THE HERMESIAN PARADIGM: RAMIFICATIONS FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

JOHN HOLGATE

It is not only the written tradition that is estranged and in need of new and more vital
assimilation; everything that is no longer immediately situated in a world – that is, all
tradition, whether art or the other spiritual creations of the past: law, religion, philosophy,
and so forth – is estranged and depends on the unlocking and motivating spirit that we, like
the Greeks, name after Hermes: the messenger of the gods.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004)

Angeletics is the cornerstone of a nascent anthropology of messengers and messaging. The

discipline (from the Greek angelos, messenger) has been developed by Rafael Capurro (2003,
2003a, 2003b) over the past decade to provide a culturally rich approach to the science of
messages. Capurro’s work (2009) on the historical development of the concept of information
(informatio) complements his analysis of the message, angelia. His insights are to be
understood from within the framework of hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer) – a word
derived from the Greek god Hermes – phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger), Luhmann’s
theory of communicative action and especially Vilém Flusser’s ideas on dialogue and
discourse (communicology).

While Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication focused on the

transmission of physical signals Capurro tends to explore the complex interface between the
sender and the receiver of a message. In this article I will explore future transdisciplinary
pathways for Angeletics or Messaging Theory (MT) within the context of the Information
Society and its conceptual framework Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

1. Hermes the Messenger in Greek mythology

Hermes was the great grandfather (through Autolycus) of Jason and Odysseus – the great
narrative journeyers and searchers of antiquity. He intervened to save the body of Priam’s son
from Achilles in Homer’s Illiad and to rescue his own great grandson Ulysses from Circe in
The Odyssey. The link between the god of creativity, travel, information and language and the
birth of the Homeric literary narrative becomes clear. His daughter Angelia was a bearer of
tidings and his mother Maia gave her name to the word ‘maieutics’ – the Socratic dialectic
method of eliciting the truth. Capurro (1997) analysed the rise of the Platonic hermeneutié as
the art of heralds, messengers and interpreters of the will of the gods and its demise with the
‘semantic by-pass’ from angelía to logos:
There is one chapter in the history of Western thought that concerns the passage from
the vertical structure of the messages (Greek: angelia) of the gods transmitted by poets
 and priests to the horizontal structure of logos in the sense of philosophical truth-
seeking. This by-pass can be interpreted as the search for stable or true knowledge that
would reach through dia-logue, i.e. through a critical exchange of logoi, the objects of
knowledge, instead of being the mediator and receiver of an unstable message based on
the uncertain will of the gods. (Capurro 1997, 3)
He provided (1999) a detailed historical perspective on the concept of angelos and related it to
modern philosophy and sociology, particularly to the work of Gadamer, Krippendorff,
Vattimo and Luhmann.
Karl Kerenyi’s “Hermes Guide of Souls” – the mythologem of the masculine source of
life” (1976) provides fascinating insights into the character of Hermes. The work was partly a
result of his correspondence with Thomas Mann (Hermes was his favourite god in Greek
mythology, which is evident in “The Magic Mountain”). Kerenyi – who was a major
influence on Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes – here describes the birth of a Hermesian
Paradigm (rather than the hermetic paradigm of alchemy) which links Capurro’s concepts of
informatio and angelia and provides a mythological perspective on ICT practice. According
to Kerenyi Hermes occupies a soul-realm that is a middle world between being and non-being
and also a basis for his ambassadorial office:
The primordial mediator and messenger moves between the absolute “no” and the
absolute “yes” or, more correctly between two “no’s” that are lined up against each
other, between two enemies, between woman and man. In this he stands on ground that
is no ground, and there he creates the way. From out of a trackless world- unrestricted,
flowing ghostlike – he conjures up the new creation.’
(Kerenyi 1976, 77)
The Kaberoi cleansed the angelos on the shores of Lake Acheruse and made her a
Goddess of the realm of souls. Out of his relation to the Kabeirian nature grows Hermes’
role as guardian of souls, which consists in ducere et reducere and also in his
ambassadorial role. (Kerenyi 1976, 75)

2. Qualities of the Messenger

If we focus on the messenger as a socio-historical phenomenon a configuration of distinctive

features emerges with which we can embed the study of angeletics more deeply into the
landscape of art philosophy and science.

2.1. News as inventio

News connotes to surprise, excitation, spontaneous novelty, innovation, discovery,

invention, curiosity and scientific enquiry. It is the linchpin between information and
communication as expressed in Gregory Bateson’s definition of information in his “Angels
Fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred”:
That which gets from territory to map is news of difference, and at that point I
recognized that news of difference was a synonym for information. (Bateson 1988, 1)
Why do pundits invariably omit the word ‘news’ when they cite Bateson’s famous
definition? ‘News’ is a difference that makes all the difference. Can there be any information
without news or any received message without news? A message (‘as’ news) travels or ‘gets
from’ the sender but if the message doesn’t make any difference to the receiver (e.g. an
unopened envelope in a letter box) it doesn’t count as information. Messages are subsets of
information ‘gotten’ (received, understood) over time.
News connotes to surprise, discovery, creativity, spontaneity and invention. Hermes was
also the god of inventio, of finding and thieving - a theft that is put to better use. The Greek
word for windfall, hermaion, signifies that it belongs to Hermes. But his inventiveness was
based on trickery, cunning and thievery as when he stole Apollo’s cattle not as a Titanic
power play but as a game to convert the horns and the shell of a tortoise into a lyre (nee phore
– new theft or Hermesian theft). Apollo suffers no loss from the robbery – he gains a lyre and
a brother. This anticipates the idea of value-adding ‘nonrival goods’ in Paul Romer’s New
Growth theory as outlined in Whitt and Schultze’s article on emergent economics (2008).
Software is a nonrival good because of its immediacy and ubiquity. It can be used by
everyone at the same time and can be copied endlessly at virtually no cost. In the Digital
Economy where the - sometimes illegal - copying of forms and ideas plays a major role,
Hermesian theft is common
.

2.2. Mediation – the tertium datum

The angeloi were endowed with special powers of mediation – mostly they were poets or
musicians. The messengers of Greek and other mythologies mediated between the gods and
humans and travelled long distances to bring their message. Like Hermes the psychopomp
they often brought critical information – a matter of life and death. Hermes the Messenger
(and later in the Middle Ages as Mercurius) represents the mercurial tertium datum in the act
of mediation between subjects and objects, between senders and receivers. Antoine Faivre
(1995) describes this mediatory role in his “The Eternal Hermes”:
As an entity he is “mediator” and “savior” – C.G. Jung would call him the Mercury of
the Unconscious: As the substance of the Arcanum, he is mercury, water, fire, the
celestial light of revelation; he is soul, life-principle, air, hermaphrodite, both puer and
senex. He is the tertium datum. (Faivre 1995, 21)
The caduceus of Hermes is also the tertium datum, the refusal to stay blocked in the
logic of identity and in its corollaries of noncontradiction and exclusion of third parties.
(Faivre 1995, 67)
This third-party mediation is similar to the informational role of negentropy as the tertium
datum in the process of extropy/entropy. Negentropy, as Flusser saw it, is not the opposite of
entropy but rather an epiphenomenon just like a lap is an epiphenomenon of sitting or a lawn
is epiphenomenal to grass. Norbert Wiener’s dictum that ‘information is information not
matter or energy’ also implies that information is a third constituent of the universe mediating
between matter and energy in a space-time-information continuum. Hegel’s concept of
‘Vermittlung’, George Herbert Mead’s notion of ‘mediatory gesture’, Donald Winnicott’s
‘transitional object’ and Gadamers ‘transformation into structure’ are all family relations of
Hermesian agency.

2.3. Transmission as transitory understanding

The phenomenon of ‘transmission’ has many guises in science technology and the humanities
e.g. information transfer, linguistic translation, gene transcription, mRNA transport, signal
transduction, neurotransmission, boundary crossing.

Hermes was the god of crossing boundaries (hence his name from ‘herma’, a boundary
marker) especially between Hades and the world of the living, between death and life. The
importance of translation in hermeneutics has been described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his
“Truth and Method” and in his article (1974) in the “Historisches Wörterbuch der
Philosophie” he specifies Hermes’ transmissive role:
Hermes was the divine herald who delivered the message of the gods to the mortals. His
proclamation is obviously not a mere communication but also an explanation of divine
orders and in such a way that he translates these commands in an evanescent language
and with a transitory understanding. The achievement of Hermes basically always
consists in the transfer of a context of meaning from another ‘world’ into one’s own.
(Gadamer 1974, 1061)
 The issue of crossing boundaries in open systems and the problematic transfer of messages
between the observer and the observed are fundamental issues within General Systems
Theory and second-order cybernetics (cf. Niklas Luhmann’s second-order observing systems
and Loet Leydesdorff’s concept of mutual information (2006). As described by Jones (2009)
boundary crossing is central to a systems approach to social change:
Boundary crossing, a notion derived from Activity Systems Theory […] is the process of
changing from one understanding to another and is encountered when a person or group
encounters a problem or dilemma associated with this change… Boundary crossing can
lead to new practices and meanings and hence to creative change. (Jones 2009)
In the history of IS crossing boundaries has been a major theme in the development of ICT
from mainframes to desktops and handhelds, from stand-alone ‘glass box’ machines to the
first TTY and CRT terminals, from the invention of hypertext by Vannevar Bush Douglas
Engelbart and Ted Nelson to the rise of Web 2.0 portal technology and cloud computing.
According to Briggs et al (2006) boundaries crossed may be organizational (‘boundary
spanning practices’) system-based (terminals hubs and routers), spatial and temporal (e.g.
telemedicine), social and generational (the ‘Digital Divide’) linguistic (terminological
differences) human/machine or transdisciplinary (methodological barriers). The breaking
down of client isolation towards a goal of ubiquitous transparency has long been a tenet of
informed ICT praxis – which continues the ancient tradition of crossing between boundary
markers established by Hermes.

2.4. Delivery

A message is always delivered across a spatiotemporal distance (from Heaven to Earth, from
Olympus to the world of mortals, from a battle to the King, from the past to the present). The
Arabic word for messenger – rasul – means a ‘straight line traced between two objects to
unite them’ (Mahommed is often called rasul Allah). In the world of computer technology the
phenomenon of delivery has a variety of faces: uploading and downloading of data,
telecommunication via portals, information delivery systems, electronic document delivery,
teleportation. In biology messages are ‘delivered’ by means of microbiological
biomessengers.

2.5. Commission

Hermes was the guardian of souls. His maternal grandfather, the Titan Atlas, was obliged,
as a punishment for his revolt, to hold up the Sky. The messenger is nearly always holding an
object (often a piece of paper, a letter or an object such as a baton or a staff). Originally Iris’s
staff represented a weapon, a spear or sword, indicating that the message had power over life
and death. The two elliptic circles on Iris’s staff were later adopted by Melanchthon as the
symbol for alchemy just as Hermes’ staff with its uroborus was incorporated into the
caduceus in medicine. As Hermes the Peacemaker he often used his caduceus to separate
warring factions. William Doty (1993) in “Mythical Trickster Figures” notes:
Hermes organizes the social cosmos, working out interconnections among people,
boundariesbetween nations, and realignments of military or political power. (Doty 1993,
56)
Hermes’ caduceus anticipates the baton of the orchestra conductor, the policeman and the
relay runner. The Spartan skytale and the tyrant’s scepter are related objects which are not just
mere symbols but crucial participants in the transforming action of messaging.
In other societies the message object could be a complex informative artifact like the
Peruvian quipus (with their quipucamayocs) or the message sticks of the Australian
Aborigines (with their ‘mailmen’).
The use of message knots as precursors to written alphabets (say in Inca Chinese and Hebrew
knot languages) is an important clue to the nature of articulation as the basis of primitive
forms of the message (as distinct from the evolution of speech and writing). The gesture of
messaging is intrinsically about connecting, about making links and creating nets (‘net
dialogue’) and is more about weaving two points together with a connective line or strand
than about expression by puncturing a paper surface such as we find in the process of writing.
Knots of interrelations are the subjects of Flusser’s telematic city described in his “Die Stadt
als Wellental in der Bilderflut” (1990). Michael Darroch (2008) observed:
The city must be rethought topographically, rather than geographically. Subjects are
knots or interrelations and information channels, out of which the net of a city is weaved.
The deliverer was considered immune from the receiver’s judgment about the content of
the message (a sentiment expressed in the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ which derives
from Sophocles’ “Antigone” and Shakespeare’s “Henry IV”). Whether the messenger can
interpret and/or change the message and whether the message has to be truthful are moot
points. Doty (1993) says about Hermes the Hermeneut:
Hermes carries messages from one person or deity to another; he does not always
originate them, and he may select or adapt what he alone chooses to present, and when.
(Doty 1993, 62)
In modern times the image of a politician waving a symbolic object is common in the
media. In religious communities the object which is carried by the messenger is often
endowed with sacred or divine properties. And what often distinguishes the angels of religion
from, say, wandering ghosts spectres or phantoms, is that they are on an errand, bearing a
commission to reveal themselves to somebody - they are endowed with intentionality, a
purpose, a ‘mission’.

2.6. Announcement and notification

Typically the messenger utters a proclamation or announcement that is information critical

such as “Peace in our time” (Chamberlain) or ”Νενικήκαμεν” (“The Athenians have won”,
Pheidippidus of Marathon). Angels also appear with glad tidings or warnings at vital points in
a life or history just as television news announcers proclaim the latest sensational event. The
concept of notification (Bekanntmachung) is important for angeletics and is similar to Daniel
Bougnoux’s ‘enunciation’ (from the Latin ‘nuntius’, messenger, literally ‘one who shouts’).
The notifying gesture – a wave, a facial expression, a nod or a verbal signal – initiates a
temporary or transitory understanding in a meaning offer. The two members of an Army
Casualty Notification Team in Oren Moverman’s 2009 film ‘The Messenger' deliver
notifications which can profoundly affect human lives. “We’re here for notification.” Captain
Tony Stone informs his protégé, “Not God. Not heaven.” How the two messengers each
choose to present their sad tidings to the families of the dead soldiers and how they deal with
their personal ‘blindness’ about heroism in warfare forms the essence of the story.

2.7. Communication

Just as the action of information presupposes indication and distinction, an act of

communication implies some form of actual or potential contact between the sender and the
receiver of a message and a degree of commonality (Mit-teilung: literally ‘dividing up
together’). This is reflected in the etymology of the word itself – from ‘common’ (L.
communis PIE *ko-moin-I held in common from *ko together + *moi-n suffixed form of base
*mei- ‘change, exchange” i.e. shared by all (a common etymology with mutable, mutation
and the adjective mean from O.E. gemaene ‘common, public, general, universal, shared by
all’ (German Gemeinde, Dutch gemeente ‘community’, Lat munia ‘ public duties’).
Etymologically embedded then in the concept of communication(s) are the notions of
community commonality and commons, exchange, civic duty, generality, universality and the
public good. Behind the technology of mass communications and impersonal digital networks
remains the Hermesian promise to restore those original senses of communality preserved in
Kant’s sens communis, John Stuart Mill’s ”„common good” and Charles Sanders Peirce’s
“community of interpretation” and to act as a guardian messenger who protects the interests
of the communal mind and the Information Commons. In the face of the capitalized
initialism ICT (Information Communications Technology) Hermes offers us the lower-case
alternative of imagination, cooperation and trust – communion instead of commodification.
The vertical autonomy of cyberspace and cybernetics (cyber = steer, control) with its
origins in military computing still dominates contemporary ICT agendas. According to this
model information technology and its panoply of digital products are manufactured by the
few (Microsoft, Apple, Google et al) for consumption by the many who participate in the
cargo cult of IT and telephony. Challenging that autonomy since the 1990’s has been the rise
of horizontal Internet-based communication networks.

2.8. Sending/receiving
Sending and receiving messages are complementary activities. As Francisco Varela might
have said ‘they mutually specify their conditions of production” (Varela 1984, 2) – like in the
famous sketch by M.C. Escher of hands drawing hands in a strange loop.

The bioengineer Koichiro Matsuno described this entanglement in terms of grammatical

tense:
When the author makes any monologic statement in the present tense, he controls the
whole situation as stated. Likewise, when a scientist refers to the [experimental] record
expressed in the present perfect tense, he could oversee the whole record. However, the
things expressed in the present progressive tense are a bit different. Although I am
walking through a crowd to avoid collisions with other people, they are also doing the
same. That is, I am walking through a crowd for collisions with others to be avoided.
When we express things in our empirical world in the present progressive tense there are
necessarily at least two or more than two agential actors to be involved. (Matsuno 1977)
Sending receiving and filtering e-mail while avoiding digital collisions can be like walking
through a virtual crowd in the present progressive tense.

2.9. Encoding/decoding

For Flusser there is a complex relationship between codes symbols and the universes of
texts and images. He defines a code as a sign system arranged in a regular pattern. Each
medium has its own specific signification system. Encoding is the bringing into order of a
chaotic world (in-form-ation) by shaping images in written or printed form (universe of texts)
or audio-visual forms (universe of images). For him giving meaning (Sinngebung) is a
process of encoding these shapes forms and gestures and interpretation is the decoding of the
messages engendered by these codes. In mythology and fiction the decoding of a cryptic
message is often a trope for an individual’s quest for meaning. Flusser explored the
relationship between codes communication and imagination in his 1978 essay ‘The Codified
World’.
Later in “On the Theory of Communication” (1986) he posited “families of codes”,
“denoting and connotating codes” with three basic forms (auditory, visual and audiovisual)
and two basic types (dialogic and discursive). In discursive codes messages flow from a
sender towards a receiver. In dialogic codes messages oscillate between the various
participants in the process. This distinction is vital for an understanding of Flusser’s theory of
communicology as it structures his philosophical world. In the same essay he commented on
the ‘hermeneutic circle’ relationship between codes and universes:
[...] the limits of translations show that no code refers to all the universes, and no
universe is referred to by all the codes. The series of universes is not bi-univocally
related to the series of codes (Flusser 1986, 14).
And on the next page, echoing both Marshall McLuhan and Claude Shannon, he added
The structure of a message reflects the physical character of its symbols more than the
structure of the universe it communicates. (Flusser 1986, 15)
 2.10 Transformation

Hermes’ act of messaging was not merely saying but enacting and transforming. His
caduceus had a transformative power. In the biosphere, for example, messages and codes
enable vital metabolic and genetic structural changes in an organism. And through radio
television and the Internet a constant avalanche of messages bombards our senses in an
attempt to change our consciousness and behaviour in the ‘persuasion economy’. The
ubiquitous presence of this information/transformation dynamic points to the need for an
anthropology of change and for a deep understanding of how and why messages can
transform human action.

2.11 Transience

A message is finite and context-bound. Victor Hugo’s famous message to his publisher “?”
about how “Les Misérables” was selling and the message in reply of his publisher “!”
illustrate this. Pheidippidus and messenger-RNA both perish immediately after delivering
their message. The relay runner who transfers the baton to his team mate drops out of the
race. Intercultural counterparts of transience are mono no aware, the Japanese awareness of
transience, and the Buddhist anicca. The receiver of a spiritual message may said to be
transported or in a trance – a transitional revelatory state of consciousness owing its
etymology to the Latin transire, originally meaning ‘to transit between life and death’.

2.12 Dissimulation

Anamorphism (from the Greek morphein / anamorphein) is visual matter presented in such a
way that the message of a painting can only be "correctly" discerned, like the subtext of a
theatrical dialogue, when seen from an oblique angle. The ana prefix means literally to
reverse a process (cf the Hermesian characteristic of ducere et reducere). In Hans Holbein’s
“The Ambassadors” the skull in the foreground (containing the message of vanitas) is only
glimpsed from an oblique position. The frontal view represents the acceptable social code of
opulence and success.

Flusser describes the role of betrayal and dissimulation in our contemporary media culture:

Media culture as a whole may be seen as the result of this kind of treason. It may be seen
as a network that divulges secrets. There are knots within that net (for instance, TV
stations) that suck in secrets. They suck in the secrets either by sending out spies
(reporters) or by seducing people who hold secrets to divulge them (people who permit
themselves to be interviewed or quoted). Those knots then transcode the secrets into a
sort of slang: they “process the information. (Flusser 1985, 58)

2.13 Timeliness and timing

The significance of a message is constrained by space and time. Like its parent ‘information‘
a message is specific to location and date and always represents contingent content ‘for’
somebody or something. The timely delivery of a message is often critical to its effect.
Timing is experienced on a daily basis in personal or public spheres of life but it is also a
factor in social or religious metamessages that claim to affect all mankind (e.g. Y2K, climate
change or the timelines(s) of Jesus Christ’s Second Coming). The timing and timeliness of
message delivery can be a critical factor in how its sense is received – be it an email
requesting a meeting, a crucial political announcement, a phone message not listened to in
time or a love letter that arrives too late. The complex relationship between messaging and
time in all spheres of existence is an important area for future research in angeletics.
 2.14 Ascent/Descent

The psychopomp role of Hermes who descended into Hades and guided souls back up to
the world of the living (ducere et reducere) is central to the Hermesian myth and to the
teleological force of messaging as a phenomenon at various levels. Referring to Boticelli’s
painting “La Primavera” Faivre notes:
The picture thus embodies the three phases of the Hermetic process: emanatio,
conversio, remeatio; emanation or procession in the descent of Zephyr towards Flora,
conversion in the dance of the Graces, and reascension in the figure of Mercury. (Faivre
1993, 29)

Emanatio conversio and remeatio (deriving from the Renaissance concept of emanation
rapture and reascension developed by Marsilio Ficino) can be seen as a basic angeletic
process corresponding to downward causation (supervenience), change (cross-level causation
or exchange between systems) and emergence (new properties arising). In angeletic terms
emanatio (emanation) is the process of composing a message, conversio (conversion) is the
translation of the meaning offer contained in it (content) and remeatio (uptake) is the ‘take
up’ of that content transformed in the mind of the receiver.

Descent and ascent, sending and receiving are complementary and entangled. Goethe’s
Mephisto (himself a Hermesian figure) summed up the central message of “Faust” (1832) as
he led the protagonist down to the realm of the Mothers:
Versinke denn! Ich könnt’ auch sagen: steige!
Es ist einerlei…

Then descend! I might as well say: ascend!

It’s all the same …
This complementarity of ascending/descending messages corresponds to Vilém Flusser’s
notions of horizontal and vertical structure and offers us an insight into the dynamics of
messaging. It also mirrors the ‘rise and fall’ of individuals and civilisations (their ‘message’)
and is reflected in historical linguistics (e.g. living/dead tongues, agglutinating and isolating
languages, the emergence and disappearance of words in usage, grammaticalisation).

2.15 Ambivalence

Ambiguity is intrinsic to messaging. Iris, the name of Zeus’s messenger, already contained
a double meaning, being associated with the Greek words iris ‘rainbow’, connecting clouds
and sea and eiris ‘messenger’ - linking people and places. The hermai of Greek mythology
had a Janus-like quality. On one side of the boundary stone Hermes was depicted as an old
man and on the other as a youth. Hermes represents darkness and light, goodness and
badness, information and misinformation. A message may bring glad or bad tidings. It may be
true or false. ‘Freedom of information’ contains a mixed message – FOI can be freedom of
access to personal information hidden by a bureaucracy but also freedom from control by
information used by the bureaucracy to monitor your life (surveillance). This is the same
ambivalence presented by the installation of public CCTV monitors which can both protect
and intrude into the privacy of citizens. Hermes’ creative invention of the lyre was also a
mixed blessing. On the one hand it represented the birth of a musical instrument and of his
friendship with his half-brother Apollo. On the other hand it meant the deaths of the tortoise
and ox which sacrificed the shell and horns as raw materials for little Hermes’ lyre. New
technology is often a blessing for some, a curse for others.
 3. The Different Guises of the Messenger – The Hermesian Paradigm

3.1 Mythology

An examination of the lives of the messengers of world mythology – Iris, Hermes, Hecate,
Mercury, Thoth/Anubis, Hermes Trismegistus, Mercurius, Odin and Wodin – reveals iterative
features and strong similarities and gives us vital insights into the nature of messaging. The
fundamental Hermesian Paradigm is repeated time and time again throughout history to the
point of universality.

3.2 Religion.

In most of the world’s major religions the messenger and messaging play a crucial role. In
Judaism there is Malachi (Messenger of Jehovah from a’ka= ‘sent’, in Christianity Jesus
Christ as a bringer of Good News, in Islam Mahommed is often called rasul Allah (Allah’s
messenger) . Christian messengers are also called angels, evangelists and apostles (from the
Greek apostellein ‘sent away’). The twin concepts of nabi and rasul and the Twelve
Messengers are central to Islamic faith. The word ‘rasul’ originally meant ‘a straight line
between two objects to unite them’. In Hinduism Lord Narad is the messenger of the gods –
his role and characteristics are very similar to those of Hermes (particularly his
hermaphroditic nature). Likewise the related Buddhist concept of Bodhisattva illustrates the
role of the messenger in the spiritual pilgrimage along paths of enlightenment. This notion of
enlightenment lingers in Western philosophy as ‘firstness’ – in Aristotle’s First Philosophy,
Francis Bacon’s First Information, Aquinas’s and C S Peirce’s firstness, Carl von
Weizsäcker’s Erstmaligkeit. In Christianity the prophet/apostle dualism (as with Islam) is
central to the delivery of their spiritual message. The apostle Paul also displayed Hermesian
characteristics – as when he used the statue of the Unknown God on Mars Hill to convert the
Athenians. The use of invention and even trickery to sell the gospel to pagans begins with him
and later became a feature of fourth century European conversion techniques (as in the use of
recycled pagan rituals such as those of the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas – both
messenger prototypes derived from Germanic cultures). Even the English word ‘soul’ was
ostensibly ‘borrowed’ by Ulfilas from the German ‘Seele’ and first appeared in its written
English form in Beowulf. ‘See-le’ purportedly refers to the final journey of a soul after death
back to the sea (German ‘die See’) from whence it first came. The New Zealand Maoris still
believe in a similar myth – the spirits of the dead depart this life from Cape Reinga (a Maori
word for ‘underworld’) and journey to the afterlife (Hawaiki) across the Pacific Ocean.

The soul/spirit dyad corresponds to the informatio/angelia relationship. Informatio is the

soul ‘as’ passive receptacle, the container or mould, angelia is the active moving spirit
(‘spirited away’ ‘Holy Spirit’) which communicates. The etymological link between ‘spirit’
(and its conceptual ‘family resemblances’ such as pneuma, anima, l’ame, esprit, psyche,
atma, Geist) and the act of breathing or exhalation (living breathing entity) is a vital clue to
the ontological relationship between being informed and the systole and diastole of giving and
receiving messages. The nabi/rasul, prophet/apostle duality (in Flusser’s terms there is one
who originates new information through dialogue and one who elaborates that information
through discourse) is also present in governments where often a leader informs theory and
policy while an ‘apostle’ is cast in the ambassadorial role and delivers the party message e.g.
Constantine and Eusebius, Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, Nixon and Kissinger.
 3.3 Society

Messenger roles are played by a range of professions in society based on their agential
function:

Modern messengers act as go-betweens, intermediaries, facilitators and agents and are
generally key players in the communications and service industries. Flusser describes this
new messenger class in Kafkaesque terms as the nonideological functionary… who puts the
information received discursively at the disposal of the holders of economic, social and
political power (Flusser 1967, 154). Hermesian figures in history have included Talleyrand,
Mahatma Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, Henry Kissinger, John Lennon, Barack Obama and the
Secretary-Generals of the U.N. who also play the role of peacemaker. Daniel Bougnoux
(1991) describes the ‘figure du médiateur’:

Le médiateur est, aux deux sens du mot, l’homme du milieu: intermédiaire ou pontifex
entre deux bords, il se montre sensible aux circonstances, aux opportunités ambiantes.

The mediator is, in the two senses of the word, the man of the milieu (middle,
environment):
an intermediary or pontifex between two edges, he shows himself sensitive to the
circumstances, to the environmental opportunities.

Bougnoux goes on to creates a typology of messengers in society – the prophet, the

intellectual, the priest, the professor, the writer, the journalist, the media personality and the
‘star’.

3.4 Biosphere

Messages and codes play a major part in molecular biology particularly in neuronal and
genetic messages (e.g. ligands/receptors, intrinsic/apoptotic pathways and the various
biomessengers and signal transducers). This is evident in the role of messenger-RNA in gene
transcription and in the actions of pyramidal and chandelier neurons in cognition, molecular
chaperones and promoters in protein folding, astrocytes in calcium signalling and
autoinducers in bacterial quorum sensing. Michael Lachmann (1999) has described the
activity of the ‘scout’ among dwarf mongooses that is given the specialized task of ‘spotting’
locations of nuts then sharing information with the gatherers that do the foraging. Similar
messaging roles are found in eukaryotic communities such as those of honey bees (waggle
dancing, piping) and ants (tandem running) and even in the sign-mediated interactions and
quorum sensing processes of the prokaryotic kingdom. – as Gunther Witzany (2008) has
vividly described. In the study of biological systems over the past decade there has emerged
the recognition that heteronomic networks and their mediating messengers play a much
greater role than previously thought.

3.5 Computing and Cyberspace

Messaging in computing embraces a wide range of technologies such as instant messaging,

Microsoft and Yahoo Messenger, Microisoft Notification Protocol (MSNP), email,
distribution lists, Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies, agents and knowbots.
Computing is best understood not as mere algorithmic computation but as com-putare
(literally ‘considering together’) akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” or a networking
of minds which was the original vision of the Internet. The recent explosive emergence of
social networking sites such as MySpace FaceBook and Twitter testify to the dramatic
‘communication turn’ in computing technology and society in general and to the major socio-
political impact of mediating and enabling networks. In fact the dramatic action of
messengers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exemplifies the Hermesian Paradigm at
work as intellectual agency in the infosphere.

3.6 Communications technology: Flusser’s pattern of autonomy/heteronomy

The history of communications has displayed a recurring dynamic between autonomy and
heteronomy, between vertical and horizontal control, between discursive and dialogical codes.
Mail telephone radio and television were in the beginning vertical autonomically controlled
devices. The pater familias often monitored their use in the household and messages were
sent in an autonomic/discursive one-to-one or one-to-many transmission model. With
portability (mobile phones, transistor radios, portable TV’s, email etc) horizontal/heteronomic
many-to-one and many-to-many models began to predominate (e.g. Internet distribution lists,
social networking, viral marketing).
This fundamental pattern is reflected in the development of religious social and political
movements throughout history. In Christianity for example we have seen how the one-to-one
autonomic/discursive relationship between Jesus Christ and his disciples became, after
Pentecost, a one-to-many and many-to-many heteronomic culture with the evangelistic team
of the apostles bearing the Good News to the unconverted. Later with the rise of Constantine
the Great and the papacy there was a return to autonomic and discursive channels of
communication (and excommunication). With Martin Luther and the Reformation horizontal
heteronomy reasserted itself until the various Protestant Churches established their own
autonomic discourse and one-to-many channels. This cycle continues to the present day. A
similar pattern can also be detected in the history of Marxism. In fact we can identify a law of
autonomy and heteronomy operating within the phenomenon of social and technological
change.

4. Towards a Taxonomy of Messages

What constitutes a message? How do messages work? What factors contribute to the form
content production impact and dynamics of messages? These are questions which need to be
addressed by the fledgling science of angeletics. An initial task is to categorize the various
types of message.

4.1 Towards a Typology of Messages

4.1.1 Agentive/patientive messages

Messages can be active or passive. Compare an email sent specifically from one person to
another (agentive message) to a message on a telephone answering machine which is not
intended for anyone in particular (patientive message).

4.1.2 Transitive/intransitive messages

A transitive message is one sent between a sender and receiver. An intransitive message may
be accidentally discovered – say a love letter found by a third party or a crop circle
accidentally encountered by a believer in extraterrestrials. Transitive messages can be
unidirectional, bidirectional or multidirectional, unilateral or transactional.
4.1.3 Direct/indirect messages

Very often messages are not received directly but are mediated by a third party – as when a
person opens a letter destined for somebody else and reads it out to him or her. This occurs
within various spheres of experience where messages are accidentally or deliberately
‘rerouted’.

4.1.4 Extrinsic/intrinsic messages

Reflecting the apoptotic/intrinsic pathways differentiation in biological messaging the

extrinsic/intrinsive distinction expresses the fact that some messages arise from an external
stimulus while others proceed internally from personal memory, self or the unconscious. An
example of this is the cinematic message which is received by an audience at the time of the
screening. It is often preceded and influenced by tangential extrinsic messages (word-of-
mouth, teaser ads on TV, promos posters and taglines) or intrinsic messages (experience of
the director’s previous film, fondness for a particular actor, positive memories of a similar
movie etc) which arise from within the spectator.

4.1.5 ‘Dead letter’ messages

‘Dead letter’ messages are those which never reach their destination - like a message in a
bottle which washes up on a deserted island or an email which is saved as a draft but never
sent. Flusser’s article entitled “Waiting for Kafka” illustrates this:
Kafka’s message has not completely reached us (Flusser 1967, 154)
The message has, according to its own nature, its addresses, its own fate. It is not
complete, it has not realised itself until it reaches its addressee and has suffered its
particular fate. (Flusser 1967, 164)

4.1.6. Feedback and feedforward messages

Feedback messages are like ‘read confirmation’ emails that give feedback on the status of
your message. Sometimes that can be a smile or grimace from an interlocutor, a laugh or a
blank stare during the telling of a joke or simply ignoring your message with silence.
Feedforward messages provide information in advance like the header or subject line in an
email, the preface or table of contents in a book or trailers and teasers in cinema. In speech
this often occurs through linguistic informatives such as ‘Are you sitting down?’ or ‘I won’t
spare you the details’. In phatic communication facial expressions or hand gestures can
provide feedforward cues which anticipate a response before the message is sent.

4.1.7. Metamessages

Meta-messages are messages that describe the structure of other messages – like in the
EDIFACT standard or HTML metatags in Dublin Core. In everyday experience they are
messages about messages such as ‘I had a great time tonight’ after a disastrous date. The
limp handshake or the untimely yawn which accompany a ‘Pleased to meet you’ are
instances where bodily gestures contradict the verbal message.

On a grander scale there are global meta-messages daily transmitted by governments,

churches and television stations which advertise a universal truth that is often contradicted by
the verifying messages of reality.
 4.2 Formats Artifacts and Devices

Messages over the centuries have come in a variety of formats – sticks, knots, tablets,
envelopes and e-messages. A comprehensive anthropological study of message formats
tracing their evolution since the dawn of civilisation is a major future project for angeletics.
Along with this is the study of message artefacts in history such as ‘message bags’ and
Japanese ‘stone letters’ (ishibumi). Messaging devices such as the telegraph, Morse code
transmitters or encryption machines would also be included.

4.3 Relay

Central to messaging is the concept of relay which has played a major role in communications
throughout history specifically by means of torches, runners, horses, pigeons and circuits, e.g.
torch messaging in Ancient Greece – Alexander the Great’s complex relay system of ‘fire
messages’ was the forerunner of modern telecommunications networks. Relays and circuits
have also played a significant part in electronics and neurobiology.

4.4 Time, timeliness and timing in messaging

A message that is delayed and fails to arrive on time can have a significant impact on the
situation of the intended recipient. This fact has been one of the major components of drama
in life history and art. To what degree time determines the messaging event is a key question
to be answered by angeletics.

4.5 The role of complementarity

Just as it is difficult to differentiate incoming and receding tidewater on the foreshore of a

beach or to distinguish between hearer and listener in the ebb and flow of a conversation the
sending and receiving of messages is often bidirectional or multidirectional. This
“Wechselwirkung” of messaging is also implied in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of “mutual
understanding” (“Verständigung”). As I talk you are reading my body language and facial
gestures or mumbling ‘huh huh’ as feedback in the middle of my sentence. This was
illustrated by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel in his method of Conversation Analysis (CA).
Much of the subtext of a message in everyday dialogue is communicated in an implicit look, a
roll of the eyes, a hand gesture whereby the explicit meaning is not contained in the message
itself.

5. Messaging and Culture

Message making and message sharing/networking are central issues in contemporary culture.
The social and anthropological practices of message creation transmission and storage, both
from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, are the object of study in Vilém Flusser’s
communicology.

5.1 Towards a New Sociology of Messaging

Flusser’s writings offer us a rich source of information for understanding and redefining our
networked society. His ideas about text and image, dialogue and discourse, vertical and
horizontal structures of communication and the ‘telematic city’ open up new vistas in related
cultural fields.

5.1.1 Messengers and messages in the fine arts and music

There is much scope for research into the role of angeletics in the fine arts. Painting and
sculpture provide us with many examples of messaging – from the “Nike of Samothrace” and
“The Annunciation” of Fra Angelico, Botticelli and Caravaggio to Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a
Letter.” A specific area of interest is the role of anamorphosis in hiding and revealing an
artist’s personal message. In music relevant topics include the birth of musical notation and
the rise of conducting as a messaging activity. The invention of the conductor’s baton in the
nineteenth century served to mediate between two incomplete circles (performers and
audience) as the emergence of the professional conductor in public concerts – from
Mendelssohn, Mahler and Wagner to Karajan and Bernstein - changed the face of music.
More recently we have witnessed the rise of rock band lead singers as a distinctly Hermesian
phenomenon in which the guitar replaces the lyre and the microphone the caduceus.

5.1.2 Literature

Key areas in literature worth exploring from an angeletics perspective are:

Message versus expression („Botschaft / Ausdruck“);

Littérature engagée – authors sending a strong message;

The gesture of writing – messaging and semiotics;

Postmodernism and the anti-message of the Absurd (Pinter, Beckett, Derrida, Baudrillard);

The subversion of messaging and the rise of discommunication -

In the disjunctive dystopias of transhumanist writers like in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Crash’,

Houellebecq’s ‘Plateforme’ or Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ the message is not
merely misunderstood but deliberately distorted using disconnection, inversion of moral
codes and reader betrayal. In our contemporary disangelion the literary heroes and anti-
heroes of modernity have given way to the diabolical hero of postmodernism, a sociopath
who refuses to communicate. From Travis Bickle and Patrick Bateman to Hannibal Lecter
and Anton Chigurh, from Camus’ Meursault to J.G. Ballard’s Robert Vaughan their
message is that there is no message in a world full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
And life imitates literature. The silent diabolical hero becomes ‘cool’ – like the Terminator.
The pseudo-communion of the Twitterverse cannot mask a subversive real world where an
email or SMS is deliberately not answered, phone messages are not listened to, calls are not
returned, and where people walk away from dialogue and intimacy. Inside this Black Hole
of discommunication how can we expect the ethos of angelos to survive?

5.1.3 Messages and Messengers in Theatre and Cinema

The arrival of a character who acts as messenger to reveal critical plot information is a trope
in the history of drama from the ‘messenger from Corinth’ in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” to
the various Shakespearean heralds reporting news from the battlefields and Chekhov’s
‘messenger element’ (two characters talking about a third to keep the audience informed).
Dramaturgical messaging techniques can also be found in the use of the Greek Chorus, the
actor’s aside to the audience and in Brecht’s use of ‘alienation effects’. There is rich material
here for an intriguing angeletic interpretation of theatre.
 Much of the artistic tension in cinema derives from the conflict between the expression of
the individual message and vision of the director and the demands of aesthetic and social
codes. We need to continue Flusser’s search for an “intersubjective exact method” (film code)
offered by a theory of communication (rather than by subjective anecdotal film criticism or
theorizing) as a method of de-ideologizating cinema. Social codes (e.g. the Hayes Code,
contemporary moral codes) can censor the artistic message of a film and its eventual success
or failure are often determined by the ability of a cinematic message to emerge over time
from the constraints of social and aesthetic codes. Cinematic codes (genre, three-act
structure, happy endings etc) often determine if and how the creative message of the director
and screenwriter (what they have to say) is taken up by the target audience.
Several films have messaging as a key ingredient in the story and plot. Movies with
messenger themes include Joseph Losey’s ‘The Messenger’ and ‘The Go Between’, George
Miller’s ‘Mad Max 2’, Wim Wenders’ ‘Wings of Desire’, Robert Zemeckis’s ‘Castaway’ and
Orem Moverman’s ‘The Messenger’. Yōjirō Takita’s 2008 Oscar-winning film ‘Departures’
(‘Okuribito’) about a coffin preparer offers an excellent example of the messaging theme and
of the Hermesian paradigm itself in its cinematic form structure and content – an Okuribito is
a person who sends a dead person’s soul on a journey. Messaging plays an important role in
the narrative articulation of a film - plot points, plot reversals and Act Three reveals introduce
to the audience significant new information which creates dramatic tension and suspense.
Cinematic metamessages are often sent through voice over, dialogue subtext, subtitles,
montage and the musical score.

6. Messaging Theory as a New Science – Future Research Agendas

Martha Smith (2000) and Tadashi Takenouchi (2004) have both written insightful articles
which point out potential research agendas for angeletics. However there are some key
research questions which need to be addressed if Messaging Theory (MT) is to become a
coherent scientific discipline with strong explanatory power.

6.1. How can Messaging Theory interface with the various theories in the science of
information and communication?

Messaging Theory can be seen as a correction or enhancement to Shannon and Weaver’s

‘Information Theory’ which is in reality a Signal Theory of Redundancy and Entropy not a
grand uniting theory of information, communication or messaging. How is MT related to
Entropy, Quantum Information, ‘It from Bit’, Second Order Cybernetics, the Data-
Information-Knowledge triangle, Floridi’s infosphere or the many competing theories of
information? Is messaging the primary phenomenon or is it a subsidiary feature or subunit of
the primitive of information? How is messaging at the level of the bios related to the circadian
clock or the concept of time itself? These and similar questions will serve to open up the
mystery of the phenomenon of messaging.

6.2 What is the essential hypothesis of Messaging Theory? How do we define ‘message’?

Clearly a working definition of ‘message’ is required that is broad enough to capture the
nature of messaging at its various levels of complexity. A starting point might be:
A message (m) is a non-random transmission of energy data or sense which occurs between
a source and a receiver and which is contingent on direction velocity and timing.
 In defining the term we again face the ‘Capurro trilemma’ of nomenclature which applies
to the multiplicity of meanings of the word ‘information’ across the different scientific
disciplines and spheres of experience. The stagnation in the science of information over the
past decade indicates that MT may face similar obstacles.

6.3 What is the structure of MT as a descriptive, explanatory and predictive discipline?

I have attempted to outline above elements of that structure. The discipline’s natural academic
home would appear to be Media Studies, Anthropology or ICT Departments within IS or LIS.
As a wide-reaching topic (like Semiotics or Knowledge Management) it could also form part
of the syllabus of a transdisciplinary unit.

6.4 Communication: a natural or an artificial phenomenon?

We need a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of communication. Media and

communication theorists such as Raymond Williams, George A Miller, Harold Innes,
Marshall McLuhan, Regis Debray Daniel Bougnoux and Jürgen Habermas have given us
some marvellous insights but have not comprehensively explained the ontology of human and
non-human communication. Reversing McLuhan’s famous dictum The Medium is the
Message Rafael Capurro argues that now The Message is the Medium.
But is communication a natural phenomenon or an artificial and perverse one, as Flusser
implies?
Human communication is an artificial process. It relies on artistic techniques, on
inventions, on tools and instruments, that is, on symbols ordered into codes...
Consequently communications theory is not a natural science, but rather is concerned
with the human being’s unnatural aspects (Flusser 1973, 1.)
Is Flusser’s view too pessimistic? Is communication by nature oblique and perverse (in a
universe of mixed messages) or do humans (along with animals, bacteria and possibly
computers) actually possess a natural tendency to commune with one another?

6.5 The Relevance of Message Theory to IS LIS and Documental Science

Optimizing content management (document delivery by interlibrary loans, e-publishing, Web

portals, point-of-use information systems etc) requires a deeper understanding than we now
possess of how messaging and messages actually work. Contemporary LIS is experiencing a
crisis of relevance and may find a new avenue of opportunity in angeletics. In his study of
information sharing among dwarf mongooses Michael Lachmann (1999) pinpoints the link
between information sharing, communication and the economics of cooperation:
Information sharing differs quantitatively from the sharing of a physical resource. When
an organism shares information about the environment with others there may be no
immediate cost imposed, no intrinsic loss. In a group of dwarf mongooses, one
individual acts as sentry while others forage. A solitary dwarf mongoose would have to
invest most of his time looking for predators and would not survive. (Lachmann 1999, 2)
This is the economic rationale for the existence of networked libraries, databases and
messaging systems as well as for the vital intermediary role of information and
communication professionals. The librarians archivists and IT specialists of the future may
need to become the informing and communicating agents of angelos, facilitators and
mediators, and no longer be the solipsistic custodians of the global archive of data and texts
like Derrida’s archons (document guardians).
 6.6 From angeletics to angelethics – the ethics and morality of messaging and messengers

Sharing and networking of messages have become an integral component of the Information
Society and are central to the mores and morals of the online world where information
cooperation has predominated. The recent emergence of Information Ethics (IE) and its
concerns with issues such as public surveillance, reproduction technology and the Globally
Sustainable Information Society (GSIS) points to the need to examine the ethical status of the
media which daily bombards us with messages (TV ads, SMS texts, emails etc) we are
constantly called on to evaluate for their relevance and veracity. In this climate the need for a
mediator we can trust becomes paramount. Antoine Faivre spells out for us a new Hermesian
ethic of mediation:
The epoch of positivism and materialistic science obviously stands under the patronage
of Prometheus. Reacting against this, the epistemological revolution of our time
(especially the second half of the twentieth century) calls on intermediaries, extending
the relational concept to every field of science and the mind (relativity, pluralism,
polarities, polysemiology, information exchange etc.), and explores the various possible
paths of the inner quest as no era ever before. This kind of revival of Hermes is called a
messenger (angelos): a Byzantinism, but a creative one, suited to times when institutions
are crumbling, and the Barbarians are at the gate of the West. (Faivre 1993, 49)
Our world appears to be in a mess - the Message is the Mess Age. Declining civilizations
often witness the emergence of a dysangelium, of what Scott Lash (2002) in his „Critique of
Information” calls a disinformed information society where interhuman communication
breaks down. In the words of Antoine Faivre (1993) the contemporary Hermesian spirit
encounters a post-Derrida world where language has become hermetic
[…] without links outside itself, without heuristics. Solipsism, atomization,
incommunicability are the ransom of our episteme since the eighteenth century, whereas
Hermes shows the path of otherness, of living diversity, of communication of souls. This
otherness, as well as its opposite – shutting out of the outside – are found in our arts and
our literature, according to whether Narcissus or Prometheus reigns as absolute master,
or whether, on the contrary, Hermes favors and stimulates living relationships within art
and literature. Prometheus without Hermes is dangerous, but so are Narcissus and
Dionysus (Faivre 1993, 70).
If Narcissus represents the world of fame and the beautiful people, Dionysus the world of
sex drugs and rock and roll and Nike the realm of sporting competition then Hermes is the
god of art language and creativity. To adopt the Hermesian Paradigm opens up creative
perspectives for the Information Society. We are witnessing a ‘communication turn’ in
contemporary culture and are possibly entering another age of angelos – only this time it is a
secular world ruled by the gods and gurus of Information Technology. But, as it was for both
Hermes and Flusser himself, the journey of ratio hermetica will not be planned and systematic
but spontaneous and peripatetic like that of Walter Benjamin’s nomadic flaneur. As Flusser
noted in his article “Orders of magnitude and humanism”:

In order to be able to maintain the priority of the human order of magnitude, the new
humanism has to refer to something nameless. It must circle it and beat around the bush
[…] some people affirm that God writes in winding lines in order to hit his goal. The
new humanism is forcedto break out of the linearity of technical progress into the
winding. (Flusser 1990, 164)
Kerenyi describes Hermes’ itinerant nature:
Hermes is constantly underway: he is enodios (“by the road”) and hodios (“belonging to
a journey”) and one encounters him on every path. He is constantly in motion: even as
he sits, one recognizes the dynamic impulse to move on (Kerenyi 1976, 15).
Flusser’s life as he moved from Prague to Brazil and finally to Robion reflected the same
nomadic spirit.
 Conclusion

While the Prometheans of cyberspace have been busy building their Information
Superhighways, expanding bandwidth and laying down their fibre optic aqueducts, the hubs
and routers of their global communication networks, the Hermesians have been simply
enjoying the journey anonymously, winding their way between the herms – the Internet cafes
and Web chat rooms, the wikispaces and blogospheres, the online gaming sites and social
networking pages that are the boundary markers of the Virtual Society. Kerenyi captures this
contradiction between position and momentum, stasis and dynamis which characterizes the
nature of messaging and communication:
The journeyer is at home while underway, at home on the road itself, the road being
understood not as a connection between two definite points on the earth’s surface, but as
a particular world […] For, unlike the Roman highways which cut unmercifully through
the countryside, they run snakelike, shaped like irrationally waved lines, conforming to
the contours of the land, winding, yet leading everywhere. (Kerenyi 1976, 14)
Capurro’s angeletics and Flusser’s communicology offer the practitioners of ICT much
food for thought. Their insights provide a challenge to regimes controlled by the Apparatus-
Operator-Complex which tends to treat its citizens as digital entities rather than as freely
communicating human beings. Sadly Vilém Flusser died in a car accident in 1991. Had he
lived to experience the explosion of information and communication technologies later in the
decade he would have been able to see many of his hopes and fears confirmed. In his paper
“On the Theory of Communication” he observed prophetically:
A radical change in the mass-media structure is perfectly possible, and present
techniques allow it. To give only one example: TV can be changed so that it becomes a
true “network” (namely, a dialogical code) more or less like the telephone
network…This would really change humanity into a global village, not only with idle
talk in the cosmic marketplace, but with real participation of great numbers in the
elaboration of information. This would be true democracy (Flusser 1986, 19).

Acknowledgement

The author is indebted to Rafael Capurro for his marvellous encouragement and expert
feedback during the writing of this article.
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