INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Professor, you believe that it is possible to interpret the development of the Western
human psyche in relation to means of communication.
Answer
Yes, that's basically the theme of all my books. Starting with the alphabet, how the
alphabet made us private people. One very useful way to describe this is how we relate to
language. Either language is outside controlling you or language is inside and you control
it. If it outside, you have very little power over your destiny, you have very little
consciousness, very little self-consciousness, and very little freedom to decide about
what you want to do, what you want to think. Just an example: when the printing press was
invented, for 200 years there was a fight for human tolerance in Spain, in Italy and
France, all over western Europe against the religious bias which was language outside.
Religion is language outside controlling people. Books, culture is language inside
allowing people to control themselves.
Question 2
What will happen to television and radio?
Answer
What happens with television - at first with radio - is language outside again. And this
is dictators, like Big Brother; these are people who talk and make armies work like a
single body. With television it's also a form of dictatorship but of the consuming world
and it turns people into consumers not into military people. Computers are like electronic
books, they give you back the power of the book and the power of control over language
except that you share this power with a machine; the machine puts your mind on the screen
outside but it is still you controlling the relationship. Books make you private, radio
and TV make you public, computers make you private again.
Question 3
What is happening today with the networks?
Answer
The network is computer plus television plus radio plus telephone. Once computers and
telephones are together you have language outside, collective, language inside with
machine, private and collective, public speech. This is the first time in history that we
have this situation where we have private control of the language which is not eliminated
by the collective and which does not eliminate the collective. Computers by themselves are
just private like books; computer plus telephone, private and public together. So this is
the story of our relationship to language through media.
Question 4
What will happen with these networks? Will there be a shift of power from producer to
consumer?
Answer
In the networks what happens is that the power moves from the producer to the consumer and
the consumer becomes a broadcaster. This is of course something that television has to
learn to deal with. Lots of people ask me: what can television do ? It's becoming
fragmented, atomised, all the audiences of television in Canada and the United States are
losing; big networks are losing audience and small networks are growing. I don't think
that television is going to die. Far from it. It is providing a certain model of human
consciousness all at once. It's a public mind. TV is like Bill Moyer said, public mind.
And so it is necessary, very necessary , but it cannot be to the exclusion of the private
mind of users.
Question 5
So a one-dimensional language. a single language?
Answer
No, certainly not. I think that what is happening is that languages and networks have all
the room in the world to express themselves. There is no need to have a single order, a
single language, a single network or a single method. Today when you explore what is
happening on the Internet, World Wide Web, what you see is that David is the same as
Goliath, everybody has the same possibilities. Olivetti has no more powerful than some
little fellow who starts in university his little program. Everybody is on the same basis,
and to that extent there is no need for a single language, there is not even a single
standard, there's not even a single platform, not even a single computer. Any computer
will work. The law of digitisation, being digital, is reducing all the differences to one
common ground, but allowing all the differences to flower from that digitised material.
Question 6
What will happen to the human brain as it adapts to telecommunications and the computer ?
What will change?
Answer
That's a more complicated question because what is happening is that until now we have had
machines or media that make our minds individually either go faster or slower. Yesterday
books made you mind go fast, today books make your mind slow because radio, television,
and computers make it even faster. But the new thing is not that. The new thing is that
computers are making many minds together faster as opposed to a single mind. Computers
plus telephone is collective intelligence. Collective intelligence changes the nature of
our mental processing and allows us to depend more on our network to come to a decision,
to create together, to discover all kinds of things. So I would say that the changes of
the mind is that change is not only of a single mind but of many minds part of many
networks.
Question 7
This is a programme for memory.
Answer
Memory today is no longer in the head, it's now more and more shared. Basically the
network, the Internet, is a huge global disk drive, a huge hard disk or a huge CD-ROM or
whatever; it's multimedia, it's got everything. And the memory is really good. I mean, we
are next to Pompeii. Pompeii as it is is fantastic. The atoms - as Negroponte would say -
the atoms of Pompeii are wonderful and I always want to go there, but to be able to
rebuild Pompeii and to create it is just like when you go to Pompeii and in your mind, you
rebuild around the ruins, and you say: this is what it was like. You try and imagine
people walking in there. This is what's happening. People are actually putting Pompeii on
CDs. Or this wonderful work by IBM, by Antiucci, the St.Peter's of Rome. Now that's still
there, but you can also imagine this available to you at home; you don't have to go to
Italy, you can do it from Canada and visit St.Peter's, just as you would in your own mind.
That's what memory is. Memory is everywhere.
Question 8
Guttenberg made each of us a reader, thanks to the use of letters. Now the photocopier is
turning us all into publishers. Do you agree?
Answer
That's clear. That has happened for a long time already. Since the invention of
photocopying we have all been able to become publishers, and we have done so, but what is
more complex now is that books are the only place where words stay still. Everywhere else
when we talk they move, they move on radio, they move on video, and on the screen with
Internet. The only thing is, and this is where publishing becomes very interesting, it's
not anymore something that is a fixed medium, it's a shared medium and it's one which
people contribute to. Now publishing is well beyond photocopying, well beyond the fixed
form, but more collective thinking in real time. So I can write an e-mail or on the
Internet, you read it, you add something, this comes back to me, you read it too, and you
add something, and after several weeks we have a big mass of very intelligent
conversations about specific things, not linear but linked, which means that every
important subject that you and I have discussed can now be studied by somebody else. Just
put on that subject and say what you and I and you have said on that subject. This is a
completely different kind of publishing .
Question 9
A book that you published recently in Italy spoke of a Christian "videocracy".
Answer
In that book I was trying to understand how religious sensibility changed under the impact
of media. My first paper was on televangelism. The reason why I was doing that was because
I was asked by a Catholic commission to write something about televangelism. And the
question was: do you think Catholics should also do televangelism ? That was a big
question. I'm not a theologian and so I was very interested. I'm a Catholic, I was born a
Catholic, and I'm a practising Catholic, so I should know. So I thought to myself: would I
recommend this to the bishop or whoever to get on televangelism because it's very
successful, lots of people. There's lots of money in televangelism. And I began to
understand how televangelism works, how it deals with your body. There's no head there.
Television does not deal with your head, it deals with your body. And so televangelism
really talks to what I call the central nervous system. And my conclusion after studying
how televangelism was working, what it was doing and how we change our sensibility towards
religion and also towards other people - and it does perform a service - my conclusion was
faith is not a matter of television; it's a matter of personal human contact. The human
word can be amplified and carried by these media and so on, but the core of the human
presence remains in the person and not in the media. So to that extent I was not sure that
I wanted to recommend televangelism for the Church because the Church is a person to
person contact, really, deep down.
Question 10
And the electronic Pope?
Answer
The electronic Pope. Yes, I wrote about that too. I think that this Pope is very good. He
ran around the world. First of all he was not Italian, which is a good thing; that was the
internationalisation of the papacy. Finally we had somebody from another country. And also
he is a very good man and took the chance. In a way he answered the question of
televangelism because he is a natural televangelist; he's always on TV one way or the
other, in one country or the other, and that has helped a great deal. The Church in fact
has received a great deal of stamina and encouragement. Of course, the Church has had a
lot of basic questions, and the Pope has not answered them all, and lots of resistance to
his views on contraception, abortion for sure is a very serious business as well, and of
course the ordination of women. There are lots of reasons for people to be angry with the
Pope, but there are also many more reasons for him to be proud of what he has done because
he has managed to globalise the Church more than it was. After all, catholic, that's what
it means global. And if we are in a global culture, we'd better have a global Pope.
Question 11
Internet is a no-man's-land or a metaphysical space?
Answer
That is a good question. It's a "none-place"; I think Negroponte was right about
that. There is no place for Internet. I don't think it's a no man's land - 30 million
people is not a no man's land. Whether it is a spiritual... let's put it this way,
networks and human intelligence on networks is the closest thing that technology has ever
given us to spirituality. But we don't know much about spirituality. My understanding of
it is that it is the fastest of all things, of all processes, it is the fastest and the
most comprehensive. It deals with everything. The only thing is that it is so fast that
nobody can see it. The fastest mind is slower than spirituality, and so the fastest system
is closer, a little bit closer to spirituality, but it's not it. I don't want anybody to
tell me that virtual reality is spiritual, that the Internet is spiritual. That's not it.
But that it can allow us to begin to understand what spirituality is, yes, maybe.
Question 12
Could it be a sacred place, a place of meditation?
Answer
No, I think meditation can happen anywhere any time, it's only the special space. I don't
think the Internet is a sacred space, I really don't. The sacred is something, again,
much, much faster than that. This is all slowed down. You know that one of the most
interesting theological theories is that light is slowed down spirituality. Light is
really much faster than everything else, you know. So if that is slow, and if that is only
a measure of the speed...
Question 13
One fact could be that the Internet is no longer material.
Answer
Something that was said this morning was very interesting, that the matter is outside and
all this immaterial is the inside, the net conversation; that is true. What Negroponte
said was right, you don't have a life without atoms, you don't have a life without the
body, you don't have a life without matter, you have nothing without matter. So, basically
it's not as if we didn't continue to have bodies. In fact everybody worries about how the
application of law on the net will happen, when he was saying you can't apply the law.
Well, you can because people still have bodies and they still can be found. I don't think
we can separate the body and the collective mind.
Question 14
But the moment when you access the Internet you leave the concept of space and time...
Answer
But this is something you have to know about the history of the alphabet. It is the
alphabet that creates time and space. All of us think of space as infinite and time as one
way beginning here and ending somewhere there. You know, this is the unilinear,
irreversible, historical time vision. But that's an alphabetic structure, it's not a TV
structure. But it's more than a convention, it's neurological, it's a neurophysiological
structure, an interaction between the structure of your mind and the structure of the
writing which is generated when you learn to read. You start learning and you integrate
these structures so that you become that way, but in the network there is no space. There
is time. There's no space, but we don't go out of time on the network, we go out of space.
Space had been conquered. Virtual reality is conquest of space. The Moon is conquest of
space. Databases are a conquest of space. We know everything about space. We know nothing
about time. Your time, my time, are still, not going backwards, you still can't expand it.
You can live faster, you can live at nanosecond speed. A child who plays with these little
machines, they live very quickly and they have more time because they live faster.
Perhaps. But you can't expand the time or change your own duration, and you can't even
expand the time of the available resources for financial advantage or for any kind of
advantage. So let's not mistake time and space as being the same thing on the net. There
is no space on the net but there is a great deal of time constraints, a great deal of
that. Speed is the essence of the Internet. How fast ,what big bang will you have for
interchange, how long do you have to wait for a page? That's a real time issue.
Question 15
The only limit we have managed to conquer with the Internet is that of going to another
part of the world..
Answer
Yes, you can save time by eliminating space. Any time you suppress space, you save the
time it takes to cross that space, of course, I mean that goes without saying. But one
thing about time that is interesting people now since the invention of virtual reality and
interactive system, talk about real time, this is a word that exists. Real time is a
gesture that you create and you have a reaction immediately, that's real time, but on
network communications real time is extended because it is not solar time. It is the time
of context and pertinence. If I send a message and that message is posted to you and you
don't get onto your own line for 6 hours, the real time is from now till the time you get
on-line and you talk back to me. This extension of time is a different way of approaching
our own way of distributing our lives, our own way of organising our lives. The idea of
extended real time is perhaps a useful one, I hope.
|
 |
