Brainframes, by Derrick De Kerckhove

Brainframes are technical prolongation created by the human being and now no more cleavable.

De Kerckhove, a McLuhan’s follower, considers the alphabet as the first brainframe of the history. He defines analogies between the occidental left-to-right reading method and the left-right division of cerebral hemispheres. This would have kept to what Abruzzese (in Industria Culturale) defines as the occidental privilege, which consists, according to De Kerckhove, in a typical confidence in rationality and in the rationalization of any experience, including the spatial ones. This would be due to a wider development of logic-spatial, chronological, sequencial and analytical elaboration, typical of the right hemisphere, developed by the left-to-right reading. Reading skills, as a matter of fact, would affect our way of thinking.

Widing the range of this studies, De Kerckhove says that, any technology which affects the language will involve changes on physiological, emotional and mental behaviour.

One of the first consequences of this occidental privilege is the try to reorganize the reality into a rational and mental structure: the perspective. The perspective as a visual strategy brought our culture to grab the world around us, to frame it spatially in order to analyze it temporally.

Television made a relevant blow to the supremacy of the alphabetical brainframe and it tried (successfully) to swap it with a new one: the videoframe. Our body reacts before our mind does to read the message the tv is passing on. Tv deletes the distance since our eyes are something like touching what we are seeing, and the time we need to interpret the information in our conscious mind. The watcher is passively watched by the tv, there’s no elaboration by him, so the elaboration is driven by the television. Besides the control the tv can have on people with the continuous solicitation of stimulus, it addicts the watcher to the screen, so he can no more escape the watching: his natural defences low down and he’s apt to a multisensorial involvement.

The perspective taught us to divide the reality into grids in order to rebuild the reality. A grid is the base for neural networks (NN), a sort of digital brain which has the duty to build link models which bring to wanted answers. Artificial intelligence and NN are invading the media, mixing electronic technologies through a massive digitalization of the world, in the perspective of a convergence of different technologies.

The highest level of integration seems to be virtual reality. VR is a joint of body and technology which seems to bring to the creation of a new brainframe: the cybernetic brain. The cybernetic brainframe seems to have the chance to realize what cubism had experimented: the convergence of different point of view different people interacting simultaneously on the collective thought in a same visual space. This is the direction which Lévy had pointed out talking about collective intelligence.

In the technogenesis of psychotechnologies is thanks to mass, speed and depth that the elaboration of information is come out from the private universe of the human mind to the public domain of cathode ray tube. While the mass man of television was surrounded by centred networks, the speed man of the computer age is everywhere in the middle. The depth is represented by the growth of VR industry. The culture of depth brings to watch through, watch inside, watch from inside, VR.

Design can be considered, in this view, as a skin of the culture, the external side in contact with our senses which gives sense to the technology. Computers speed up and disintegrate the traditional cultural screens and they rebuild them in a different way. The resistance of a structure is functional to its design, the material, the scale and the pass. The base of occidental economies has stood frequent changes: on the material level, from the agriculture phase to the information one; in terms of scale, from a local dimension to a global one and in terms of design, from nomads to ecology. The crisis are often considered symptoms of a changing era, a break, an imminent change.

De Kerckhove points out a new man, fest, informed, polyglot and with an ethic and environmental conscience. He defines then the brain as the place where the effects of technology transpose themselves in psychology and change culture to economy.