Connected Intelligence

Patrick Colgan is the former executive director of the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

De Kerckhove, director of the McLuhan Program in Technology and Culture
at the University of Toronto, provides an insider’s view of the
computer revolution that is by turns fascinating and frustrating.

Connected Intelligence is divided into three sections. The first deals
with interactivity issues, including the melding of technologies, users
as content, human-machine linkages, virtual movement in space and time,
and computers as active agents. The second section, on hypertextuality,
is the best part of the book, with good discussions of hypertext, the
just-in-time approach of cyberspace, navigation in cyberspace, and the
future of news, books, libraries, and museums. In the third section, the
author envisions the emerging connectivity, with its new cognitive
properties, associated economy, and global scale. An appendix describes
some case studies of workshops conducted under the aegis of connected
intelligence. There are notes, but there is no index.

Throughout the book, de Kerckhove raises many important issues:
political (e.g., the Web as a democratic force and weakener of national
sovereignties), economic (the disenfranchised majority), educational
(freedom for many points of view), and personal (self-image, career
paths, and interaction with others). Unfortunately, his arguments are
undermined by excessive enthusiasm, a lack of focus, and overreliance on
personal anecdote. Although some of his views are perceptive, others are
strange (e.g., those on ecology as a religion, or spiritualism,
depending on processing speed), opaque (projecting mental contents not
in awareness), unrealistic (artificial intelligence has to date been
largely a failure), or simply wrong (culture as a uniquely Western
concept). Nonetheless, as a perspective on the consequences of the
computer revolution from a(n) (hyper)active participant, this book
merits reading.