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"Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds"
"THE MAN WHO RUNS THE WORLD'S SMARTEST WEBSITE"
THE OBSERVER - THE NEW REVIEW
By John Naughton
Sunday, January 8, 2012
"To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it's true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a "cultural impresario" or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an "intellectual enzyme". (Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is "a biological catalyst - an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things".)
The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow's "Two Cultures" - the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie, . But he's also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call..."
Download Guardian Digital pdf of print edition:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_
about the di! erences between atoms
and bits, but the fi rst time I heard it
was from Marshall. For anyone who
met him during the 60s, his manner
and the way in which he presented
himself were remarkable and never to
be forgotten. Sitting down at lunch, you
would be faced with machine gun-like
expositions of facts and ideas ranging
from medieval classical literature to
arcane scientifi c matters concerning
the aural space of the native North
American Eskimos, the focus of the
work of his collaborator Edmund
Carpenter .
It was Carpenter who explained to
me what he thought was the secret
behind Marshall’s brilliance. At the time,
McLuhan was hospitali sed after being
operated on for the removal of a brain
tumour. “And all those years we thought
about the brilliance and we thought it
was just Marshall,” Ted said. “But it was
the pills he was taking for symptoms of
what turned out to be the tumour.”
JN I noticed that Martin Rees and
Richard Dawkins avoided talking
about themselves and wondered if
there might be something cultural
– i e British – at work here? I’m an
Irishman and so can say this!
JB Actually not. In this regard, the
major challenge is to get 150 to 200 of
the most brilliant people in the world
to follow a simple set of guidelines.
And one of the pronouncements this
year is: “No anecdotes about spouses,
signifi cant others, kids, family pets.”
The reason for this prohibition is
that E dge is a conversation – it’s not a
magazine written for the public. The
audience for the contributors to E dge
is the other contributors. The readers
have the opportunity to look over the
shoulders of some extraordinarily
gifted individuals as they go back and
forth in the battle of ideas. And since
the scientifi c method is central to our
activities, I want to avoid the personal
and focus on evidence.
JN I was pleased to see quite a lot about
the “collective IQ” of the net – which is
something that the mainstream media
don’t seem to understand at all. A
passage in William Calvin ’s essay where
he talks about the net enabling us to
“stand on the shoulders of a lot more
giants at the same time” reminded me
of an older metaphor coined by, I think,
Doug Engelbart, who invented the
mouse, windowing interfaces and a lot
of other seminal computing technology:
“Power steering for the mind”.
JB One of the concepts that people
were talking about in the late 60s was
“the collective conscious”. McLuhan
made specifi c reference to it on many
occasions. Cage used to talk about
“the mind we all share”. The cultural
anthropologist Edward T Hall , who was
in that circle, and studied what he called
the silent languages of time and space,
once pointed out to me that our most
signifi cant, most critical inventions
were not those ever considered to be
inventions, but those that appeared to
be innate and natural.
His candidate for the most
important invention was not the
capture of fi re, not the printing press,
not the discovery of electricity, not
the discovery of the structure of
DNA. Our most important invention
was… talking. This was something
considered innate and natural,
or actually something that was
probably never even considered,
until the fi rst human rendered it
visible by saying: “We’re talking” –
probably an important moment in
our evolutionary past.
The internet is such a new
invention, a code for the collective
conscious or “distributed networked
intelligence”. The internet is our
collective externali sed mind. I think
of it in terms of the concept of feedback:
t h e i n fi nite oscillation of our collective
conscious interacting with itself,
adding a fuller, richer dimension to
what it means to be human.
It’s not about computers. It’s
not about what music your friends
are listening to. It’s about human
communication. “We’re talking.”
How is the Internet Changing the Way
You Think? , edited by John Brockman,
is published by Atlantic Books. John
Naughton’s From Gutenberg to
Zuckerberg: What You Really Need
to Know About the Internet is
published by Quercus Books . To buy
either title for a special price with free
UK p&p, call 0330 333 6847
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