Psychotechnologies:

interfaces of language, media and mind

DERRICK DE KERCKHOVE

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?

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"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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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