Derrick de Kerckhove
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Derrick de Kerckhove is the Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, author of The Skin of Culture and Connected Intelligence and Professor in the Department of French at the University of Toronto, Canada. Now is Professor in the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Naples Federico II.
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[edit] Background
de Kerckhove received his Ph.D in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Doctorat du 3e cycle in Sociology of Art from the University of Tours (France) in 1979. He was an associate of the Centre for Culture and Technology from 1972 to 1980 and worked with Marshall McLuhan for over ten years as translator, assistant and co-author.
[edit] Publications
He edited Understanding 1984 (UNESCO, 1984) and co-edited with Amilcare Iannucci, McLuhan e la metamorfosi dell'uomo (Bulzoni, 1984) two collections of essays on McLuhan, culture, technology and biology. He also co-edited with Charles Lumsden The Alphabet and the Brain (Springer Verlag, 1988), a book which scientifically assesses the impact of the Western alphabet on the physiology and the psychology of human cognition. Another publication, La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne appeared in France in December, 1990 and in Italy the following year (Feltrinelli, 1991). Brainframes: Technology, Mind and Business (Bosch & Keuning, 1991) addresses the differences between the effects of television, computers and hypermedia on corporate culture, business practices and economic markets. The Skin of Culture (Somerville Press, 1995) is a collection of essays on the new electronic reality which stayed on Canadian best-sellers lists for several months. It was translated into a dozen languages including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Polish and Slovenian. Connected Intelligence (Somerville, 1997) introduced his research on new media and cognition. His latest book, The Architecture of Intelligence, was first issued in Dutch in December 2000, and in English (June 2001), Italian and German in September 2001. It was later translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. He collaborated with Mark Federman on McLuhan for Managers: New Tools for New Thinking, published in September 2003. de Kerckhove is also contracted to work on a book about the history of stage performance from early Greek theatre to modern Opera, in collaboration with Francesco Monico.
[edit] Other work
de Kerckhove has offered connected intelligence workshops worldwide, and now offers this innovative approach to business, government and academe to help small groups to think together in a disciplined and effective way while using digital technologies. In the same line, he has contributed to the architecture of Hypersession, a collaborative software now being developed by Emitting Media and used for various educational situations.
As a consultant in media, cultural interests, and related policies, de Kerckhove has participated in the preparation and brainstorming sessions for the plans for: the Ontario Pavilion at Expo '92 in Seville, the Canada in Space exhibit, and the Toronto Broadcast Centre for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He was involved in plans for a major exhibit on Canada and Modernism at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris for 2004 and was a member of the cultural committee of Toronto's bid for the Olympics in 2008. He was a member of several government task forces on developing a telecommunications policy for Ontario, designing a cultural policy for the francophone community in Ontario, and also appeared before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) Public Hearing Committee on the Information Highway. A World Economic Forum Fellow, de Kerckhove is also an active member of the Vivendi Institut de prospective where he is in charge of investigating the future technological and business development of the new technologies. He was decorated by the Government of France with the order of "Les Palmes académiques" and has been a member of the Club of Rome since 1995. de Kerckhove is, most recently, the holder of the Papamarkou Chair in Education and Technology at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
