What would Marshall McLuhan think about the way the internet has evolved during the last decades? This interview followed days of presentation and discussion at the Ars Electronica symposium on the topic of Origins in 2011, the year of Marshall McLuhan’s 100th anniversary. There, lead scientists of the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN, Geneva, explained their technical set-up, their middle- and long-term research goals and discussed their possible significance with other scientists and philosophers. Derrick de Kerckhove sits down with Leo Findeisen to discuss how Marshall McLuhan might have reacted to the state of the art in experimental physics. McLuhan has been one the founders of Media Theory as we know and de Kerckhove has been his long-time assistant back in the days.

Topics discussed:

* How would you explain the relevance of McLuhan´s work to a fourteen-year-old, a member of the Always-On generation that lives a digital life at the current stage of the information revolution?

* Would McLuhan have laughed about the fact that the World Wide Web was a technical spin-off from physicists at CERN, yet has lead up to developments like WikiLeaks and the current Jasmin-Revolution in Tunisia?

* And, if in CERN, McLuhans prediction of 1962 that the next medium will make ‘humans hold all times in our hand’, is validated, what are possible implications to our own cognitive and actual self-navigation at the current state of Quantum Logics?

* What are the implications of McLuhans statement that. ultimately, ‘one has to be a mystic to understand the world’ ? And what is his connection to the Hegelian tradition in philosophy? Why is spirituality nowadays ‘merely a technical problem’?