De Kerckhove Derrick_Connected Intelligence

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction Prologue

PART I

IX

xv XXI

1NTERACTIVITY

CHAPTER I

The Business ofInteractivity

CHAPTER 2

The Biology ofInteractivity

17

3

CHAPTER

3

Person, Real and Virtual

37

CHAPTER

4

Presence, Real and Virtual

57

PART 2

HYPERTEXTUALITY

CHAPTER 5

All About Hypertext

77

6

The Future of News

97

CHAPTER

CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER

8

The Future of the Book

107

Museums, Real and Virtual, and the Tyranny of "Point of View"

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

19 1

APPENDIX

Test Cases in Connected Intelligence: How to Run a Productive Workshop Notes

197 21 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

COMMUNICATUS INTERR

PTUS

November 5 as the day when, in I9 88 , 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 Centre 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 on ly 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 inreresting 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

I

CELEBRATE

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 sh~lte~'e~ by the whole thing, but, i of serving_Ille wi!:h thC;;!f.9st p~{nflJl vet:ifl._cation of MurRhx's Law ("if it can bre~k down 1 tt at thd ~or~t'PQssiQt~' / time . .. "), my disk?i:Jr tur~e~rout to be blessi~g.c As Eckart Wintzen, the celebrated founder of BSO, a Dutch System Integration Company now restructured under the name Origin, 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 "gall~~t(faif~~e." Eckart, with his typically visionary approach to technology, saw something interestingly "communicational" in Transinteractivity and invited me to the 1990 Infolutie on Communications. For the 1991 Infolutie, Eckart asked fI)..e to write Braintram~.~~~a~_~first 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 stimulating my thinking. I would like to thank all the persons and organizations 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 dedicate 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 undergraduates in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, who make me think about their future which is so evidently tied to

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