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Auflistung nach Autor:in "de Kerckhove, Derrick"

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  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Text, Context and Hypertext, three conditions of language, three conditions of mind
    (Mensch & Computer 2002: Vom interaktiven Werkzeug zu kooperativen Arbeits- und Lernwelten, 2002) de Kerckhove, Derrick
    Argument: The technologies that support or manage language also affect the mind, of necessity, simply because language is a system for the articulation of the mind, a kind of operating system writ large. Language thus entertains a close and intimate relationship with our inmost sensibility and also with both the content and the structure of our minds as we show it in this paper. For example, oral societies, having little verbal memory support have been more or less obliged to live in world in which the body has to do the job of remembering and they have to keep reenacting the past. Two major technologies have modified our earlier relationships with language, literacy and electricity. Literacy by detaching text from context also detached the reader and liberated individual minds from the collective one of the tribe. Electricity brings all the senses back into language, but, at the same time, it externalizes the minds of the readers on screen, and makes public once more, the contents and traumas of the private literate mind. With the help of Jean-Pierre Changeux's theory of mental objects, we will attempt to tease out some features of the hypertextual mind by drawing comparisons between mental and digital objects. The next technological – logical – step in IT development after wirelessness has run its course is “mind-machine-direct-connect”, where the main real time interface is the human mind. With the ever stronger convergence between orality (real-time), literacy (databases and all archives) and electricity (all things digital), we can expect a giant enlargement of mind. There are indeed three main stages of language as we know it, oral, literate and electronic. The principal interface between self and world in the oral society is the physical body. The whole body talks, the whole body remembers, the whole body of everybody takes part in body politic. Oral society is the society of context, not of text, for obvious reasons. People are always in context, they live in a kind of extended present, but they refer to events that occurred in the past. They revere their ancestors who showed them the operating rules of their principal reference, God(s), the ur-context. These societies are “religious” almost by necessity, not by choice. Their survival depends on shared experience. That is the context. To keep that context alive, they ritualize it and reenact it, which is a way for a collective to remember. They don't study the past they simply make it present. It is a society that is perceptually dominant in the sense that its members rely on their senses (sensory) rather than on pure sense (meaning) to make sense of reality. Even its memory is anchored in sensory modalities, statues, monuments, songs, story-telling, play-acting.