Dossier, Volume 14 #4

Connected Minds, New Integration

An interview with Derrick de Kerckhove

Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and professor of French language at the University of Toronto, keeps a close watch on the impact of computer communications. He is the author of The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality (Toronto: Somerville House, 1995). Dr. de Kerckhove was interviewed in late June by Compass associate editor Mary Rose Donnelly. The following is an edited transcript of that interview.

Mary Rose Donnelly: You've talked about the printing press and the effect it had on culture and civilization. Are today's technologies having similar effects?

Derrick de Kerckhove: Computer Undo Button

What I have worked on particularly is the impact of the alphabet on creating a private consciousness and a kind of closed-in psychological realm. That was part of the reason why the Reformation was followed by so many splits in the churches. Different people grabbed control of the meaning of the old scriptures. Oral language is controlled by both the receiver and the sender, whereas writing is completely controlled by the individual. The elaboration of its meaning is entirely private property. So taking control of language via the alphabet was one of the most powerful individualizing effects of writing. And it shattered the unity of the oral church.

Today we have seen several shifts in the relationship between the word and people. Radio gave power back to tribal chiefs, except this time without the old model of dialogue between the tribe and the chief. Here the chief has no dialogue, but issues orders as a dictator. The renewal of fundamentalism in Islam comes from the use of cassettes and radio and electrifying the minarets. Television also represents a form of guarding the word, one that leaves very little critical judgement to the viewer. This is very different from the effects of books.

Mary Rose Donnelly: In that the communication is one-way?

Derrick de Kerckhove:Yes, television is a one-way medium, and that is very critical in comparing it with computers. What you watch on your television screen is basically not your responsibility, except for the zapper if you have one. For a long time we didn't have a zapper, but even a zapper is a minimal form of response. It's a raw form of criticism.

Computer Help Button

The most powerful screen is one where you're responsible for the content with the machine, and that's the computer. At the computer screen you negotiate the meaning with the machine and whatever appears on your screen is part machine and part your stuff. You share meaning with a very powerful accelerating device. The writing system used in the West that was developed by the Greeks and the Romans had a fantastically powerful accelerating effect on language, on the one hand, and on individual minds on the other. People could start thinking on their own and do more thinking than when they were simply learning all the oral lore by rote.

Now we're not only having our minds accelerated by computers, but we also have these computers connected to one another by telephone, so that we connect minds together for the first time in the history of technology. We've always connected minds together in a physical way--people gathering together generate some form of mental consensus that you can call a form of connected mind. But now that you do it by the accelerated media of computer networks, you have a situation of connected minds with huge access to information of different kinds, and that has to create new conditions. I'm not quite sure what religious consequence will attend that sort of change. I'm still working on that.

Mary Rose Donnelly: What are your thoughts so far?

Derrick de Kerckhove: For the moment I'm quizzical about it all. I'm not sure that there's a whole lot of spirituality online. I don't think that technology does that. What it does is favour a certain kind of connection over another. I'm interested in telepresence--what is presence and what is telepresence, and how much of presence is still in telepresence. Presence has always been part of the fundamental religious experience--religion is the connection. And so, what is the realm that is opened up by these access routes? I don't know. I know about some things that have been tried. I know that there is an automated confessional online. An artist from Montreal put it there. I'm not sure it distributes an absolution you can trust, but hey, who am I to criticize? I also know of several religious associations. There was a memorial to the people who had died in the Challenger by the United Church of Christ in the United States. They connected all over the world in prayer and in mutual support. And I think some members of the families of the people who had died were there, as were some of their students. It was quite a moving thing.

Another example would be a wedding that took place in Sherwood City, a three-dimensional city that stays online and can be seen from whatever angle you choose to approach it. The buildings are there semipermanently for anyone to visit and the only person who can unmake a building is the person who built it.

Computer Undo Button

In that city you can send characters--avatars as they call them, figures of yourself or electronic masks that move about in the space. In May the first wedding took place in Sherwood City: a clergyman married a woman and a man who were in two different spots, and they had 400 avatars milling about in the church. The chapel had been built by a designer and that chapel is still there and it's in memory of the wedding of these two. Well, you start asking yourself questions, like: Who's going to consecrate this chapel? If the chapel can't be unbuilt, does it stay as a digital monument not just to the memory of those two, but to a certain style, a certain epoch, or a certain sense of place that is typically California?

Mary Rose Donnelly:If computer networking allows a vast exploration of different ideas or faiths or traditions, do you think we'll be able to discriminate on our own? Will an increase in information be synonymous with an increase in knowledge?

Derrick de Kerckhove: I don't think that data is enough for anything. Where is the wisdom we've lost in information; where is the information we've lost in data--who said that? It sounds like an Eliot thing. I think the context is all, and I think that religious matters and spirituality have much more to do with presence or absence than they have to do with arguments and logical reasoning or information. If you are more informed, are you better off spiritually? Very often it's the exact opposite: the more data that you contain in your head the less room there is for any kind of real contact or any real presence with anything.

I think spirituality will become more powerful in the future rather than less, because what is needed now is a form of guidance at new levels of integration. Two or three things are happening now in a very deep, fundamental way. One is that we are now as human beings, as a species, dealing with the fundamentals of life and matter. We've gotten to the core of matter, or are getting there. We've gotten to the code of life, or are getting there. And we can turn it all into information. When you have these three master codes--the subatomic code, the genetic code and the digital code--you realize that it's all in your mind. That is, whatever you think of doing with these things is what's going to happen. And so your thinking and your feeling and your total being become much more involved as an indicator rather than just survival, which was our previous teacher. We don't have a good teacher any more for how to behave. We vaguely recognize that if we go on spoiling the planet, if we go on bumping one another off and selling arms and planting mines in the Earth, we simply won't improve anything. Only the jerks will survive for a short time and then everyone will die.

So the new thing is the planet. You can get online and see a satellite's-eye view of the planet for the last half hour. That's something very big that we didn't have before. The planet is unified so that it becomes the new basis of survival, and that's what satellites and computers and communications have done for us. It is a very powerful and mystic and cosmic and classic and religious kind of thing. No wonder the astronauts who landed on the moon described a religious experience on seeing the Earth. Suddenly you see it all as one, and it's your place and it needs protection from your group, and this is very significant.

Computer Help Button

In the old days we could be satisfied with imitating past models--the Christ figure being a perfect past model to continue imitating--or Buddha. We've had many masters as role models of behaviour in worlds where our principal issue was survival. Now we have yet another level to integrate in our consciousness and we don't have any role models. We still have the Christian models but we don't have role models for these large changes. Ultimately religions come back, if only because they've always contained something way better than our dog-eat-dog or law of the demand of the market. Now we need role models for the powers that we have and also for the thoughts we have, because the world becomes what we behold in our minds.

Mary Rose Donnelly: Our thoughts take on active properties?

Derrick de Kerckhove:Yes, if we behold the world as a sorry mess with 80 per cent starving while 20 per cent take advantage of them, and if we see it as a place that will forever be stuffed with mines and polluted air, well, that's the way it will be. But if we see it as a place where we have alternative ways of satisfaction, other ways of connecting, then we will make it that way.

Mary Rose Donnelly: The breaking of the master codes and the proximity between thinking and doing--these are incredibly significant shifts for civilization.

Derrick de Kerckhove:We are definitely into things that have the ring of apocalypse. In terms of the powers that are in the hands of just about anybody, it's quite frightening. We all could do so much harm, and we don't quite know yet how to do a lot of good.

Mary Rose Donnelly: In your quiet waking hours, do you ever worry about this?

Derrick de Kerckhove:I never worry. Actually, I'm full of faith. I let a whole lot of things happen and fall in place. This is for me part of processing at a higher level. These days any spirituality for me has to integrate all of my being, not just my intellectual rumination.

Mary Rose Donnelly: Can the spiritual quest happen in a faith community online?

Derrick de Kerckhove: The presence I'm talking about could very well be a telepresence, a presence to each other of two people communicating, whether lovers over the telephone, or business people in a board room by videoconferencing, or the meeting of avatars in the 3-D model city. There are so many varieties of presence.

When I began to work out the details of this in 1982, I was doing research on televangelism and whether I would recommend that the Catholic Church jump into this. And at the end I said I cannot make any recommendations because ultimately the Christian message has gone from person to person. The medium is the voice here, a human voice, human presence, human touch, the healing touch. The human presence was the guarantee of some sort of transference of spirituality. Whether you can do the same by Internet remains to be seen.

Mary Rose Donnelly: How will the technology use us?

Derrick de Kerckhove: That is something that was not asked by our forebears when it came to the effect of the alphabet. And that resulted in several hundred thousand people killing one another in the religious wars. The effects of radio, both in Rwanda and during the Second World War, were also pretty murderous. One should ask oneself about the effects of the technology, but it's both a necessary and a vain question. It's necessary to the extent that it would be foolish not to learn from the question to evaluate the effects of previous media. It's vain because it's the blind spot of all blind spots. What will this medium do to me? It's just arrived--how can I tell?