I am specifically interested in the relationship between technology and psychology. I address this issue by first approaching the question of how media edit the environment, how they change our environment for us, and as they do that how they also edit the user, how people are being modified by the use of the media that they actually are exposed to every day. For example, one of the questions that must be examined is, considering how much time we spend in front of them, what are the effects of the screens of TV, computer, video, palm-top and cellular phones upon how we live, feel and think. Screens have become so intimate, and are getting so much more intimate, that they are a bit like a biotechnology. I also address issues of cognition and media and how new technologies affect our conscious and unconscious strategies of information-processing. In the networked media, for instance, there are many cognitive events that support observations about the difference between individual, collective and connective forms of consciousness that are now developing and which are evident in the cultural context of Internet.
Media as interfaces
Media function as interfaces between language and mind. They also affect
the body because they affect the body image. They position language and thought
inside and outside the body. Ask yourself if when you feel something you just
feel it inside your body, or if it is shared between the inside and the outside.
In Antiquity, archaic Greeks believed that people were not thinking but "breathing"
information, not even looking nor hearing it, but breathing it in and breathing
it out. This makes sense for a culture that equates breathing with life itself.
Bodies are recognized to be dead, that is unfeeling, when they have stopped
breathing. So if breathing and knowing are integrated in one's perception of
what knowing is, then one is more likely to "feel" information, "feel"
knowledge, as opposed to seeing it, hearing it, or thinking it. Another pertinent
question today is: does your thinking happen inside or outside of your head,
or both ways? Since more and more intelligence is outside our head, more and
more of it is shared between the user and the world outside. How much of your
feeling and your thinking, whether you're Canadian, Swiss or Japanese, a scientist
or an ordinary person living an ordinary life, how much of your feeling and
your thinking are your own, under your control, or are already a by-product,
a part of a consciousness industry, as Hans Magnus Eizenberger called the industry
of radio and television. Consciousness industries are those that market not
only our attention but also the contents of our thoughts and desires. TV certainly
plays a dominant role in collectivizing some of our most intimate reflexes,
such as, for example, our automatic associations between eroticism and the desirability
of products. TV, of course, is supported in this effect by all the other media,
including printed media. Today however, as Internet allows us to answer back
to our screens, to share with them the responsibility of what they contain,
what is the status of the consciousness industry? If TV can be said to manage
-or industrialize- the collective contents of our minds, does the Internet manage
the connective processes of our minds ? Can a machine lay out our mental processes
for us? In other words, can the way we think be reproduced and organized for
us by technology? And do we have control?
"Screenology"
All of the above is predicated on the dominance of the screen. The screen
has now become the necessary entry point for connected information processing.
The first step was the privatization and the internalization of the mind in
individual bodies. In the history of writing in the West, there appears a kind
of privatization of the mind as if there was a screen inside our head, as if
cognition was happening exclusively inside the head. When I read a novel, the
information comes in and I'm thinking about it within my mind. In fact, I am
translating the words into sensory content and my mind makes a kind of psycho-sensorial
synthesis to build the images that behave as similes of a real sensory experience.
I imagine places and people. I make these people move in my head as if I were
projecting an interactive and flexible film onto an internal screen. This private
information-processing activity has been powerful enough to support the redistribution
of consciousness itself from the actors of a collective oral tribe to the individuals
of independent communities. Everybody has been allowed to develop different
contents and processes. Everybody could potentially become a scientist, a writer.
Fiction would become an experiment or a model of living and thinking that was
provided by a single individual, the author, to any number of other individuals,
the readers.
With television, the cognitive situation has changed radically. Thanks to TV,
all the people who are watching it at the same time experience together the
same content. Thus the screen is the necessary portal where the public mind
is made up. And this relationship to the television screen reverses the orientation
of the mind. With TV, my mind goes to the screen to enter in the world that
it shows me. When I'm reading, I'm thinking from words that bring the world
in my mind. When I'm in front of the screen, I reverse this and I'm externalizing
my thinking process, which is a radical difference compared to our traditional
approach. Screens externalize the psycho-sensorial synthesis. With computers,
we negotiate the meaning that appears on the screen and that allows many among
our cognitive strategies to relocate outside of our private mind. So what we
are looking at is a form of emigration of the mind from the head to the screen.
Not all the mind goes to the screen, but a large part of it, and there it meets,
of course, other minds.
Having lost control over the screen during the television era, we are beginning
to recover control with the computer. "Screenagers" is an expression
invented by Douglas Rushkoff, modeled on the well-known category of "teenagers."
The screenagers are kids who are using television as an interactive medium;
they are "playing television" with video games, with the Internet
and CD-ROMs and so on. They know how to control the screen, while their parents
are content to just watch it. So we've had an introduction with the zapper and
the mouse and the keyboard. The computer brings a full recovery of control over
the screen so that now when we use a computer we share the responsibility of
producing meaning. We produce meaning together with the machine and with other
people.
Media "edit" the environment
Then how do media edit the environment? First of all, they select the object.
Whether they are transportation media or communication media, they frame the
situation and they organize the physical environment and the use of specific
objects. Just as cinema and photography select and frame the objects and sceneries
of their content, they frame the environments in which these objects are perceived.
Television doesn't frame the world the same way as film; film does it differently
from photography; photography does it very differently from the World Wide Web.
So the framing of the object is very clearly an organization of the information
for you. Thus media control the place and the duration of exposure to the user--where
these things happen, for example whether it's inside the house or outside. Television
changes both the size and the use of the space of our daily lives. We know that
it extends our perceptual reach; it brings the world inside the home, and it
does so "live", that is in "real-time". Real time is not
really a physical reality, but technological definition that is becoming a kind
of psychological experience. It is the emotion of synchronicity and the impression
of instant responsivity that, of course, is an illusion, because reaction-time,
the human appreciation for instant response is itself a measurable and constantly
changing variable. On another plane, TV controls the time of exposure, how long
you spend with it. For example, watching television for the average viewer is
an occupation that runs almost like a clock. Most people do their watching at
very specific times. You may feel that you are free, but generally you have
a rendezvous with your TV set at a specific time during the day.
The other thing to observe is how media deal with the images of the world: for
example, photography and cinema edit the environment and they cut it in little
frames. In cinema these frames are put together to create a sequence of images.
Television is much faster than that: it scans the world. We too, by the way,
are being scanned. TV scans both the object and the subject of tele-vision.
Put in another way, you can compare the scanning process in bokks and in TV.
When you read a book, whether it's in Hebrew, Japanese or English, you are moving
your eyes on the page; you are in control of the movement and you do the scanning.
But when you are watching television, the movement is done by the cathode ray
tube that guns the viewer in regular sprays of interlaced scans of photons.
So pushing this argument a little, it is as if TV read you. The medium is the
message in television; it follows the structure of how television works on the
consciousness of the watcher. And the mass culture that follows television,
the mass creation and distribution of objects and sights follow the structure
of the scanning process. As Marshall McLuhan observed repeatedly, this scanning
of the viewer is a kind of massage, a subtle tactile experience that has a calming
effect. The beam of the television screen caresses the viewers and, by the same
token, homogenizes their differences, socializing them in the same mode that
we call "mass culture".
Media edit the user
How do media edit the user? They determine the stimulus response ratio, that
is the speed with which people process the information, how long they process
the information, how much of the information they actually bring closure to.
In psychological theory, closure is the act of consciousness that recognizes
and records an item of information as worthy of notice and connects it with
previous context of some personal concern. Not all media, however, allow people
to achieve closure to the same extent. Television, for example, works too fast
to give much time for closure. It's not like reading a book. When you're reading
a book, you can close on every sentence and make sense of that sentence. In
television you don't have time. Indeed, media determine the attention span.
You can and you have to develop a fairly large attention span in front of a
text. The text is fixed; it doesn't move, and you can grab as much meaning as
you need in the amount of time that you need in order to grab that meaning;
people can read a whole paragraph at once, or go back to the beginning and read
the same sentence more than once to deepen their understanding of it. With television,
the scope of your attention span is partly determined by the continuous action
of the scanner.
TV advertising has developed from the early spots that lasted 60 seconds and
more to the present trends of 15 seconds and less. Much of television action
in serials and sitcoms seems to emulate the method of the stand-up comedian
who strings jokes and reference too quickly for us to fully register the contents.
We laugh mainly because of the speed, not because of the content. The purpose
of television advertising -and all television generally- is to keep us in a
receptive, not a critical mode. So when we watch television, all the time it
raises questions that we never have time to give answers to. That makes us open
all the time, and thus available for commercial indoctrination. So we become
open victims to television advertising. That is the reason why television can
create a collective mentality. On the other hand, that is not the case with
computers or with the Internet because both media restore the possibility of
closure.
In principle, all screen-based images should have this effect. Because it requires
and combines both reading and viewing strategies, Internet can actually increase
the attention span. Even the quality of attention is improved with Internet.
That is because we share the information and the responsibility of the stream
with Internet, so the span of attention given to any object is potentially larger,
longer and deeper. On line, the user decides how much time to spend on anything
appearing on the screen. With Internet closure is effected at any time when
we interact with the information on the screen whether it is to write e-mail
or search the web. This affords us a fair degree of psychological independence.
Media manage the sensory responses of the user
Media determine the user's sensory biases too. It is apparent both in the
art and the history of the West during Antiquity and again from the Renaissance
to the Modern Times that the dominant sensory bias has been vision. That is
an effect of alphabetic literacy. Today, thanks to electricity, the dominant
visual bias is challenged by a tactile bias. By connecting itself to itself
in the flows of electrons that touch each other instantly, electricity puts
the whole world constantly in touch with itself.
What we're looking at in Virtual Reality, 3-D graphics and all interactive media
generally is the reverse of the Renaissance perspective. It is clear that in
the Western art, during the Renaissance, perspective became a foundation for
visual representation of space. Perspective was the formal representation of
space structured by binocular vision when the analytical side of visual experience
and cognition became more important, more significant than just the perceptual
side. This is a consequence of the alphabet that redistributed the cognitive
priorities of the visual system from just "grabbing" (quite literally,
the eye "grabs" the visual object as in "frame-grabbing")
to analyzing the objects of vision.
What is developing today is the exact opposite: electricity brings back the
priority of grabbing over analyzing. During the Renaissance, artists and architects,
as well as their patrons resorted often to the technique of "trompe-l'oeil".
We find much evidence of it in churches and palaces from the 15th to the 18th
centuries. Trompe-l'oeil means to simulate tactile experience by vision alone.
So, for example, while the walls of the churches and the chateaus of the Renaissance
are built with real stone, when the top of the wall begins to connect with the
ceiling, the carvings of real stone give way to painted simulations at a certain
point where the acuity of the eye begins to recede. Surely because paint is
less expensive than stone, but also because there was a real art and skill in
developing the technique, the artist paints a simulation of the stone carvings,
in the exact proportions, so that it looks so real that it literally "fools
the eye". Thus, trompe-l'oeil is a kind of conquest of touch by vision.
3D is the exact opposite. By making space perception the effect of a variable
of distance within the field, inviting a change of point-of-view to appreciate
intervals, 3-D makes the visual an object destined to tactile appreciation.
Trompe-l'oeil makes touch visual, while 3-D makes vision tactile. 3-D is in
fact the restoring in visual form of a tactile experience.
Perspective removes the viewer from the view. 3D brings the viewer back in.
Perspective does the same thing as theatre. Why did the ancient Greeks invent
theater? To expel the spectator from the spectacle, to remove him or her from
the spectacle. This was the great Brechtian insight about theatre that its true
nature requires not the total participation requested by Artaud, but a strong
distancing effect to enable the viewer to be detached from the object of reflection
(the stage, of course, being one typical reflection, a symbolic interpretation
of the object). Interactivity is properly Artaud's child as it brings the interactor,
the user, back into the process. Interactivity in fact prevents the user from
keeping his or her distance, that distance which is the judgment distance, the
critical stance, the intellectual distance. So interactivity may herald the
end of theory and of the theoretical dissociation between the knower and the
object of the known. In this manner and others, electricity has reversed many
aspects of literacy from which we have drawn our main cognitive strategies.
The other interesting thing is that with the mouse, the keyboard and the pointer,
we penetrate the screen in a tactile way: we put our hands in the world of thinking.
It is not just like perspective, theater or theory, where we stand outside looking
in, looking at something external. We are now getting into the information by
literally grabbing it with our hand, with the links and with the pointer, and
so on. Interactivity, in fact, is much closer to touch than to vision. Interactivity
is variation on different kinds of tactile experiences, some very subtle, some
not so subtle, some with very strong grain, others with finer grain.
How media edit the mind
Moreover, media entertain an intricate relationship with language, and language
entertains an intimate relationship with our consciousness, so that the media
themselves are constantly in communication between our mind and the world outside.
The marriage of language and electricity on the telegraph, which has led to
the World Wide Web, is probably one of the most mythical experiences of our
contemporary era. I say mythical because, like in many myths of ancient cultures
that isolate numinous powers and names them or, in the case of ancient Greek
and Roman myths, anthropomorphizes them, the telegraph is a meeting place for
two fundamental powers of our time, speed and complexity. It was the first technology
where maximum speed, that of electricity, was combined to maximum complexity,
that of language. The children of this marriage, the children of language and
electricity, are being born every day today.
Because of this intimate relationship with language, media also determine some
of the basic structures, or the fundamental coordinates of our minds. By giving
us all the same content at the same time, television provides us with a collective
consciousness that behaves as an extension of our private consciousness. TV
provided us with a full education to the world of the screen; it's the education
to a form of cognition that is shared in different ways according to different
screen-based media. But of course we cannot participate in television, we cannot
talk back to it, and the big difference with computers and the Internet is that
we can. The kind of consciousness we exercise with Internet has to be different
from that which rules our mind from the television screen.
How we organize time and space both in our minds and in our lives depends on
how media themselves treat time and space. Western people, for example, are
trained unconsciously by the alphabet to imagine everything in relation to a
mental horizon, with preference for horizontal bases as opposed to Chinese or
Japanese people who will tend to favor vertical structures (as is abundantly
evidenced by their calligraphic and pictorial traditions). Likewise, the temporal
modes of phonetically literate cultures are influenced by the need to combine
one after the other phonemes to make syllables and syllables to make words and
words to make sense. This one-way (quasi irreversible) process of linear combinations
invites western minds to structure their appreciation of time in a linear, historically
oriented, non-reversible manner. Japanese people tend not to emphasize a clear
separation between time and space. It is quite difficult for a Westerner to
really understand the complex integration of time and space that the Japanese
call "MA".
The "objective imaginary"
Maybe virtual reality is the place where time and space are reunited. In
VR, space is created by gesture that in turn takes time. Even at the merely
technical level of VR processing, there is a constant trade-off between visual
(spatial) resolution and flow (temporal) of gesture. Because of the limitations
of the integrating powers of the processors, the more you give to one the more
you take from the other. Again a comparison between the cognitive strategies
involved in reading and in experiencing VR is in order: virtual reality puts
your head in a world of combined time and space ("real" time and "virtual"
space), whereas reading puts a world made of space and time clearly distinguished
in your head. VR brings the viewer into the view as opposed to books, which
put the view into the viewer. It's the exact opposite. While the literate process
encourages the development of the private, subjective imagination, the virtual
reality world creates an objective imaginary of place and time. That is a kind
of imagination that you can share with other people. It's imaginary because
it is a reproduction of something that is not real. And even when VR is entirely
based on "real" things or places or data, even when virtual reality
is used only to augment the real world, it is still a kind of an objective imaginary
environment, just as when we are thinking about the real world in our own mind
it becomes a subjective imaginary environment.
Mind-machine-direct-connect
Media also determine what kind of associations we entertain with the various
contents that they produce for us. For example, today the World Wide Web gives
us an incredible environment of permanently available associations. We are used
to cultivate associations inside our head; now we can cultivate them outside
and we can have access to enormous quantities of potential recombination of
information. SONY, Olympus and other manufacturers make little goggles to connect
directly to your computer. This new display technology, now available on the
shelf, provides the user with the equivalent of a 60-inch frame at about a meter
distance in front of the eyes with fairly high definition. These "eyephones"
bring a new intimacy between the screen and our mind. There is a direct connection
as close as we can get. The eyephones close the gap between the mind and the
screen. You're not just in front of screen; the screen is slapped right on to
your face. And now we are about to get even closer with "vitrionics".
Vitrionics is a further technological development that strives to put screens
directly into our eyes as contact lenses. We can call that "mind-machine-direct-connect".
Gurunet.com, for example, allows a writer to go straight from word processing
to a search engine. All you need to do is just to click on a word to see relevant
links appears. Michael La Chance is a philosopher from the University du Québec
à Montréal who created the concept of hyperphilosophy. He suggests
that every glance can and should become a command with a direct eye-brain ratio.
So that when we look at a word that we are typing and we are using those goggles,
we can simply blink at it and get pertinent information about it from the Net.
We can easily imagine a situation where we just wink at a word, and it comes
with all the information that we are looking for. When that becomes current,
we will have instant connection with the database, with different kind of indexes,
different levels of search, and an incredible resource environment, very similar,
but, of course infinitely more powerful than our own mind.
When we are remembering something or thinking about something, we have an instant
search engine that brings up the information on our personal mental screen.
All our interactive methods are substitutes for the kind of internal search
engines we use ever second of our lives to grab and make sense of things. But
is it really "as we may think", the title of the 1948 article written
by Vanevar Bush that was the origin of hypertext and hyper-thinking ? There
is what I call hypertinence in the search engine, in that pertinence and speed
are the criteria that guide both the development and the use of these devices,
but I don't think it is really as we may think, because what we find on the
Net is no in our head, but on a screen. We think very differently with an assortment
of databases that are infinitely more subtle and complex than anything afforded
by the Internet. Even though the machine may be incredibly fast, the contents
of the screen will remain, by necessity, external to our heads. The screen,
beside being a kind of focusing device, is also necessary to allow the instant
connectivity of several users within the same thinking process. The Internet
and the Web combined with the present technological trends to faster and more
powerful processors, with faster and closer to instant downloading speeds are
extending the personal and private mental properties to the contents of everybody's
mind on line.
Connected intelligence
As we reflect on the new relationships introduced by hypertext between reading,
writing and thinking, we suspect that the very clear distinctions we tend to
draw intuitively between speaking and thinking may not be quite so clear after
all. What if thinking was not just internalized and formalized - disciplined
- speaking, that is "speaking in one's head", but if language itself
was really externalized thinking ? What if what people say to each other, even
during the most anodine conversation, was really "thinking outside their
heads and sharing the process". Heads seem to be made to interpret the
complexity of thought on many levels. Suppose we could give the control and
the discipline of thought that is available already to a mind trained by logic,
philosophy or mathematics to a brainstorming group or a workshop ? It is now
possible to experiment with this hypothesis on line and with hypertext, precisely
because hypertext combines the externalization of speech by writing, the non-linear
access of minds to associative knowledge, the archiving property of writing,
a flexibility of language management that is close to that of thinking and a
context-based relationship that approximates oral conditions. Until now, people
use and think of hypertext as an access and display system for linked documents,
not primarily as a tool for sharing ideas. But hypertext is a condition of language
that can bring people together and provide a common ground for the simultaneous
thinking, writing and reading of many people either in real time or over a given
period of collaboration. It combines some of the fluidity of thought and the
immediate pertinence of talk with the lasting quality of writing. The screen
becomes the place where the thinking is written down, but simultaneously, it
is also the place where the thinking is shared and processed by several people.
With hypertextual links among themselves and to any number of pertinent databases
on line, people can gather from wherever they are at the time they choose to
contribute to a common thinking process. That is a form of connected intelligence.
Thus we can share and combine not only the objects of vision, but also the contents
of thought as they are expressed in sentences and images. The exploration and
development of this kind of environment has hardly begun, but it is clear that
it calls for a combination of cognitive, architectural and design skills to
achieve structure, efficiency and coherence. It may well prove to become a privileged
area of connected architecture. Hypertext would then become its privileged medium.
Hyperthinking
The way I work at a plan or a task is to throw on paper more or less as they
come the ideas I get as I proceed to think about the matter. I put lists of
things on different parts of the page(s), illustrations, side comments, last
minute thoughts, etc. Then by many iterations, and by spoiling a lot of paper,
I will eventually get to an outline that is sufficiently satisfying to engage
me in writing the text. I used to think that this was just a mark of my disorderly
mind, but I now recognize that this non-method is a very flexible, fluid and
reasonably fast idea management strategy. While I am scanning my notes, there
is a constant feedforward and feedback effect between the re-reading and the
rewriting of my notes that allow for big or small adjustments, new associations,
improved appreciation for what is pertinent and what isn't. There is a constant
evaluation process inherent to this kind of thinking.
For hyperthinking, this kind of process should be made available to a group
of people. I should be able to benefit from the disorderly inputs of other brains
than my own, but the disorderliness should have a modicum of control. It should
be possible to see the ideas and suggestions from different participants appear
in a single environment allowing each other to have a kind of all-at-once view
of the whole. And to be able to add to it, reorder it and resubmit it to all
the others over a period of time. What I need is the application of everybody's
mind to the common task in ways that I can see and evaluate, not merely the
records of the comments made by participants. What I want is a tool for thinking
together and getting usable results with a format to bring a synthesis forward.
My first software development project was precisely on that track. It began
in early 1999 when, frustrated by the delays and inconsistencies of the publisher
of Connected Intelligence (Toronto: Somerville Press, 1997), I decided to put
the book on line in a way that would reflect both the new potential for combining
posting and publishing on line, and also the substance of connectivity. I was
inspired by Thinkmap, an elegant piece of software developed by Plumbdesign
from New York, and especially by Visual Thesaurus, a screensaver that establishes
associative links among 50,000 words of vocabulary. The word at the centre of
the screen commands the associations that summon the other words which circle
around it. Clicking on any one of those brings that one to the centre and summons
other associations. You can even type in a word and, provided it is included
in the Thesaurus, it will take centre stage and summon its own relatives. This
brillant metaphor of how the mind creates associations via neighboring meanings
seemed to break new ground to explore group thinking. I began to dream of a
hypertextual system that would do the same as Thinkmap, but instead of being
limited to the closed content of a single database, it would open onto the web,
just as Tim Berners-Lee had opened hypertext to access any existing connected
database worldwide. This is what led to Thinkwire.
Thinkwire
Thinkwire is the main product of a new dot.com company, www.thinksmith.net
that so far seems to have survived the worst of the e-companies free fall since
April 2000. The actual kernel of layout and structure of today's elaboration
of Thinkwire was started on a stormy winter's day in January 1999 with Gary
Schwartz, the co-founder of Thinksmith. I wanted to put "connected intelligence
on line". Gary said that we could use an existing web application to map
the ideas in the book and architect this into a collaborative online "workshop"
for multiple users to add ideas at any time from any place in an exchange that
could mirror a live discussion. Gary and a programming team, housed in a garage
in Toronto, went on to develop software architected on "ideas". A
thinking team can be assembled around a set of ideas. Ideas appear in a cognitive
map on the left and the anchored section of the text appears on the right. Gary
calls it "Knowledge Building" (KB) as opposed to what is known now
as "Knowledge Management" (KM).
People using ThinkWire can share in the creation of a document in real-time
and archive the discussions for further retrieval. Of course, this kind of result
is reached by an increasing number of reliable CSCW software such as ICQ or
Lotus Notes. True hyperthinking requires programmers to consider higher levels
of performance. ThinkWire allows participants in an on-line workshop to input
comments in real time and allow these to appear pertinently in a continuously
self-updating site-map of the text. Simply scrolling or calling sections by
page numbers, or in a non-linear mode can enable the user to explore the document
in a linear mode by clicking on the icons on the left side of the screen. To
input comments, the participant in the discussion simply needs to click on a
word or a sentence in the document on the right side of the screen. This action
calls up a menu of choices for the kind of comment the user wants to make, be
it a query, a statement, an argument or a suggestion for a link. Clicking on
one of these brings up a box allowing the user to input and send the comment.
Within less than a second, this comment will appear attached to the name of
the topic that gave rise to it, on the left side of the screen. For each comment,
an evaluation chart is appended to the comment's display, so that the reader
can estimate the comment's pertinence, exactitude and level of agreement.
New ideas, questions and concerns from the team are flagged graphically into
the cognitive map for all to see and discuss as soon as necessary. File and
web resources can be added to workshops as backup information or as the basis
of a new discussion. The book becomes dynamic and modular, ever growing. Thinkwire
archives the entire thought-process of the team, including how and why conclusions
were reached.
Sessionstorm
We tried Thinkwire in several different contexts and found, to our dismay
and disappointment that while it was greatly admired it was never really used
by the otherwise very motivated teams. The last attempt was to use it to develop
my most recent book, The Architecture of Intelligence (Bale: Birkhauser, 2001
- the German edition is expected for the fall of 2001). The so-called "Rna
connective", a dynamic team made up largely of young graduates from the
architecture and design school of the University of Waterloo (Canada) was given
the use of Thinkwire to discuss chapters, propose ideas and links and generally
assemble on-line whenever they could. Within a few weeks, they decided to opt
out of the software connections to concentrate on the face-to-face encounters
which they claimed quite legitimately to be more congenial. Some invoked the
slowness of reactions, others the lack of value-added features that could replace
or even substitute for face-to-face interactions. Eventually we found a better
on-line publishing tool in a slash-dot inspired technology called Openflows.
Two chapters of the book are available at www.architecture.openflows.org.
So I went back to the drawing board and, with a new team, inspired by a new,
more ambitious project, that of connecting young Canadian leaders among themselves
to become a national think tank on local, regional, national and international
issues, we developed Sessionstorm. This is a collaborative software that brings
very common features of browsers and on-line communications such as chats and
forums to develop strategies or products or any planning that involves the skills
and expertise of people who are not necessarily in the same space at the same
time. The merit of Sesssionstorm is that, different from Thinkwire, it does
not require any training to yield immediate results. All the functions are available
all the time on a single screen and all are well known to even newbies (slang
for beginners in the wired world). There are three complementary levels of ideas
and comments inputs from the humble chat to a full-fledged presentation tools
such as Powerpoint or customized strategy proposal. At each step, it is possible
to see the self-updating site-map of one's ideas and those of other contributors
in a color-coded display that reveals different attributes for the kind of ideas
or their intended destination categories. This map still inspired by Thinkmap's
Thesaurus, also enables the user to sort out and reorder the different items
simply by clicking and dragging the elements wherever they are needed. It is
as if you could create different architectures of ideas within your own mind,
but in fact, you are dealing with the ideas of all the contributors.
Sessionstorm allows instant input and retrieval of the comments in several modes
of visualization. Among such modes is one that allows the user to see all the
comments in a forum, to call up a critical sentence from each comment simply
by "mouseover", to grab the comments by "click-and-drag",
and to build a new tree simply by dragging all the relevant comments in a given
area of the screen and interconnecting them via lines and arrows wherever relevant.
Every participant in a workshop, a brainstorming session, involved in thinking
together is allowed personal and unfettered editing privileges. Indeed, Sessionstorm
allows each participant in a discussion to rebuild the contents of the discussion
for his or her benefit without spoiling the initial array of comments for the
other participants. The comments, corrections, links, suggestions and the text
items about a common project become available as construction blocks not only
for the project coordinator but for all participants because it is made available
to them at the discretion of the user. I am able, like every one of the other
participants, to pick and choose and order in my own way all the items I have
available from my own intelligence and memory, and from those of my collaborators.
After a certain level of maturation, I can then propose a new order of ideas
and so can any other collaborator; these groupings coming from second or higher
levels of iterations are marked as such, thus making more significant the level
marking tool that is already available on software such as Thinkwire.
We tested Sessionstorm on a class of 200 students in Nice and assigned them
different research projects in 20 teams of 10 people. Within less than 10 days,
Sessionstorm allowed these students to post a dozen credible development strategies
fully illustrated and available today at www.nice.sessionstorm.com.
Technopsychology
Hyperthinking practices assume that the production of meaning is always more
or less shared even if most of the time, this sharing is not acknowledged because
of the bias of western literate culture. What's the consequence of this evolution?
We are shifting from a reader watcher, viewer sensibility culture to a user,
interactor culture. We must develop a new psychology, supported by a new epistemology,
a new knowledge of how we know things. We can begin now to see a pattern in
the development and the distribution of mind and media. We've had the individual
created by reading and writing with the alphabet; we've had the collective created
by radio and television. We are developing worldwide a new kind of mind that
goes well beyond the collective. it is the connective mind. And the importance
of that is that the connective allows one to integrate both the psychology of
the group and that of the individual person with mutual respect. This is the
real message of hypertextuality. The connective mind is not just that of the
individual retiring from the group, like that of the reader who doesn't watch
television; nor is it part of a mass without an identity, like that of somebody
only watching television and never reading. We are now in connective situation
where we can cultivate and keep a private identity, but also share information
processing with a selected group without being wiped out by the identity of
the group. Once we are made aware of this, we need to develop new skills. We
need to extend the ability of response to a new kind of response-ability in
information processing. We need to develop a new branch of general psychology,
with a status equal to "developmental" or "child" psychology,
technopsychology, the science that Gustav Jung had already invoked but without
pursuing ithimself, the investigation of the mutually influencing relationships
between technology and psychology.