web
continues to develop. So the issue of access is an absolutely critical
182 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
one in terms of the new production environment. I would venture
to predict that governments in Europe, certainly, will recognize the
folly of imposing artificial financial barriers to access sooner rather
than later. When, in 1998, the European Community opens its gates
to true competition in telecommunications, at least for long-dis-
tance operations, there should be a rapid drop of rates in Europe,
which will probably signal a decline elsewhere as well.
According to Buxton, the definitive access issue is neither tech-
nical nor financial, but cognitive. How well prepared is any given
culture to absorb and deal with the new technologies? The first
consideration here has to be the average local level of education.
The problem is that with the less costly, text-intensive versions of
networked communications, more or less fluent literacy is required
of users. To the extent that network access is in demand in Africa, it
is a demand which tends to be urban, professional, university, and
business-based.
Let us assume, on the other hand, that the basic conditions of fi-
nancial, technical, and cognitive preparedness for network commu-
nications are somehow met for the nations of Africa. What benefits
might be expected to follow? Would the effort prove worthwhile?
At the moment, 80 percent of what is known about Africa is in
European and u.s. databases, not accessible to Africans because so
few of them have access to the Web.
This is an enormous resource denied to people locally: it includes
statistics about jobs and disease patterns, geographical information,
environmental data, history, culture-basically, the memory of the
continent. Perhaps even more distressing is the issue of "Lost Science
in the Third World," as described in Scientific American:
Many researchers in the developing world feel trapped in a
vicious circle of neglect and some say prejudice by publishing
barriers they claim doom good science to oblivion. I
Not only are Africans denied access to information, they are denied
access to today's foremost means of information distribution.
PLANETIZATION
The other side of the same coin is that African countries have
better access to u.s. and European news than to news about their
own neighbors. This is because the information moving between
two neighboring countries in Africa travels on foot or by radio and
television with all of their inherent delays and censorship opportu-
nities, and it travels on-line instantly to the u.s. and Europe.
The less developed countries have other unique problems. Gov-
ernment policies may be unfriendly to Net access not just because of
the cash-cow issue, but because of the need for governments to
tightly control information in undemocratic societies. Even among
the long-established democracies, including both France and the
U.S., governments are loath to permit private citizens access to
sophisticated encryption software: in France it is controlled under
military secrecy legislation.
In 1996, China gave us an intriguing new example of government
control. The leadership there dreamed up the nation-based Intranet.
The ostensible motivation is to protect the people of China from too
much foreign cultural influence. At the same time, Beijing does not
want to miss out on the economic opportunities of networked com-
munications. So the idea is to erect an electronic Great Wall to keep
the enemy out. The so-called firewall technique is one used by many
corporations to protect their internal networks from outsiders while
still allowing employees to access the wider Internet. A firewall
would allow authorities in Beijing to control access by Chinese citi-
zens to the Internet, and access by outsiders to the Chinese Intranet.
In theory. It is difficult, however, to see how Chinese citizens can be
prevented from using long-distance telephone links to connect with
Internet service providers outside their country.
Like the Great Wall, China's Intranet firewail plans are probably
impractical in terms of the perceived threat of invasion. At a sym-
bolic level, however, it may be quite effective. It is one more reflec-
tion of a fundamental concern of Chinese rulers from the early
emperors through to Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping, which is
the national unity of China. This ideal cuts across many languages
and writing systems in China, but it means walling-in everything.
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Political resistance to improving network infrastructure in devel-
oping nations is sometimes rationalized in terms of perceived dan-
gers of technological imperialism or colonialism. This is a serious
issue: after all, Western technology has already invaded a good half
of the planet with the alphabet; now, with electricity, it is taking the
whole thing. Is technological colonialism political colonialism in
sheep's clothing, another threat along the lines of that presented by
the insidious worldwide reach of the American television industry?
Psychologically and technically we have done too much coloniza-
tion from the West.
Neither should we underestimate the effects of the intensifica-
tion of real-time, interactive distant communications in oral cul-
tures already so sensitive to the amplification of orality. Radio has
been used as an instrument of propaganda to disastrous effect in
both the developed and the less developed world, and continues to
be a very dangerous technology.* One can only hope that the Inter-
net will prove to be more benign in this respect. My feeling is that it
will be, because it is participatory, because it empowers the individ-
ual rather than putting people under the control of a central dissem-
inating source as radio does. The Internet is not an authoritarian
instrument in any sense. Although it is mediated by writing, any-
thing that happens on the Internet is instant, so it resembles oral
communication. Communication is archived and instantly retriev-
able. I think to that extent the Internet is a safe technology but I
don't want to bet on it right now. Perhaps, by multiplying thus the
possibility of private communication, the Net will help to tone
down some of the power of tribal rhetoric typical of one-way-only
radio transmission. This is a frail hope, I must confess, to offer a
continent profoundly wounded by technology.
American television and the English language are two examples
of world-conquering cultural technologies. A cultural technology is
one that is so pervasive as to fundamentally infl uence the structure
and behavior of communities. The old cultural technology of
* See Rwanda and Burundi for a lesson in the power of radio to foment hatred.
PLANETIZATION
Europe and Norrh America is still around and doing fine in the form
of the self-consciousness created by the phonetic alphabet. It is true,
however, that this literate mentality is being seriously challenged by
the new electronic technologies, and that we are as yet only dimly
aware of the consequences. (Most of us for that matter don't yet real-
ize the extent to which we have been affected psychologically by
learning to read and write.)
Every shift of media generates a new configuration of linguistic
processing: the new configuration proposes a new mirror, and a new
image of community to the users of the medium. The image is terri-
torial and the size of the "land base" depends on the reach of the
medium. The shift from oral to literate media, for example, intro-
duced the need for well-defined national boundaries. Fierce colonial
wars were waged against regional, nonconforming languages. Na-
tional cultures were homogenized through the schools (among other
means) but within those newly unified codes, individual personali-
ties were permitted to develop and democracy eventually emerged in
most Western nations.
With the shift from printed to electronic media, personal identi-
ties have been shaken and physical frontiers have been shredded.
The impact on local language has varied; in some cases friction
has arisen between linguistic groups. For example, the impact of
television on French Canada helped to accelerate the revolution tran-
quille, the quiet but relentless development of Quebec's sense of sep-
arate identity, which has led to a quest for a "distinct society" status
within the Canadian Constitution and growing agitation for out-
right sovereignty.
For a short while, electricity returned the Western cultures to oral
conditions. Radio and television brought back the preliterate prior-
ity of context over text. They created instant mass audiences: Hitler's
voice on radio helped to put Germany (and much of the rest of the
industrial world) in uniform; television created a worldwide con-
sumer society with its ideological center in the U.S.A. In the former
Soviet Union, the power of electricity was muted by a totalitarian
bureaucracy, with the consequence that local cultures were denied
186 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
the right to evolve freely; today some of them resort to unspeakable
violence to catch up.
The Internet is, without question, a cultural technology. In fact,
with the Internet, culture itself becomes a technology, hence, the
absolute necessity to allow differing cultures the chance to co-exist.
In the new context of digitization, everything hard turns soft, every-
thing static starts to move, the virtual takes over from the real, the
local moves to global and back, and time becomes more critical than
space. Very soon, not to say inevitably, the cultural should indeed
become the dominant form of all technologies. The meaning of
design, in terms of cultural rather than strictly industrial or scientific
technology, is a form of cognition. We get to know things with the
help of design. Thinking will sooner or later become equivalent to
doing. When that happens, we will need every bit of long-term,
multileveled cultural sophistication just to survive the speed of our
own transformation.
S U STA I NABLE C U LTURE
The McLuhan Program recently opened a "sustainable culture"
unit. With all the talk about sustainable development and the bliss-
ful ignorance about the radical impact of technology on culture, we
felt that there was a need to investigate what was durable and
resilient about culture invaded by technology, especially foreign
technology. While there is no evidence of a concept of "culture" any-
where but in Western tradition, the evidence of stubborn stability in
even profoundly disturbed cultural ecologies is very much in evi-
dence. For example, in Australia, aboriginal peoples have survived
decimation by white settlers, after having managed through the
strength of their culture to live through 50,000 years of radical tech-
nological penury. The fascinating aspect of aboriginal people, not
only in Australia but also in Canada, the U.S., and of course in
Africa, is that these are cultures that survive with minimal media and
maximum language input.
PLANETIZATION
Now a new cultural question has arisen beyond the issue of West-
ern cultural imperialism. For how long, we must now ask, can the
developed countries themselves maintain their distinct identities
even in a tenuous form? In many countries, including Canada and
France, voices have been raised in opposition to multicultural influ-
ences which threaten to tip the balance of white supremacy. While I
do not share that kind of anxiety, I am curious to know how the
Greco-Roman heritage will fare on the Internet.
What Westerners call culture-when they don't mean the opera-
is what is left of the content of the Greco-Roman heritage and its
consequences, principally the legacy of literacy as sustained by the
written and the printed word. Literacy allowed the storage and trans-
mission of the thought of officially recognized great persons of the
past; they stood as models for emulation long after most other rem-
nants of the culture were gone. The Renaissance was not merely a
high point in the rebirth of humanism, it was a monumental double
take on the culture ofliteracy. Born-again literates.
It will be interesting to study how much of that heritage survives
on the Internet. We find the Greco-Roman legacy being trans-
formed in postmodernism, of course, and we find the new cultural
standards in the blending of all traditions in media and entertain-
ment. What delights me about the film Blade Runner, for example,
and makes me trust it as a believable forecast of what's coming, is not
the idea of the replicants, sophisticated organic robots programmed
for short-duration perfection, it is that the English language spoken
in Los Angeles in 2019 is almost untecognizable, so laden is it with
contraction, slang, and foreign words. William Gibson's perceptive
novels also capture the sense of otherness that can undermine cul-
tural continuity, given enough time.
Popular culture does for most people what art does for the spe-
cialist, that is, it provides a multisensorial decor and collective icons.
The advantage of popular culture is that it is popular. It spreads far
and wide instantly, without stopping at local cultural barriers. It may
also be a marketing racket, but it is a racket that works only because
it finds an avid market. People subjected to rapid sociotechnological
188 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
change need popular culture. Pop culture adjusts the rhythms, the
palette, and the feel of the hidden effects of new technologies on the
individual sensorium. Rock videos bring the senses together in a co-
herent synergy, involving a physical response on the part of the view-
ers or dancers. The sounds and rhythms of the times fill the airwaves
and the supermarkets, trickle into gyms and restaurants, run along
the highways and generally saturate the environment to set our bio-
logical clocks to the new beat of the computer or nanotechnology.
Pop culture icons, myths, public figures, and paraphernalia pro-
vide a content to anchor the floating shreds of meaning left over
from previous eras. Like medieval heroes once were, presidents, en-
tertainers, and sport idols are endowed with superhuman mental
and physical attributes, not without a little help from marketing ex-
perts. We can absentmindedly pin our desires to them. They also
give tangible shapes to the amorphous desires and unformed identity
yearnings of millions of people in search of reflections. Like
Madonna, they rise and they fall according to symbolic needs, rather
than historical reality. A Michael Jackson and a J. F. Kennedy can re-
main "good symbolic value" until they are not needed anymore, at
which point they are executed on a symbolical level, usually through
the revelation of some scandalous episode. It isn't that the behavior is
new or that no one knew about it, it is that now the behavior and the
obsolescence of the public figure coincide. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The pathways followed by the relentless pressure for global cul-
tural standardization are varied. Creeping uniformity can arise out
of amplification (television is louder than books), reach (shortwave
radio penetrates further than FM), and speed (fax is faster than mail).
Oral media tend to homogenize cultures while written media often
tolerate high levels of diversification.
Computers, of course, colonize their users before they go out and
colonize anybody else, in a process that might be called psychotech-
nological colonialism. And I am not just talking about the tweaking
of the user's mental habits; I am talking about language. English is
the dominant language of the Internet. This is a significant issue at
every level, not only in terms of the communication and/ or violation
PLANETIZATION
oflocal sensibilities, but also in terms of ordinary training. It has be-
come almost axiomatic that you have to learn English in order to
learn computers.
Our perception of language is warped by literacy. Language is
much more than a vehicle for meaning. * Language is the first mass
medium. It is an environment, both within and without the body.
The body speaks and is spoken; words result from networks of ner-
vous impulses that reflect and affect both the physical and the social
body. That is why language is so closely tied to identity, both private
and collective. Communications media extend and prolong lan-
guage by moving it out of bodies and manifesting it in the environ-
ment. In this context, many kinds of nonverbal artifacts should be
treated as linguistic forms as well: images and services coming from a
specific community and contributing to the social construction of
meaning; money; networks which allow for the circulation of mean-
ing such as highways (land-based or electronic), the telephone, satel-
lites. The sum total of these technological infrastructures creates
huge linguistic environments which sometime threaten to wipe out
local customs and identities. Technological colonialism may seem to
be more radical than the military, political, and economic varieties,
but it may also be part of a largely unconscious, self-organizing sys-
tem. Violence results when cultures are rushed, but the new order
insinuates itself inexorably, of its own accord.
Will English become a global language? The question may be
moot, because the global networks, in seeking uniformity, can toler-
ate linguistic differences that will be gradually perceived as indis-
pensable. New technologies may help to emphasize the value ofloeal
cultures by allowing people to explore the subtleties of nonverbal dif-
ferences in languages. In the short term, however, the issue for many
languages and cultures is survival. Strategies differ: former French
president Franc;:ois Mitterand proposed that every Francophone be
granted French citizenship (thus continuing a great tradition begun
* The key to this issue is in John Austin's assertion: "Words don't mean any-
thing, people do."
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
by the Capetians). Native Canadian artist Lawrence Paul Yuxwelup-
tun has created a completely original and self-contained virtual real-
ity environment called Vision Rights, Inherent Rights, where instead
of trying to tell the Story of his people with words, he has chosen to
show it and make his audience live in it.
The worldwide evolution of networked communication is a
revolution of such historic importance that it demands humane
management and timely human intervention to correct market defi-
ciencies and correct injustices. It is important either to require from
industry that it develop a statesmanlike sense of responsibility, or to
insist on effective, morally informed oversight from responsible gov-
ernment. There may be, as cyber-utopians believe, a largely self-
organizing system at work, but, for the moment, it is primarily
self-serving. While some businesses are beginning to show a measure
of social responsibility, if only in their advertising campaigns, most
are still focused intently on the bottom line. There are good reasons
to fear a future where purely economic pressures could drive the
have-nots into permanent exclusion and misery.
At the same time it must be noted that, because of the implosive
tendencies of communication media, we are developing forms of
sensitivity that might be incompatible with the old dog-eat-dog
approach to society. A true sensitivity to the plight of peoples in the
emerging nations may overwhelm connected people and move them
to concerted action. The Berlin Wall fell as a result of such a wave of
emotional release. There is still time to turn things around and start
collaborating on the common welfare instead of forever competing
for shreds of our own flesh. The thought we have to connect with is
that the health of the whole body depends on the health of all its
parts and vice versa.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THINKING
THE EA R T H
A
SATELLITE gives people omniscience for a penny. The view
from above, even if mediated by much interpretative tech-
nology, is comprehensive, to say the least. No matter what
amount of technology intervenes, the end result is a reliable repre-
sentation of what there is, and the biases of the computer data-
rendering are known, adjusted, tested, and corrected to get as pre-
cisely factual a rendering of reality as possible. All the technological
instruments and transformations required to make satellite images
visible on a Web site, for example, amount to the equivalent of a pair
of glasses. Nobody ever complained that spectacles distort reality;
rather, they enhance access to it for those whose natural faculties are
impaired. Let us then assume that a satellite image is as faithful a
representation as what we might see with our own eyes.
The satellite vantage point is also becoming a personal one. Not
too long ago, satellite images were accessible only to experts who
could muster the considerable technological support necessary to
interpret the data. Today, anybody on-line can access a weather site
and obtain an image that was computed a few minutes earlier,
straight from the satellite. The basic image will be continuously
refreshed with new data, showing, for example, the minute-by-
minute progress of a hurricane. Though it's getting to be a common-
place of on-line experience, I still marvel at the fact that I have
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
personal access to this godlike view of my basic life-support system.
Mine and everybody else's.
If we were to internalize the consequences of our technological
innovations, especially those which extend our sensory reach well
beyond our natural body's abilities, we would soon conclude that the
standard psychology we have learned at home and in school, our
everyday self-image, simply does not fit the scale that is now becom-
ing the norm. If, for two thousand years, man was "the measure of all
things," today the planet is the measure of all things. The change of
scale brought to the content of our technology needs to be accompa-
nied by a comparable change of scale in our psychological makeup.
We might say that satellites globalize the Earth for the common
man. They make the planet whole again. Psychologically speaking,
this situation is not entirely unprecedented, insofar as most ancient
cosmogonies and most aborigin'al religions did and do cultivate a
sense of the world's unity. This point of view was arrived at, of
course, without recourse to advanced technology, and one might
argue that it is precisely because so much technology intervenes "be-
tween ourselves and our roots," as Philippe Boissonnet would say,
that our fundamentally important relationship to the Earth is not
immediately intuitive. To grasp it requires a leap to a higher order of
perception, and to achieve this, people need to internalize the Earth.
If survival dictates priorities for the individual, it should dictate
them too for the new kind of connected consciousness that our tech-
nologies are building around us. The new priority of a much-
enlarged world population, more or less in touch and in sync via
global communications but threatened with dissension and the
depletion of vital resources, is to achieve a new self-image. This self-
image will have to go beyond the skin, beyond the single point of
view we carry within as a permanent reference for our position in
space. From the earliest stirrings of the child's consciousness to the
last thoughts of the dying, people need to "think the Earth." By this
I mean we need to capture the whole planet within the realm of our
consciousness, and beyond that, to add the image of the earth to the
list of core constituents of selfhood.
THINKING THE EARTH
193
A self-image that would include the Earth would have to tran-
scend local differences and individual agendas without eradicating
them. It would also have to be anchored in tactile as well as visual
perceptions. It is not enough to see the Earth differently; we must
also feel it differently. Some of this tactile contact may not be alto-
gether pleasant, but that may be part of the bargain we strike for sur-
vival. The sensation of pain is not a punishment but a survival
mechanism. If the Earth's body is the totality that is connected as a
life source to my body, then, in a subtle way, I have to be able to feel
its areas of friction and inflammation, I have to sense its fever.
Indeed, whether I like it or not, the world has now become my back-
yard. Personally, I may not apptove of the vertical integration of
communication media or of huge corporate conglomerates which
have profit more than our well-being or our enlightenment in mind,
but I have to recognize that I benefit from them to a certain extent
and that I share in the responsibility for their existence. I may balk at
the dependence of wealthy industrialized countries upon the arms
trade, which makes the world less safe to live in, but I can exercise
the option not to invest in funds that might go to support that trade,
even at a great remove. I may very well be against fundamentalism or
the deforestation of the Amazon, or child labor, but in order to be in
a position to overcome their negative influence on the health of the
Earth, I have to first make them mine; that is, to recognize that they
are a part of the total destiny of this planet of which I am a responsi-
ble and dependent part.
Media bring us to the world just as much as they bring the world
to us. They make each one of us commensurate with the planet. Just
as we are responsible for our own welfare and happiness, we are
becoming responsible-whether we are willing to recognize this or
not-for that part of us which now extends far into and around the
Earth. The self-centered ego is now seeking a counterpart in the
world perceived as an extension of self. Furthermore, our minds are
being extended far and wide and accelerated by our computerized
technology. Ecological consciousness is not only a matter of global
hygiene, it is also the best metaphor for the expansion of our minds
194
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
to global dimensions. Media technology is approximating the mind
and enabling it to command material change in real time.
Nowadays so much of our technology is geared to information
processing rather than industrial production that perhaps a quarter
of the world's population is engaged in activities more closely related
to mind than to matter. While such activities do not necessarily
interconnect, more and more they are evolving in ways that will
make interconnection a purpose, not just a consequence. New tech-
nologies are now promoted by popular metaphors such as "virtual
reality," "information highway," "personal digital assistant," which
have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. This implies
that the way we think and the way we shape thoughts with language,
now more than ever, is endowed with transforming power. When
you can do anything you want (at least in simulation), the question
ceases to be what you can do, bur becomes what you want to do.
As we move from a culture of archiving (oriented to the past) to
one of programming (oriented to the future), the right metaphor
becomes an important issue. It may be more urgent than ever to
practice connected positive thinking when global mood changes can
go either way. The word is not our yet on the fall of the Wall, the
crumbling of all walls, for that matter. Getting rid of guilt, paying
increased attention to other people's voices, staying open, expanding
one's mental scale to planetary proportions, consulting one's body
and the body politic for proprioceptive information about the state
of things generally, are some suggestions for grounding personal
ethics in a democratic and sustainable development.
In principle, it is a good idea not to jump to conclusions, espe-
cially ethical conclusions, in times of great social and cultural trans-
formation. We are in such a time, and yet an ethical imperative can
be seen developing in various guises, whether in political correctness,
fundamentalist attitudes, antismoking campaigns, recycling cru-
sades, or other behavioral groupware. Some trends, such as talk
about collaborative rather than competitive ventures, new gender re-
lationships and attitudes, political correctness, multiculturalism, so-
cial responsibility movements in professional societies and even in
THINKING THE EARTH
195
free enterprise, are indicative of a general orientation to a radical
mood change. Part of this phenomenon can be attributed to "popu-
lation implosion": thanks to media, people are exposed to each other
in greater numbers, with greater frequency, greater intimacy, and
greater impact. We are routinely thrown into situations that do not,
at first, seem to concern us. So the correlative psychological issue is
one of processing speed, that is, the power of integration a mind
needs in order to make sense of such a huge and incompletely ac-
cessed realm.
What if spirituality were not metaphysical after all, but just a
faster processing of all connections? Spiritual dimensions do exist,
there's no question about that. Whether they stay attached to the
forms that we give them is another question. Spirituality, for me, is
an issue of processing speed, not of theology. The mind goes at cer-
tain speed and beyond the speed of the mind there is a spiritual
realm which is very much faster. As an integrator of complex orders
of eventfulness, spirituality is akin to information processing taking
place at such a speed that everything becomes limpid and contradic-
tions seem to work themselves out on their own.
With this argument based on processing speed I am trying to
connect spirituality with physics, even if it were only through super-
luminal speeds. There is no reason, it seems to me, why spirituality
shouldn't belong to physics. Light, after all, is a physical phenome-
non whose existence no one would question in the name of some
fanatical theory. Light, by reaching and stabilizing the speed at
which all the other rhythms of matter are synchronized, functions
like a very fast integrator of even the most baffling and conflicting
jumble of heterogeneous entities. We should perhaps start exploring
the possibility that spirituality is an emergent property resulting
from the concentration of human, material, and life forms, and
from the convergence of apparently contradictory agendas.
Spirituality is something that becomes more and more necessary
because what is needed now is a form of guidance at levels of inte-
gration that were hidden or uninteresting to the mechanistic, liter-
ate mind of the West. The world is unfolding for us now in a very
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
deep, fundamental way. As humans, as a species, we are coming to
terms with the fundamentals of life and matter. We've gotten to the
core of matter, or are getting there. We've uncovered the code of life,
or are getting there. And we can turn information into matter:
indeed, at the subatomic level there now seems little to distinguish
between them. And so these three master codes-the subatomic
code, the genetic code, and the information-manipulating digital
code-are the keys to the given.
The consequence of possessing such powers is that brute survival
strategy is simply not precise enough to tell us what to do. Survival
was our previous guiding principle, bur we do not have a teacher or
a rule book anymore to instruct us in how to behave. As a species we
have reached a point which is quite beyond that. You can explore
the new territory yourself quite easily. Anybody can toy with a
fantasy. Just try to imagine that you had the power to control all of
nature. What would you do with it? What would be your next job?
Merely by thinking along those lines, you get to the point where a
fundamental integrating principle, including everything and every-
body's agenda, becomes indispensable. When you get to that point,
you realize that, yes, it's all in your mind; that is, the average of
whatever you and the rest of humanity think of doing with these
powers is precisely what is going to happen. And so your thinking
and your feeling and your total sense of being become much more
involved as an indicator of what it is you ought to do. At that speed,
you either crash or integrate.
APPENDIX
T EST CAS E S
I N CON NEe TE D
INTELLIGE NC E:
HOW TO RUN A
PRODUCTIVE WORKSHOP
I
HAVE COME to workshop organization rather late, and almost
by accident. I used to hold a rather jaundiced opinion of work-
shops in general, having been a participant in so many that didn't
amount to much.* I find that I have now become deeply involved in
their development and leadership. I apply workshop strategy in my
* Workshops are often no more than an excuse for professionals to engage in a
talkathon with their peers. Think tanks end up as piles of chart paper scribbled
with red and green and blue felt-pen ink. Some brainstorming sessions are bet-
ter than others and leave you at least with a sense that your mind was active,
almost in the manner it is when exposed to a very good movie. The end result,
however, is like all oral promises or contracts: "not worth the paper it's written
on." The conclusion that I draw from most of my experiences with group think-
ing is that it can be a lot of fun, but seldom even remotely practical in its out-
comes. When there is a record, it often comes out as either terse and desiccated
minutes or as a lame manifesto of some description. Rushing to consensus lami-
nates individual input and brings the best ideas down to the level of the smallest
common notions. In irs results, if not in the process itself, group thinking tends
to have a homogenizing, limiting, and downsizing effect on the individual intel-
ligence, however brilliant.
197
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
teaching and I practice it around the world. This new vocation
developed in two stages: first, I was invited to participate in a really
good workshop on ecological issues in the tourism industry in
Australia, where I learned the basics by observation; later I was
asked to lead a workshop in Cologne, at the Design Institute run by
Michael Erloff and Uta Brandes.
H OW TO RUN
AN EFFECTIVE WORKSHOP
What first opened my eyes to the true potential of workshopping
was taking part in the Winter School Collaboratorium at the Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).* The immediate task at
hand was to serve as one of the media experts in several groups of
workshops on eco-tourism. My own agenda was complementary: at
the outset, I had announced that one of my principal goals in the
session at RMIT was to identify forms of connected intelligence
among people in small groups addressing a very new issue, and
working under a certain degree of pressure. My question was: Is it
possible to manage human intelligence in groups to achieve results
unattainable by individuals?
The term "collaboratorium" was well chosen as, for me, the expe-
rience resembled being involved in a top-drawer research group
looking into collaborative processes. I met and worked with about
forty people from all over the world who, like me, didn't know much
about tourism or about information technology's connections with
ecological issues. But, in the end, we came up with real proposals
supported by exceptional presentation material, all within one week.
It was exhilarating, and it produced authentic results. The process
* This week-long workshop Uuly 9-15,1995) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology followed a keynote conference on "Where Worlds Converge: Trav-
els Around the Info-Eco Future." The workshop addressed the issue of tourism
and its connections with information technologies and ecological concerns.
TEST CASES IN CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE 199
rekindled my interest in workshop structure and provided me with a
superb example of group thinking in action.
Because it is an organic process and because it unfolds over time,
connected intelligence, whether computer-assisted or not, goes
through different stages. Periods such as the conception of the idea,
its birth in a decision to act, its growth in organization, the first signs
of true innovation, patterns of expansion and contraction, followed
by tentative projections, contradictions, verifications, reassessments,
and final delivery, can all be seen at work in human gatherings. To
observe such intelligence at work, that is, to try to imagine such sep-
arate moments in a continuum, is to see a single current of mind
supported by words and gestures, at some moments self-organizing
and at others being guided to connect to the overall purpose. I have
identified twelve such elements, each of which describes an aspect of
applied connected intelligence.
1. A sense of urgency
Why, how, and where does something like applied connected intelli-
gence begin? A need must be felt and expressed eloquently by some-
one. In the case of the RMIT workshops, the urgency derived from
the need to protect the natural environment in a sustainable econ-
omy, and it is interesting to see how this need was communicated.
Sustainable development is one of Ezio Manzini's prime concerns.
Manzini is a director at Domus Academy, the famous design insti-
tute in Milan. He developed the notion of "Factor 20," the idea that
if our way oflife and development is to be sustained at all, our whole
society, and especially business and government, must achieve a
ratio of 20 to I in reducing the present consumption of natural,
social, and industrial resources. Ezio talked about this at the Interna-
tional Congress for the Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID 93) in
Glasgow, and again at several meetings in Toronto in preparation for
ICSID 97, but the idea really caught fire at a meeting in Febtuary 1995
at the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam (NDI).
For many professionals, ecology and the environment are not
exceptionally sexy issues and it takes some persuasion to get them
200 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
stirred up. The notion of "sustained development" has more of the
dull ring of a UNESCO project than the zing of a cutting-edge business
proposal. The problem of tackling the whole planetary economy in a
responsible way is enormous, disarming, and not immediately ur-
gent to most. What was needed was new food for new thought.
2. A new connection
The novelty of the Nor meeting was in putting together "info" and
"eco," information technologies and ecological considerations.
Somewhere in the back of people's minds and smoothly moving to
the fore was the corresponding idea that information technologies
are themselves organizing along the lines of an ecosystem. It was also
readily apparent that much of the data monitoring and retrieval that
was enabling us to newly perceive the interdependence of a global
ecosystem was provided by information technologies. However,
what the first meeting revealed was that no one knew of any formal
attempt at making a direct, conscious, and sustained connection
between the two. Our job was to make one. That new connection
would be akin to a giant synaptic contact between two largely self-
organizing realms of human experience.
3. A focused and easily accessible area of investigation
While tourism is obviously very familiar in most regions of the
world, it is not something that comes readily to mind in considering
the priorities in ecological prudence. Tourism, however, is perhaps
the most natural-physically experienced-connection between
local and global sensibilities. It affects people everywhere personally,
even those who are not fortunate enough to travel.
4. A task-oriented approach
Even more than a focused theme, we needed an exciting professional
chaHenge.
The chosen strategy was to set up and conduct workshops, but
not let them evaporate in mere talk. The key to the whole process
would reveal itself to be the organizers' insistence that the workshops
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED IN TEL L I G ENe E 20I
develop concrete presentation materials to support their proposals.
Designers could be expected to excel in this area, but it was the prin-
ciple that was important: it isn't the product but the process that
really counts here.
The kind of attention people give to creating objects is quite dif-
ferent from that which they give to talking, or even writing. The
product is a pretext to improve the quality of the process. The need
to produce objects forces the connected intelligence to include con-
nected imagination in its process, something that rarely occurs in a
standard workshop.
In fact, the real problem for the organizers would be how ro man-
age the timing of the various phases of the workshops. While noth-
ing could be rushed at the beginning, there would be great haste
towards the end because of the very concrete demands of the pro-
duction of objects. The focus of mind, too, would be affected by the
search for elegant and meaningful ways to express what turned out
to be rather complex issues.
5. A broad mix of people
In a good workshop, everybody brings more to the process than just
"something to contribute." Each participant is a specific being with
a presence and a behavior that affects the whole process. Personal
intelligence or expertise are only fragments of a whole person. One
of the pitfalls cleverly avoided by the Melbourne workshops was the .
assumption that only qualified experts can contribute effectively to
connected problem-solving. Crowding together the best and the
brightest rarely produces success. The majority of the workshop
members in this case were students, artists, designers, and generalist
thinkers.
In a way, a workshop is not so much a meeting of minds, as a
meeting of persons, and that means bodies, too, and gestures, tone
of voice, and attitudes. The space of the minds' unfolding is that of
the bodies meeting in colloquium. Confrontations between individ-
uals create useful-or disastrous-imbalances in the group. All of
that has to be managed somehow, worked into the melange that will
202 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
produce a truly connected, unified creation. And the mix, of course,
includes not only the participants in the workshops, but everybody
involved in the planning and the executing of the process.
6. A multi-tasking structure
The collaboratorium had more than forty registered participants,
who were organized in five teams with a view to avoiding duplica-
tion of energies. The main workshop theme was "Where the Worlds
Converge": this poetic turn of phrase actually translated as, "How
does the convergence of information technology and ecology affect
tourism?" That general theme was redistributed in five different
subthemes. The five complementary sections bore the following
names:
The Virtual Explorer (touring virtual reality/visiting virtually)
Travels to the Edge (discovering limits as a form of tourism)
The Virtual Museum (space-time data retrieval in cyberspace)
Techno-Touro (ecologically sensitive itinerant shows on demand)
@Home (how far can we go without leaving home)
What is effective and worth noting about these themes is that
they all demand the use of imagination. They demand mental pro-
jections, just as design does. Each represents the frontier of today's
technology, of today's levels of skills and expectations. They imply,
at their center, the role of networks and virtual experiences, but they
adopt different positions.
7. Managing mental energy
Motivating group intelligence is a complex affair. It is a problem of
mental energy, which is why workshops are successful only to the ex-
tent that they have a manageable number of participants.You can nei-
ther teach nor learn very well in large groups because mental energy
scatters easily, like incandescent light. But it bounces and ricochets
extremely productively when it is confined within small, seminar-
like groups.The big hurdle in connected-intelligence management
TEST CASES IN CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE 203
is priming. Mental energy, like the other kind, has to be produced,
pumped up out of its reservoirs. There is a need for a great initial
stimulation and a few repeats during the early phases.
Phase one at RMIT was the briefing. A series of lectures and per-
formances, packed with energy and passion and disguised as a public
conference, set the tone and hinted at the content of what would fol-
low. These were not really pep talks, but rather a series of insights to
whet the mental appetite and challenge further thinking. As the per-
formances concluded, the organizers reminded everyone that the
work was only beginning, and those among the audience who
would not be taking part in the workshops were invited to return to
see the results at the end of the week. Throughout the week, the
workshops would be fed with more input coming from a variety of
sources: guest speakers, slide shows, demonstrations, short visits to a
gallery or a museum, a busy schedule with healthy disruptive effects,
especially at the beginning and in the middle of the week. If the
priming is successful, connected intelligence will run on its own
energy supply through to the end of the project. It could be a sort of
"synaptic thermonuclear effect": if there are enough connections
made at the priming stage, then momentum will come from the
exponentially multiplying interconnections that follow. Mental
energy can therefore be made to grow in groups and to flow. *
8. A hormonal strategy of management
The complementarity of the subthemes ensured that any participant
could go from one workshop to another without losing the thread of
discussion. The novelty of the collaboratorium was to place not one
but two facilitators in each workshop section. One, the "shaker," was
permanently assigned to the same group for the week; the other, the
"mover," was assigned to a single group as well, but was also expected
* An analysis of the flow of mental energy is easily done, and can be documented
and properly tested. It can be carried down to the individual group and should
address the various levels of transistence (resistance and transparency ratios)
each individual participant carries into the common task.
20
4
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
to move about during the afternoon sessions from one group to an-
other, listening and making suggestions. Movers and shakers be-
haved like hormones in a biological system, working at different
speeds in different mental and social territories.
As a mover, I remember dropping in to different groups as if I
were visiting family. The hormonal function here is that the pres-
ence of a person whose job it is to connect patterns from group to
group is enough to change the balance within a group and unblock
energy. The fascinating thing is that you couldn't push your way in
just anywhere. You pretty well had to wait to be invited. The effect
was magnetic, both on me and on the new group. Sometimes, it felt
as if! were an incarnation of the previous group's experience.
9. The huddle
Another successful innovation in the process was that all the movers
and shakers, along with the workshop organizers and support staff,
were required to huddle every morning for about an hour to discuss
the progress and the problems of the sections. The huddle presented
a perfect opportunity to compare notes and find solutions to prob-
lems of any of the groups. It was also a way for the shaker to assess
and monitor the relevance of the work done in his or her assigned
workshop. At these morning sessions, a certain lucidity would estab-
lish itself, even if critical problems were raised and disagreement
arose. The huddle was also the place from where a change of direc-
tion in management could be made, if need be. It was classically
democratic, in the sense that each workshop section-the con-
stituency-was represented by two voices. In return, the clarity
gained at the huddles would feed back into the workshops and
establish useful continuity.
The huddles were where the workshops really came together,
repeatedly, as if to measure themselves in the context of the larger
goals of the whole process. The process of weighing possibilities,
playing out scenarios, testing simulations, and coming up with deci-
sions is called "thinking" when it is practiced in an individual's
mind, and it precisely happened each time the group met for huddle
TEST CASES IN CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE 205
time. Behind the talk, something like a total shape of the relation-
ship between information technologies and ecological concerns in
tourism was being discovered and acted upon. We were working in
real time, taking on responsibilities that, initially, we wouldn't have
thought we could manage.
10. Work-in-progress reports
Once a reasonable amount of time has been allowed for themes,
ideas, and scenarios to be discussed, the process must be crystallized
into decisive action of some sort. This decision cannot be left to a
self-organizing outcome. It has to be taken consciously and some
pressure has to be applied, otherwise, the process will go on without
ripening and bearing fruit. * At the collaboratorium, the teams were
asked at mid-week to present their work in progress and their plans.
This turned out to be a kind of dry run for the work to be developed
later. It was also the first time that each of the groups could really
find out and appreciate what the others were doing.
With a final presentation in prospect, a certain level of rivalry
between the groups was inevitable, and the spirit of competition
really began to set in at that time. In fact the whole collaboratorium
shifted gears. On the following morning, you could see mental
energy rippling in more animated talk, more and better suggestions
and insights, even improved memory, as if the connections had
awakened useful recollections from each individual. Competition
also brought the groups closer together as teams.
II. Final production
Two days before show time, you could feel another change of atmos-
phere. Bodies began to move faster, change places, look for materi-
als, sit up in front of screens: the focus and self-absorption of each
group was riveting. At that point, any pressure coming from outside
a group was found to be rather unwelcome. Ideas, mined ftom a rich
* To overcome the proverbial "writer's block," one solution is to write some-
thing, anything, down on paper.
206 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
lode, were being quickly forged into presentation projects. Design-
ers, programmers, presentation software gurus were coming for-
ward. Doors were now more often closed than opened; people
whispered, or conversed in enigmatic codes. * The free-ranging dis-
cussion and argument of the first three days had yielded to a period
of intense contraction with rapid distillation of ideas and execution
plans. There was energy enough to sustain some until late into the
night.
12. Delivery
When we all assembled on the final Saturday, it felt like an end-of-
the-year high school valedictory and prize distribution. Coming
from adult professionals, there was a distinctively youthful klnd of
excitement in the air. Interestingly enough, while hardly any tech-
nology (except for pens and paper and chalkboards) had been used
to develop and multiply the connected-thinking process itself, the
end products benefited greatly from the skilled use of available high
technology. The teams produced two CD-ROMS, a Web site, and two
slide shows, all of exceptional quality. Two or three are themselves
potential accelerators of connected intelligence.** There is no doubt
that fortunes could and will be made on a dozen of the concrete
ideas that came out of that process.
For me, the message of the Winter School Collaboratorium in Mel-
b04rne is that there is such a thing as connected intelligence and that
it doesn't have to be machine-based. Connected intelligence is all
* One idea developed in my (eam, but not exploited there, found its way via
another mover to another group and became one of the foundations of their
proposal (much to the mock dismay of our team).
** In recognition of the privilege of having shared this experience with them, I
would like to name the people who were parr of (he @Home team: the modera-
tor (shaker) Dimity Reed, the documenters, Niels Peter Flint (designer), Patricia
Picinnini (visualizer), Kevin Murray (writer), Peter Hennessey (photographer),
and the parricipants, Nick Beams, Malcolm Enright, Richard James, Vasilije
Kokotovich, Jesse Reynolds, Michael Sheridan, and Nancy Spanbroek.
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED I N TEL L I G ENe E 207
r o u n ~ us. We have known it in different guises since childhood, but
we have rarely recognized it for what it is because we thought that, as
individual people, we are pretty well impermeable to each other.
Connected intelligence can be gauged in a classroom, in a city, or in a
culture. However, it cannot easily be perceived in such groups be-
cause it works both faster and slower than the individual human
minds, over a different scale of time than that to which we are accus-
tomed. It works in real time, and changes from second to second,
like the thought in your own mind, so that it is next to impossible to
get a single overview of it. However, it is clearly and demonstrably
susceptible to significant improvement when it is purposely man-
aged. Indeed, the real breakthrough in the developing human and
technological networks of connected intelligence is not only that
they promise new avenues to the solution of urgent human prob-
lems, but also that they reveal natural, organic connected intelli-
gence as an age-old resource heretofore unexploited-like electricity,
the airwaves and the atom once were.
TEST CASE #1: MADEIRA
Uta Brandes, one of the stars of German design, teaching, and criti-
cism, had asked me to conduct a week-long seminar with a small
group of design students at the Institute of Design of Cologne. The
choice of date and of theme was up to me. As I was still mulling over
the idea, I happened to give a talk in Funchal, on the island of
Madeira, about "Madeira in the Age ofInformation." My approach
to this theme was inspired by reading about efforts made by the
island government of Majorca to develop an offshore consulting and
development industry for networked services and system integra-
tion. I was particularly interested in the fact that while there are only
270,000 people living on Madeira, there are more than a million
Madeirans living all over the world and most of them still consider
themselves as Madeirans first and nationals of their adopted country
second. I talked about the growing networking industry in Majorca
208 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
and suggested that in the age of information, no island is an island
anymore. I showed a few Web sites already existing on and about
Madeira. I also showed a video of T-Vision. At the end of the con-
ference, Pedro Ventura, the organizer, asked me if I would like to
help him with plans for contents and directions of the Madeira Tec-
nopolo, the high technology scientific research park then under con-
structlon.
At first, I was rather daunted by the proposal, having never tack-
led a project of that scale. Then the idea of making that the theme of
my workshop in Cologne occurred to me. A few weeks later, I was in
Cologne showing a promotional videotape of the plans for Madeira's
Tecnopolo to seventeen baffled design students. Only two of them
could locate Madeira on the map. We started to work on ideas right
away.
My method, which I call "Connected Intelligence Workshops"
(CIW) , is to work on such projects with teams usually made up of a
combination of students, designers, experts and nonexperts, and
whoever is interested in participating. Here is a shortened version of
the text I sent to the participants:
The object of the CIW is to produce one or more presentation
materials to support the development of a cultural, social, or
business project.
Project Description: The project is to find and develop ideas
appropriate for the orientation of the Madeira Tecnopolo, the
high technology research and development center of Madeira,
and to design materials to support presentations to Madeiran's
and European Community authorities for evaluation and assess-
ment.
Objectives: The task of the CIW is to provide suggestions
for contents, displays, multimedia interactive, Web sites, per-
haps virtual reality, and other audiovisual displays. The final
project presentation materials should be either on video or digi-
tal supports (CD-ROM, Web site, video, PowerPoint, or other pre-
sentation). The overall aim of the workshop is to train the
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED I N TEL L I G ENe E 209
participants in handling complex and ambitious projects with a
team constituted with available local resources in personnel and
equipment.
Method: The method of the CIW is inspired from common
practice in industrial design and project management and
involves both experts and nonexperts in a structured working
association over a period of four days.
Process: Participants will be distributed in groups of no less
than five, and no more than ten persons. Each group will be
working-under my direction-on a different theme:
1. The globalllocal connection between Madeira and expatriate
Madeirans.
2. The establishment of an experimental information delivery
free zone.
3. The development of an experimental art and technology re-
search center (two different groups are working on that theme,
one devoted specifically to giving a characteristic Madeiran
identiry to art and technology on the Internet, and the other,
developing a locally based research and design center).
These themes are just examples, not prescriptive suggestions;
the finalizing of the thematic selection will be up to each indi-
vidual group.
In each group, there is a facilitator, one or more travelers, and
an implementer. These positions are to be decided at the first
meeting of each group. The rest of each group is composed of
experts on different pertinent subjects and nonexperts whose
presence and active participation are considered and treated as
contributions of equal importance to those of everyone else. A
general coordinator, assistants, and technical support personnel
are always available on the site of the workshops.
The specific task of the facilitator is leadership. The facilita-
tor takes charge and responsibiliry for the sustained presence,
participation, and active involvement of each member of a
210 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
group. The facilitator stays with the same group from the begin-
ning to the end.
The task of the traveler(s) is to spend the first half of each day
with the original group, bur the second half sessions with
another group of his or her choice. Every morning, the trav-
eler(s) must return to the original group to share what has been
learned elsewhere.
The implementer has the responsibility to keep records of
applicable strategies that have been explored and make sure that
they have real-life potential in the local context of the project.
Every morning, all facilitators, travelers, and implementers
meet with the coordinator to discuss the previous day's progress
and to plan for the present day's work.
Four days later, we had four elegant and polished presentation
materials on the following themes:
1. How to use networks to tighten the connections between
Madeira and expatriate Madeirans. (The group conducted
an Internet search and asked contacts on the island for infor-
mation regarding Madeiran associations in the world, and
created a PowerPoint presentation on how to develop com-
munity networks on the Internet and with Web sites.)
2. How to stimulate multimedia production. The project was to
establish an experimental information broadcast free zone,
using the resources of Madeira's existing cable infrastructure
and testing a wireless video transmission system invented by
radio engineer Leonidas Ferreira (a four-minute video).
3. How to shape and develop an experimental art and technol-
ogy research center. Two different groups worked on that
theme, one, devoted specifically to giving a characteristic
Madeiran identity to art and technology on the Internet (they
created a Web site mock-up), and the other, developing a
locally based research and design center (this group made a
superb multimedia presentation integrating environment,
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED I N TEL L I G ENe E 2II
marine biology, and technological art to reflect some of the
natural and human resources of Madeira).
The seminar ran from December 12-19, 1995. Taking advantage
of the interruption of my teaching duties at the University of
Toronto during Reading Week, I chose to conduct the second work-
shop between February 15 and 21, on location with the principals of
the Madeira Tecnopolo. It happened to be right at the time of
Madeira's wild and woolly Carnival. Seven of the original seventeen
design students came along, invited by the Tecnopolo. In four days,
we designed and developed three new presentations for the local
Madeiran authorities and media. To do this, we reworked the origi-
nal material completely to fit the actual local context as we found it,
covering all the bases required of a feasibility study.
We discovered, for example, that perhaps more than anything
else, we needed to find strategies to encourage a greater number of
Madeirans both on and off the island ro take advantage of new tech-
nologies that the majority (85 percent) either feared or ignored. To
that end, we developed two simple concepts for projects. The first
one was to open a continuous video-conferencing link over two
switched telephone lines between a public area in Funchal and
another one in Lisbon and later in other cities such as Toronto, for
example, where there are many expatriate Madeirans. The proposal
would be an experiment in market stimulation. The basic idea was
to invite the islanders to hear, see, and talk to their relatives at the
other end of the link. Our (as yet unverified) supposition was that
people having this unexpected personal contact via the new tech-
nologies might be better disposed to requests from their own chil-
dren for modest computer equipment. A second research goal of this
project was more specific: it was to monitor and evaluate the com-
munications traffic between Funchal and Lisbon before, during,
and after the establishment of the video-conferencing link. Our
guess during the workshop was that while many people would want
to take advantage of free communications between Funchal and Lis-
bon, many more would prefer to go to the phone for privacy. The
212 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
question then would be: Does the availability of free communica-
tion in public surroundings stimulate or decrease standard tele-
phone usage?
The second project was called the "Madeiran Sea Lions Club."
The object here was to use networks, and especially the Internet, to
establish or reinforce connections between local and expatriate
Madeirans and their communities. There are four, small desert
islands (Desiertas) within sight of Madeira that are home to the last
survivors of a once vast population of Monachus seals, popularly
known as sea lions. The animals congregate on tiny, inaccessible
beaches where they are protected by nature, and now also by law,
from the merciless hunting they were subjected to twenty years ago.
The workshop project proposed setting up a solar-powered camera
trained permanently on beaches likely to be visited by sea lions. The
slow-scan video source would be connected to a Madeira Sea Lions
Web site open to all Madeirans, and anybody else interested in
Madeira, anywhere in the world. The idea was to provide an incen-
tive for people to join the club and return to the Web site frequently,
if only to check the local weather, since they would never know
whether this migh t be the day they would be treated to a rare view of
a sea lion baslcing on one of the Desiertas beaches.
Today, work continues on the next steps involving the actual
implementation of workshop projects. What I learned from this
experience was that the CIW concept could withstand reality checks
and also that there is tremendous value in doing this sort of research
in two stages: one far from the real site so as to allow maximum free-
dom for imagination and conceptualization; the other on location,
to adjust the dreams to local reality.
TEST CASE #2: FLORENCE
I tested the CIW formula again with MediAR Tech, a high technology
and culture trade show at the Fortezza da Basso in Florence, this
time with students from the European American Institute of Sophia
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED IN TEL q G ENe E 213
Antipolis in France. With these students, the format was completely
different because the work was to be done over a longer period,
rather than in a concentrated fashion as in Madeira. I also had to
take advantage of short trips to Europe for other purposes because of
my duties in Toronto. So, as is often the case in French academic
institutions, the workshop was distributed in irregular periods of
two to five hours, separated by long stretches of time. This made
concentration more tentative. What surprised me is how committed
the students showed themselves to be both before and after the
workshops despite the elongation. Here is the syllabus for the work-
shop in Sophia Antipolis:
Objective: In the new economy, many people will soon have to
invent or create their own job. And that will more often than
not involve a good knowledge of the new powering technologies
available to them for that purpose. The course is geared to help
the students to understand the opportunities that lay ahead and
to develop strategies to take advantage of them. So there is first a
theoretical side to it, followed by hands-on practice in a real
project.
Format: The first six lectures address the development of
psychotechnologies, that is, technologies that support and mod-
ifY the use of language-and thus affect the mind-from the
alphabet to the Internet via radio, TV, and computers. Then next
six-hour-Iong lectures address the effects of the recent conver-
gent and networked technologies on business and the economy.
Workshops: The last eighteen hours are devoted to work-
shops to learn how to approach and develop real projects involv-
ing technology, culture, and business. This year's project (Spring
1996) is to run a professional development workshop on the
social, industrial, and economical opportunities afforded by the
new technologies at MediAR Tech, the high technology and cul-
tural goods trade show in Florence (May 28-June 3, 1996). The
task at hand in Florence is to find ways and means of imple-
menting four major policies:
214
CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
1. Wiring and networking the schools and generally the educa-
tional system of Tuscany
2. Connecting the Tuscany Regional area to the larger Mediter-
ranean technopoles such as Barcelona, Montpellier, Sophia
Antipolis, and Athens
3. Promoting the cultural heritage and the artistic tradition of
Tuscany with the new technologies such as multimedia, vir-
tual reality, and the World Wide Web
4. Persuading the larger segments of the Tuscan population
to begin addressing their attention to these new technol-
ogIes
The students will be redistributed in four groups, each
addressing one of these themes. Midterm, each group will show
a pre-project to the rest of the class. At the end of the course,
each group is required to propose a final project presented in one
or more of the following media: video, Power Point presentation,
multimedia, CD-ROM, or Web site. The projects are evaluated
according to whether they are good enough to present to Medi-
ARTech a month later. It is hoped that some, if not all, of the
students, will be able to also repeat their workshops in a concen-
trated fashion in Florence, using their presentation as starting
point. Some of the lectures will be conducted by video confer-
encing from Toronto.
To tell the story of Florence-the exquisite charms and refined
frustrations of working in three languages with more than seventy
participants in the midst of a maddeningly noisy trade show, inter-
rupted by eager and impatient journalists and/or technical break-
downs every four and a half minutes (I timed it)-would require
another book. Suffice it to say that of the six projects developed in
Florence, one is in progress at this time, one is being adapted for
another region in Italy, and three more are undergoing feasibility
studies for implementation in Tuscany. The work in progress is
a Virtual University in Sherwood Towne created by Alpha World
T EST CAS E SIN CON NEe TED IN TEL L I G ENe E 215
expert, Bruce Darner, with my students from Sophia Antipolis.*
Here are some of its goals and principles established by our con-
nected-intelligence group as formulated by Elselien Smit, a Dutch
educational technology consultant who took part in that workshop:
The Virtual Reality University (VRU)
The VRU is based in the Alpha Worlds, a virtual world in which
75,000 registered users live. The VRU is located in Sherwood
Towne which is a virtual city which served as the basis of social
experiments on human behaviors in virtual worlds. The VRU is a
multinational university constructed by the world twenty-four
hours a day in all time zones and where users can be everywhere
and nowhere and are not restricted with being somewhere in
particular. In this environment, an exhaustive database of people
and documents will be constantly updated by the publishing
and reading of documents in the Virtual Library.
Objectives
In general terms, the project aims at distributing knowledge in
multimedia technology and networks among university stu-
dents and professors in order to prepare them for tomorrow's
electronic world and to practice "connected intelligence" in a
structured virtual environment.
More precisely, the VRU has the following aims:
I. To create a transnational university. A university in which
students and professors from the whole world could interact,
and therefore bring together their cultural differences in the
purpose of connected intelligence.
2. To support lifelong learning. Today technologies are evolving
so fast that people constantly need to update their knowledge
* The students who created VRU under the direction of Bruce Darner and con-
sulting with Marc Pesce are Sebastien Can us, Eric Busch, David Villechaise, and
Patrice Arnera.
216 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
in a certain field in order to keep up to date and avoid becom-
ing obsolete. This implies that people should not have to go
to university for five years and then never come back any-
more, but rather that they go through different phases of
training at different periods in their professional lives.
3. To enhance the cooperation between students and profes-
sionals. Through workshops run by professionals, databases,
using real-life simulations, students will get a better insight
of what their future professional career will look like if they
follow such or such kind of studies. The above also implies
an improvement in connected intelligence by sharing and
exchanging information and expertise and an enhancement
of the cooperation between the academic world and the
actual market.
4. To teach multimedia by using multimedia.
Principles
1. Just-in-time education. This principle is the engine to
achieve our aim of providing lifelong learning. The VRU will
in fact supply what people will be asking for, at the time
they'll be asking for it.
2. Learning is exchange, not broadcast. The end of mass com-
munication also implies the end of mass education. VRU'S mis-
sion is to bring back the old model of mentors and followers
and transforms the lecture to a journey of initiation through
the virtual world and towards connected knowledge. Differ-
ent from the academic system, virtual university has a flat hi-
erarchy, there is not a single person with all the knowledge but
every person has the same status. Exchange of information is
the main rule of the virtual university. Learning is sharing
and not only receiving information or knowledge. In this
perspective, the VRU rejects the broadcast model of education
to replace it with a networked model of education.
3. Enviromorphing according to user profile. Enviromorphing
is the fact that the whole environment is shaped by the user's
TEST CASES IN CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE 217
own characteristics. By defining a profile on their first log-in,
users will state their field of interests, and during their jour-
ney, the environment will be constantly reshaped to match
his/her profile. Users will therefore have access only to what
they are really looking for. When people come to the virtual
university, they can choose, very precisely, their own infor-
mation. They can also consult and contact the persons that
they want, following their interests of the moment. This is
feasible by letting the user define his/her profile at anytime as
well as the system recognizing the user's evolution. Default
keywords or criteria can be customized and contain as much
as is needed to levels specified by the need, or remain at a
basic level.
Registration
To register, people give their names, e-mail addresses, working
qualifications, field of interests, and also workshop participa-
tion. People are selected in this register by their profiles. The reg-
ister is the key to find contacts and people in a specific field of
knowledge. In the register, you put out the people which you are
interested for formation of new workshops. In this way, the reg-
ister creates a real database.
There are many more details in our original plans that can be
round on the site itself. The work on the VRU started by our group in
Florence continues today on the Web. The name has been changed
to The U and it is the object of intensive study, observation, interna-
tional collaboration, and improvements.
The upshot of all of this experience is that connected intelligence
works and that it can emigrate from its locus of origin to go on
affecting the lives and minds of people you might never meet.
NOT E S
Prologue
I Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture (Toronto: Somerville House
Publishing, 1995), 63-64.
2 See "Cyberspace and the American Dream, A Magna Carta for the
Knowledge Age," a position paper by Esther Dyson, George Gilder,
George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, release 1.2 posted on the Net, August
22,1994. For updates and further information, e-mail [email protected].
3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964),66.
Chapter One
I For those who would like to pursue this matter further, I recommend
Chapter 2 of my previous book, The Skin of Culture (Toronto: Somerville
House Publishing, 1995), 7-18.
2 Op. cit. , 49-50.
3 Stephen Talbot, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines
in Our Midst (Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly, 1995), 17.
4 Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of TV, (New York: Vin-
tage Books, I986).
5 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital {New York:Vintage Books, 1995) ,I02.
6 Peter Weibel, "New Space in the Electronic Age," Boek voor Instabiele
Media, Stichting V2 Organizatie, 's-Henogenbosch, 1992,72.
21
9
220 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Chapter Two
I Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy, Promise and Peril in the Age of Net-
worked Intelligence (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 20. One-third of
Canadian homes have pes.
2 Douglas Rushkoff, Playing the Future (New York: Harper Collins, 1996),
181. In this very funny, bur seriously researched book, Rushkoff calls
teenagers "screen-agers."
3 Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Cyberdammerung at Wellsprings Systems,"
Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1996), II5.
Chapter Three
1 Katherine N. Hayles, "Embodied Virtuality or How to Put Bodies Back
into the Picture," Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),1.
2 Ibid., 2.
3 Further information on "ALIVE" and "Hamsterdamer" can be found on
the Net at <<http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/projects/alive>>.
4 Sandra Farran, "Virtual Spaces," Maclean's, June 17,1996,46.
5 Turkle, op. cit., 268.
6 "Technosphere" can be found at <<http://lcp20.lond.inst.ac.ukltechnos-
phere.
7 Mark D. Pesce, "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace,"
published on-line at
27
8 Turkle, op. cit., 170.
Chapter Four
1 Susan Kozel, "Virtual Reality: Choreographing Cyberspace," Dance The-
atreJourna!, vol. II, (1994).
2 http://www.dds.hl
NOTES 221
Chapter Five
I Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu," Wired, June 19% 140.
2 T. H. Nelson, Literary Machines, 9.J.I (Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1965), IS.
3 Raymond Hammond, Digital Business, Surviving and Thriving in an On-
line World(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 14.
4 Steve Steinberg, "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)," Wired, May 1996, II3.
5 Ibid.
6 Howard Besser, "From Internet to Information Superhighway," Resisting
the Virtual Lift, the Culture and Politics of Information, ' eds. James Brook
and lain Boal (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 67.
7 Idem, 156-57.
8 Steinberg, ibid., II3.
9 Op. CiL, 180.
10 Ibid.
II Ira Sager, "The Race Is on to Simplify," Business Week, June 24, 1966, 45.
12 Pierre Levy, Qu'est-ce que Ie virtue!? (Paris: La decouverte, 1995), 41.
13 Stephen L. Talbot, The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the
Machines in Our Midst (Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly, 1995), 360.
14 Plato, The Phaedrus, par. 256.
IS Op. CiL, p. 210.
16 Michel Bernard, "Hypertexte: La troisieme dimension du language, "TEXTE,
13lr4 (1993): 5
Chapter Six
I Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (New York:
Everyman, 1962), 145.
2 Nicholas Negroponte, "Products and Services for Computer Networks,"
Scientific American, September 1991, III.
3 George Gilder, Life Mter Television (New York: W W. Norton and Co.,
1994),23
4 Warren Caragata, "News, One Byte at a Time," Macleans, January 29,
1996,34.
James Fallows, "Navigating the Galaxies," The Atlantic Monthly, April
1996, 105.
222 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Chapter Seven
I B. W Powe, The Solitary Outlaw (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys,
1987),16.
2 Robert Cook, co-director of Technology, Education Commons, OISE,
University of Toronto, quoted in "End of Chapter?" The University of
Toronto Bulletin, (August 19, 1996): 8.
3 The Economist, October 16,1993, I05
4 Joost Kist, "The Role of Print on Paper in the Publishing House of the
Future," Incidental paper, Program on Information Resources Policy,
Harvard University (December 1993).
5 Robert Bothwell, "End of Chapter?" The University of Toronto Bulletin
(August 19, 1996): 8. Allegedly, the argument of one sultan who ordered
the torching of the Library of Alexandria around the eighth century A.D.
was: "lfit's in the Koran, then we have the Koran; ifit's not in the Koran,
we don't need it, so burn it." Noah Kennedy (the Industrialization of Intel-
ligence) suggests that we take this legend with a grain of salt and that "a
competing theory ascribes the same crime to fanatical Christians cen-
turies before."
6 G. M. van Trier, "Information 2000: A Dutch View," The Electronic
Library, vo!' IO, no. 3 Oune, 1992).
7 James Larue, "The Library of Tomorrow: A Virtual Certainty," Computers
in Libraries, vol. 13, no. 2 (February, 1993): 16.
8 Kenneth Dowlin, "Public Libraries in 2001," Information Technology and
Libraries (December 1991): 318 and 320-21.
9 Colin Steele, "Millennial Libraries: Management Changes in an Electronic
Environment," The Electronic Library, vo!. II, no. 6 (December, 1993).
IO John Corbin, "Technology and Organizational Change in Libraries,"
Library Acquisitions, vol. 16,349-353.
II Speech to the U.S. Senate, as quoted by Colin Steele, op. cit., 394.
12 John Blegen, "Beyond Access: Implications of the Information Age for
the Public Library," The Future of Books (1993): 459.
13 Mark Surman, "From VTR to Cyberspace: Jefferson, Gramsci and the
Electronic Commons" (May 1994). For more information e-mail to msur-
[email protected].
NOTES 223
Chapter Eight
I Helen Searing, quoted in "Old Images, New Metaphors: The Museum in
the Modern World" (part 3), "Ideas," CBC Transcripts, 1982, 20.
2 Marjorie Halpin, idem, 22.
3 Thierry de Duve, "La condition Beaubourg," reprint from Critique, no.
426, quoted in Lifpoque, La mode, La morale, la passion, aspects de tart
d'aujourd'hui, 1977-1987 (Paris: Publications du Centre Georges Pompi-
dou, 1987), 40I.
4 Paul Virilio, "Images publiques, "in "Theatres de la memoire, " Traverses, no.
40 (April 1987): 38-53.
5 From the catalogue "Les Immateriaux, "Paris, Centre de Creation Indus-
trielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (March-July 1985).
6 Jean Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique el La mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976),
176.
7 Liz Addison, quoted by John Bentley Mays in "Getting in Touch," Globe
and Mail (Toronto), April 9, 1987, section C.
8 Marjorie Halpin, op. cit., 23. In his Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and
Hearing, Anton Ehrenzweig supported the thesis that the creation and the
acceptance by the consumers of new harmonies of color and sound were
not due solely to biological or mathematical laws but to people's tenden-
cies to reorder their sensory responses according to the experiences they
had been exposed to over time. Thus, what was once deemed to be discor-
dant would eventually become pleasurable after some repetition.
9 Marshall McLuhan, op. cit., 78.
10 Marjorie Halpin, ibid., 23.
Chapter Nine
1 David Kline, "The Embedded Internet," Wired, October 1996,98.
2 <http://www.ffly.com>
3 <http://www.ideosphere.coffi>
.4 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems
and the Economic World (Addison-Wesley, 1994), 26.
5 Kelly, op.cit., 20.
6 MIT'S Media Lab Web site <http://www.media.mit.edu> Autonomous
Agent Group, posting May 24, 1996.
224 CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
Chapter Ten
1 Robert McIlwraith, "The Feelings Economy," unpublished paper, a per-
sonal communication, August 1996.
2 Noah Kennedy, The Industrialization of Intelligence (Unwin, 1989), 6.
W Brian Arthur, "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business,"
Harvard Business Review, July-August 1996, 1OJ. (I am grateful to Tom
Strong for bringing this article to my attention.)
4 Ibid.
5 op. cit., 20I.
6 Op.cit., 104.
7 Walter S. Baer, 1973. "Cable Television: A Summary Overview for Local
Decision Making." National Science Foundation Research Applied to
National Needs Program, 134-NSF. Santa Monica: Rand, quoted by
Howard Besser in "From Internet to Information Superhighway," Resist-
ing the Virtual Life, The Culture and Politics of Information, eds. James
Brook and lain Boal (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 60.
Chapter Eleven
I W Wayt Gibbs, "Lost Science in the Third World," Scientific American
(August 1995): 92.
(Continued from front flap)
be the next step in the evolution of human
in telligence.
Updating the communication critique tradi-
tions of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan,
Derrick de Kerckhove focuses his erudition
and imagination on issues raised by this grow-
ing ecology of computer interaction.
Connected Intelligence is as prescient a road
map to the future as we can hope to have for
the present.
Derrick de Kerckhove is a Professor in the
Department of French and Director of the
McLuhan Program in Culture and Technol-
ogy at the University of Toronto.
Wade Rowland, who edited this book, is an
author who writes and lectures extensively on
new media.
COVE R DESI GN : GORDON ROBERTSON
COVER ART : ANDREAS ZARETZKI
AUTHO R PHOTO: CHROMAKEY