Reports

Whilst making the most of his free time wandering through Barcelona, he advises that the Catalan capital should "have free and open Wi-Fi so that people can work and develop their creativity wherever they want to". And he does not see this to be a utopia, as he always remembers that "Catalonia is a pioneer in new information and knowledge technologies thanks to Art Futura and the UOC, which is the world's first online university".

Quick to link theory and day-to-day activities, Derrick de Kerckhove sees in the streets of Barcelona how McLuhan's global village was not a utopia. "Along the Rambla, I saw some young people with small video cameras recording the reactions of people walking by to a sign offering free hugs for anyone who wanted one. It is a communicative phenomenon that began in Australia and which the police initially banned. But some young people uploaded the recordings on to the internet, without an editor, without a producer and without any funding, and the phenomenon has now spread and reached four million visitors from around the world." De Kerckhove recorded his experience on the Rambla with his digital camera and then passed it to his personal computer, alongside other souvenirs from Barcelona.

McLuhan's heir also observed that there are increasingly more people working with laptops in every corner of the city and the university libraries. "As well as pioneering with Art Futura and the UOC, Barcelona should also be pioneering in offering freely accessible broadband for everyone." Whilst contemplating how a student consulted the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, he updates the theories of the master McLuhan. "He said that the media was the message; now internet is the message and computers reconstruct the message. In 1963, McLuhan foresaw that those immense computers would make a universal encyclopaedia for the people possible; we now call it 'Wikipedia' or 'YouTube'", he reflects.

Around the city, he sees people who are constantly chatting away on mobile phones. "It is a permanent and immediate form of communication activity. The digital age is minimalist. It is based on simplicity and allows us to communicate and think together with other people. In a limited amount of time, we have access to limitless contents, and all this, together with the internet and recent inventions like tags and blogs, brings with it certain far-reaching political, commercial and artistic consequences."

Aside from cutting-edge technologies, Derrick de Kerckhove is also an art lover and took the opportunity to visit one of the city's churches for the first time, Santa Maria del Mar. "The first sensation is beauty, balance, proportion and purity of form. The second is to think about the history of the people who built it, in their faith and in the feeling of time and spirituality that it inspires. Santa Maria del Mar is the most spiritual place in Barcelona and it is a high quality spiritual experience. You can also see it on the internet or on a DVD, but that is a different kind of experience. In this sense, the internet tends to pass from a technological phase to a social phase."

The most inspirational and brilliant intellectual on communications on the world scene bids his farewell with some practical advice for users facing a common problem: what should we do when the internet crashes or the computer's memory melts down? "I call it 'lobotomy'. It is like annulling a part of our brain and the mind needs to be rebuilt. But rebuilding our minds keeps us young."