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Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory 290

Posted by michael from the three-sheets-to-the-wind dept.
joabj writes "Paper was itself a technology at one point, this essay from Umberto Eco, author of "In The Name of the Rose," reminds us. Eco holds forth on the differences between paper and electronic memory. He doesn't come out in favor of either, rather he talks about the advantages each has, in technical terms. Some fascinating ideas here...."
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Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory More

Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory

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  • Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:47AM (#7577506) Homepage Journal

    Paper is better than electronic for long term storage. There are already concerns for data being lost forever because of incompatible older formats and hardware. Paper was good enough for da Vinci.

    • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But how many priceless documents have been lost over the millenia? Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.
      • Countless priceless documents may have been lost however a lot of it is due to religious zealotry and war. I'd wager the bulk of the lost books/scrolls didn't just rot on a shelf, they were torched.

      • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mikerich ( 120257 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:29PM (#7577718)
        Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.

        The best estimate is that at least 75% of Leonardo's writings have been destroyed or lost since his lifetime. Most of the surviving codices are actually rebindings of his work which have been salvaged from elsewhere.

        Then there is the problem that Leonardo hardly ever finished anything - he loved procrastinating work, so its hard to know if some works attributed to his pupils are actually overpaintings of Leonardo's work. he hardly ever signed anything, so a good number of paintings (and some sculptures) are suspected of being Leonardo's work, but it can't be proven.

        And he kept experimenting - most famously in the case of The Last Supper [upenn.edu] in Milan. Leonardo wanted to paint with oils for their intense colouration, but did not want to use the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster (Leonardo rarely worked for a long period of time - so the plaster would have dried before he completed the work).

        So he invented an oil-based paint that could be applied to dried plaster. And it looked magnificent - contemporaries were in awe of the work - for a few years, but Leonardo's formulation did not bind to the plaster and the paint began to crumble from the plaster. The painting was then restored a number of times - quite crudely, which made a big difference to the work.

        So if you are in Milan, go and see The Last Supper - it is a work of extraordinary beauty and power (and size), but it is a faint shadow of the original.

        Leonardo also lost a lot of work thanks to his choice of patrons, most notably Ludovico Sforza [wikipedia.org], tyrant of Milan between 1480 and 1499. Ludovico hired Leonardo ostensibly to create a massive 8m high statue of a horse to commemorate Frederico Sforza, the dynasty's founder.

        Well Leonardo being Leonardo, he didn't work terribly quickly and got side-tracked, spending much of his time producing the majority of his known paintings, designing fortifications for Milan, a giant crossbow and starting his obsession with geology.

        In 1499, the French invaded Lombardy to settle their claim for the dukedom of Milan. Sforza lost the battle and fled - Leonardo took his opportunity to leave as well.

        What he didn't take was the full-sized model of his horse. The clay model was destroyed by Gascon bowmen and reduced to rubble. In recent years, an American team [leonardoshorse.org] have created a pair of monumental bronze horses inspired by the original. One is in Michigan, the other in Milan - I saw the latter one this summer - and in a word - WOW!

        And just think, this is Leonardo da Vinci we are talking about, what has been lost from less-well-known artists? What about the collected works of the Library of Alexandria, the libraries of the Caliphate of Baghdad, Rome...?

        Best wishes,
        Mike.

    • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by in7ane ( 678796 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:52AM (#7577537)
      To play devil's advocate - what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on (electronic storage has a much higher content/size ratio)?

      As for incompatible older formats - is that like old languages which are hard to decipher? As mankind progresses extracting data from old electronic formats will be similar to extracting it from squiggles on stone pillars.

      • Archives and Comtemplation (Score:4, Insightful)

        by yintercept ( 517362 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:08PM (#7577623) Homepage Journal

        I really don't fall for the lost data due to file incompatibility issue. The last 50 years has recorded more information than any other corresponding period. Our biggest problem right now is information overload. We are recording more information than future generations can or will ever want to process. In this regards the electronic archives might prove more valuable as they can be processed by historians in a faster manner than paper.

        books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.

        I found this quote from the article interesting. By being slashdotted, thousands of people are reading Eco at the moment. The slashdotters are actively engaged in trying to think of something clever to say for mod points. The blanket statement that people reflect when reading books, and don't with the net isn't quite true. People are engaged a little bit differently.

        • File incompatability? Try hardware incompatability!

          My old Amstrad PC1512 can read and write 5 1/4" floppies, but I don't even know if it works any more. 3 1/2" floppies will die a death soon enough, and the CD...? Who knows. In fifty years time even your latest super duper spanky-wank data storage medium might just be a lump of worthless crud.

          Looking at file incompatabilty you might want to think about space mission tapes that can't be read because no-one's alive who know the decoding/reading system. Lots

          • I did not say file and hardware incompatibilities do not exist...just that we are not suffering the possibility of loss of our culture. Once data is on the network, the hardware problems become less severe. When one program replaces another, you migrate the data to the new servers.

            The problems we will have with electronic media probably will have more to do with reinterpretation during the transfer. These same problems occurred with monks transcribing works. First they chose which works to keep and which

      • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Theatetus ( 521747 ) * on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:30PM (#7577721) Journal
        what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on

        Well, from what I've read of Eco he would consider that one of paper's chief advantages. When preserving information is more difficult, you only record things worth recording, rather than the pointless dataglutting that we do today.

        • Attitudes like this are suspiciously like historians/archaeologists used to be (until very recently, anyway).

          "Why should we care about the common man, we only want to record the *important* events".

          You never know what's important data 50 or 100 years down the road.
        • So paper is better because

          1. It is easier to store data on, and
          2. It is harder to store data on

          I suspect some people just like paper, and make up reasons as they go along...

          One way to use the higher storage capacity of digital storage would be to store stuff in thousands of different places, different media, formats etc. Some may be lost, become unreadable etc, but hardly every single copy. And it would still just take 1/1000 of the space of paper copies.
    • Yeah, right.

      I don't want to think about how you propose cataloging all the paper data you want kept.
      Or about the way you'd ensure the data's backed up.
      Or about how you would propagate a change through your enormous cross-indexed mirrored filing cabinets.

      Yes, long term storage of electronic data could be a problem, but this is why you review your data storage methods periodically, and ensure you aren't using hard/software that won't be readable in five/ten/fifty years time.

      I know that paper certainly

      • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:4, Insightful)

        by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:08PM (#7577621)
        I don't want to think about how you propose cataloging all the paper data you want kept.

        Librarians solved that problem hundreds of years ago.

        Or about the way you'd ensure the data's backed up.

        Just like anything else, another copy.

        Or about how you would propagate a change through your enormous cross-indexed mirrored filing cabinets.

        I am sure that removing an index card isn't that hard.

        Yes, long term storage of electronic data could be a problem

        Not "could be". It is a problem. It's a problem because the technology is so new people don't know what works, and what doesn't.

    • well.. but paper has so much less space per volume, if you just keep on moving to bigger and bigger data storages(the earlier storage just being always a fraction of the new), wouldn't you able to keep much much much much larger sets of data stored? most of the important things get stored on paper(on publications & etc) nowadays as well.

      though, when you archive for paper you should keep in mind to archive it in a way that doesn't self destruct.
    • Between loss of electronic data from format problems, and loss of celluloid data from mouldy vaults, and loss of paper data from legal ambiguity about ownership, a surprisingly high amount of culture is going to vanish before it enters the public domain. Look around you. This just may be what a dark age looks like from the inside.

      • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Greedo ( 304385 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:38PM (#7577753) Homepage Journal
        FYI, a very good read on the problem with microfiche storage is Nicholson Baker's book Double Fold [barnesandnoble.com].

        From the publisher:
        Since the 1950's, our country's greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Barker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself -- who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy.
    • I've got plaintext dating back to 1985(my early programs and school papers). Now stored on CD-ROM, brought over from the original floppies.

      I always thought that proprietary formats were going to be trouble, so I always kept a copy of my stuff in plaintext. Lotus 123 was exported to CSV. Wordperfect 5.1 exported to plaintext, etc.

      This stuff is still usable. I recently dug back into some analysis I did in 1991 for a CICS system and pulled out an outline and some paragraphs that kind of suited the J2EE proje
      • What kind of plaintext: ASCII or Unicode? (Rhetorical question, Unicode wasn't around in 1985).

        As computers evolve, even non-proprietary formats become problematic. If the underlying tech changes (for instance, the number of bits per character is increased) all the old data must be converted to the new standard to ensure that newer machines can use it. But, if the amount of new data produced increases (due to population growth, etc), the amount of existing data grows exponentially, and it becomes impract

    • Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by STrinity ( 723872 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:59PM (#7577856) Homepage
      Paper is better than electronic for long term storage.

      That's arguably true provided you have a printing press. Anyone who's studied medieval and classical literature knows that paper is a horrible medium when data has to be copied manually -- most things written more than a thousand years ago don't exist today, either through war, disaster, or lack of interest, and those that do survive, have been bowdlerized.
      • Actually, I'd say most people nowadays with a computer *do* have exactly the equivalent of a printing press - a printer. The real problem is that there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't lend itself to being stored on paper, owing to sheer size and its not being text. Continually updated webpages are a good example of sheer size, sound and video are a good example of not being text.
    • "Paper is better than electronic for long term storage"

      And carved stone is even better. I would suggest using a CNC milling machine to backup any data you want to keep for longer than paper allows, but I guess punchcards are probably just as good.

      Could be worse I suppose. We could have translated the Rosetta stone to discover it reads: "Content-type: text/DRM-Encrypted\n Note: this material is copyrighted, please purchase an egyptian slave to allow you to legally read it"

    • Each to it's own (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stephen Samuel ( 106962 ) <samuelNO@SPAMbcgreen.com> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @02:25PM (#7578227) Homepage Journal
      Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

      -- Jesus
      There are advantages to both the web and physical books. The web is easy to search, but -- as a recent article pointed out -- it's very ephemeral. Web pages have an average lifespan of 100 days, and the WhiteHouse is limiting searches of articles about Iraq. Modulo problems like that, it's possible to find anything you want -- as long as there's stil a valid pointer to it, and it hasn't been changed.

      Many years ago, I was doing a school report on Fidel Castro's revolutionary activities. My mother had an encyclopedia that had been bought in 1959 -- Just about the time that Castro was starting his second (and successful) revolution. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had about one paragraph on him -- describing him as little more than a failed revolutionary.

      For me, this historical view of Castro (the view itself being of historical nature) was rather interesting... and unlikely to have been repeated in later versions of the encyclopedia. Today, even the teaser for the Fidel Castro's entry [britannica.com] in the encyclopedia is as long as the entire original

      . I'm very glad that my mother bought the original Encyclopedia, and that my sister has seen fit to keep it. I would also encourag anybody who has such old works to keep them as historical record, much less likely to change than the 'net.

      For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC, which still has a reasonably active Native culture. There are still a small handful of people in BC who grew up trained almost exclusively in the pre-european style of the various nations that are now British Columbia. The Native tradition is very much an oral one, and they had methods and customs designed to keep such histories constant over time... Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.

      I remember one native elder recalling how his (then) elder scoffed at the european tradition of writing everything down...

      "If it's that important, why do they have to write it down to remember it?"

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:48AM (#7577520)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • read the article, buster (Score:5, Insightful)

      by misterpies ( 632880 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:12PM (#7577639)

      It's clear from all the posts so far that I'm the only person to actually read the article.

      Eco is not interested in the physical difference between paper and electronic media. He doesn't discuss problems of compatibility or the possibilities of electronic paper. His article is about the evolution of *what* we write, not how we write it.

      The way in which the online world frees us from the single author, linear narratives of books and opens the door to multifaceted collaborative efforts (he doesn't mention wikis, but he seems to have got the idea). He thinks about what effect this will have on authorship and envisages the process as being akin to a jazz riff, slightly different every time depending on what the participants bring to it, rather than the single vision of an auteur.

      It is indeed an insightful and thought provoking article by one of the world's leading philosophers. And frankly, it's not something you can even begin to comment on until you read it. Which makes me wonder how it got onto /. in the first place.
      • We do that a lot, don't we?
        We get obsessed with the technology that's changing how we do things and then we completely ignore the effects of that technology until we are well into the change. IMHO, that's because we're always trying to get new technology to do the same old things "faster" and "easier". It's usually the iconoclasts/rebels/weirdos/(your favourite label here) who are the first to point out that the new tech can do things we've never thought of.

        I wouldn't presume to reduce Eco's complex dis

      • Re:read the article, buster (Score:5, Insightful)

        by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @02:30PM (#7578237) Homepage
        Also note the other (and for me much more insightful) assertion that Eco makes: we value "inflexible" texts like books, scrolls, obelisks precisely because they are so inflexible...

        Jazz is lovely for some entertainment, but is a poor substitute for fate and destiny, which we project onto the libraries of printed matter in ways that we cannot project onto the Internet, precisely because on the Internet, we create the content, even if not in the HTML, in the hyper-reading. Wherever I am the author (and every hyper-reader in some sense becomes his own author), fate and destiny have been killed by my own will.

        In some cases (i.e. the encyclopedic search), this is helpful. In others (i.e. meaning making, metaphysics, the desire for a collective memory) it is not.

        Interesting.
  • how paper for years has been used to record things by writing them down, now this...

  • advanttages and disadvantages (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrsev ( 664367 ) <mrsev@ELIOTspymac.com minus poet> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:50AM (#7577530)
    Paper can be stored for ages and is so redundant in its information carrying capacity that even with degradation and damage is still HUMAN readable.

    Try the same with a HD and see how much damage it can take. On the other hand electronic data can be copied ad infinitum. ..

  • And don't forget the alphabet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heironymouscoward ( 683461 ) <heironymouscoward@NOsPAm.yahoo.com> on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:53AM (#7577540) Journal
    John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

    Paper, the way we describe our world, the way we describe ourselves... the impact on the way we think can be enormous.

    As for "technology", everything we make has been radical new technology at some point. People are so impressed that chip prices fall every 18 months. But this applies to all technological products when you're climbing the S curve.
    • This article might have been informative...10 years ago; Umberto's a bit behind the times.

    • Re:And don't forget the alphabet (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RayBender ( 525745 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @01:03PM (#7577875) Homepage
      John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

      Why is that to the detriment of our worldview? Abstraction from physical objects has allowed us to develop things like abstract mathematics and music. Beside, the much-maligned western worldview has led to the most stunningly successful civilization anywhere, anywhen. Sure there are problems (environmental, societal, economic, political, spiritual) and things we could improve; but now we have the material security and scientific knowledge to begin dealing with those issues, and what is to say that any other civilization would be any better at dealing with these issues, anyway?. The adored Chinese worldview appears to have produced a stagnant behemoth unable to compete with modernity, nor provide the standard of living to the masses that we all take for granted. In addition, ancient China referred to itself as the 'middle kingdom', i.e. the center of the world (which is partly why it failed to keep up). That's pretty self-centered in my book.

      Finally, it is the development of modern science (in partciular astronomy) that has fundamentially changed our view of the Universe; we now know that we are but a small planet orbiting an average star in an average Galaxy etc etc. That's pretty humbling, and entirely the fruit of western thought.

      People who confuse current problems with fundamental limitations, and who over-romanticise primitive cultures (while enjoying all the fruits of modern life) really, really irritate me.

      • Why is that to the detriment of our worldview?

        No-one is romanticising a particular culture. John Gray's argument (which I quite like, even if it's not 100% my own opinion) is this: western thought has been driven by a human-centered world view since the time of Plato. This world view has, indeed, been the basis for modern western life, but also the basis for seriously aggressive religions and many social problems.

        The argument continues: the idea that humans are "special" leads to the myth of human perf
      • You know, I find it really irritating to defend Eastern cultures every second day here on /. especially when people miss the point by miles, but really:-

        Abstraction from physical objects has allowed us to develop things like abstract mathematics and music.

        And the Chinese don't have abstract mathematics or music? As in, what's the relevance to the abstraction you're talking about?

        Sure there are problems (environmental, societal, economic, political, spiritual) and things we could improve;

        Potentially

  • please correct title of Umberto Eco's book (Score:4, Informative)

    by postworek ( 691146 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:54AM (#7577548)
    Real title is "Name of the rose" not "In the name of the rose".

  • Domesday (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @11:57AM (#7577567) Journal
    I think the best example is probably the domesday book and the domesday project.

    A thousand years ago (more or less) the Domesday book recorded a snapshot of life in England (and Wales I think ,but I think the scots gave'em the finger :-), it's still available today.

    20 (or so) years ago, the domesday project did the same thing - recorded to a laserdisk, and intended to be a resource of all things at that time. For the time, it was pretty fantastic - schools up and down the country took part, videos were made, maps, testaments from people of all walks of life.

    There is now a project [umich.edu] to try and resurrect the domesday project, because no technology available can read it. The book (though written in latin) is still perfectly legible. Which is the better technology ?

    Paper every time, apart from when you're searching :-)

    Simon.

    • Re:Domesday (Score:2, Funny)

      by STrinity ( 723872 )
      20 (or so) years ago, the domesday project did the same thing - recorded to a laserdisk, and intended to be a resource of all things at that time. For the time, it was pretty fantastic - schools up and down the country took part, videos were made, maps, testaments from people of all walks of life.

      There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project, because no technology available can read it.

      The problem is, it wasn't a videogame. If they'd included a few side-scrolling shooters, there'd be
    • Until it burns.

      Imagine if the library of Alexandria had been "backed up" to another site somewhere else in the world.

      Or to bring it closer to home, a friend of mine recently had a house fire. He now only has photographs of his life dating from about 1999 onwards, when he first bought a digital camera.

      I suspect the Domesday book either isn't quite as important to people as Slashdotters try to make it out to be, or they chose a really stupid format to put it in. What, did the reading equipment suddenly jus
      • You're confusing two things, one is longevity, the other is redundancy.

        The library at Alexandria was unique throughout the world; no matter what medium was used to store the data, if the container is destroyed (with significant prejudice, in this instance), the data will be lost.

        The issue here was that the hardware was specific, expensive, and tied to a platform that died. Suddenly people realised they couldn't get to the data any more.

        Sure, the project has little bearing on your life or mine, but it's s

    • There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project...

      ... and it has succeeded. [pro.gov.uk] Visitors to the National Archives at Kew can use a new PC-based interface to browse the original data from 1986.

      Adrian's first goal was to get the BBC Master computer working reliably again.

      Hmm... I'll have to dig out my BBC Model B and see if it still works reliably. Could have saved them a bit of trouble ;-)

      (FWIW, it was covered here [slashdot.org] about a year ago.)

    • Better="meets requirements"

      Everybody may have different requirements in mind when working on a project such as the modern domesday.

      If the requirements were "get me lots of temporary fame and grant money for this fancy high-tech project" - I'd say laserdisk was the "better" technology.
      If the requirement was "to produce something that would be more likely to be read by our progeny 1000 years hence", of course, it didn't work out.

      Always think of the requirements. "Better" is a pretty vague description.

    • I don't see the failure of the modern-day domesday project so much as a result of some fundamental flaw in every storage medium other than paper, but merely the consequence of a flawed approach to electronic storage.

      That the modern domesday records are useless to anybody without access to a laserdisc reader is analogous to the fact that the original Domesday book is useless to anybody who cannot read Latin. We can read the original Domesday book because Latin is a standardized and widely-understood langua

  • Required reading (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scrotch ( 605605 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:04PM (#7577605)
    This article should be considered a prerequisite for any slashdotters that want to spout off (from any perspective) about copyright, intellectual property, the future of storage and/or digital rights management.

    If you can't get through this article and get something from it, you shouldn't be in the debate.

    • Required reading (Score:4, Informative)

      by harriet nyborg ( 656409 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:14PM (#7577653)
      on preview what scrotch said.

      double plus good scrotch.

      even if you dont' manage the whole article, just this paragraph is worth reading:

      "Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both."

    • Required reading (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nuggz ( 69912 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:19PM (#7577676) Homepage
      Of course the fact that it is a rambled spew of ideas, it definately has something smart to say!

      I think it is crap.
      It is unclear and confusing.

      Some people have this idea that to be smart profound or insightful you need to obscure what you are saying.
      I think the real challenge is to say it in such a way that people can understand you. The more clearly you can state a complex idea, the better the author.

      Required reading should be clear and understood by all. It should be easy to read. We shouldn't discount people simply because they can't understand some random rambling rant.

      (Can you tell I didn't like the article?)
      • Just think he's talking about source code and distributed authorship like in most GPL'ed projects, and you'll see his point.
      • Umberto Eco might have different goals in his communication. He's not just making an argument or disseminating information. He's layering ideas about history, society, and information. He's trying to make a piece of text with a certain aesthetic, and something that can lead to further thought when contemplated on.

        Your guidelines are good for practical communication like business or debate. But sometimes it's ok to ask the reader to think between words.

  • long-winded, but some interesting points... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:07PM (#7577615)
    condensed version:

    "People ask me all the time if digital technology means the end of books."

    "It doesn't mean the end of physical books, because the computer I just spent 12 hours reading hurts my eyes, and eBooks haven't been a success in the marketplace; never mind that it took 20 years for the engineers of cellular phones to come up with the technology and design necessary to put one in every pocket -- digital readers will never be any good because today's suck."

    "It doesn't mean the end of the book as a narrative or storytelling device either, because the nature of hypertext is wholly different from linear writing. Hypertext will supplement books and fiction as another form of expression, not replace it."

    I hate it when academics write about engineering problems. His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.
    • Some of those "engineering" problems are really in another domain. Even his point about hypertext making it easy to find links between things that we would normally class as not closely related, and how that may make us think there is no distinction between close and distant, sounds like an engineering problem in some ways (It's tempting to think you could solve it by counting the relative numbers of hits for a search engine, or by a catagorization scheme). Eco seems to be thinking outside of both the acade

  • Books and Further Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:09PM (#7577626)

    The article is interesting, but I cringed when I saw this point:

    First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary, they are machines that provoke further thoughts.

    Ideally this is true, and it's the expected opinion of Eco, who makes his living off of the written word. In reality, though, books often do little to promote further thinking. I need only think back to my time as a TA, when many students wouldn't understand how to solve a particular problem because they couldn't simply look it up in a textbook. Even when a solution was there for them to find, most would simply duplicate the answer without understanding the thought-process behind it. Even today, a significant portion of co-workers wouldn't try to figure out a non-trivial problem because they feel as if it's a waste of time, and surely there's already an answer written up somewhere for them to find. The new human nature, I guess.

    While this has more to do with information itself than with the benefits of paper vs. electronic memory, the mere fact that so much information is recorded on one form or another has significantly altered the mind-set of today's generation. A great number of us really are allowing others to think for us. While Eco rightly suggests that books are limited in their abilities, namely they can only record and not compute, I feel that they often promote less thinking.

    • I feel that they often promote less thinking

      You and a lot of educated people back when the printing press was invented.

      Before this, most information was passed down verbally, and people couldn't just "look up" an answer to a problem - they had to figure it out for themselves. 15/16th century academics often worried that mass availability of printed material would stop people from thinking for themselves, because all the answers were available on paper.

      I've heard of schools fighting against textbooks eve
    • This is especially true for American school textbooks. I was educated in France and our books were nowhere as thick and as detailed as your textbooks.

  • Hm... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:23PM (#7577689)
    I am, of course, printing this sucker out before I read it.

  • extended criticism... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:25PM (#7577696)
    The naive question is: "Will hypertextual diskettes, the internet, or multimedia systems make books obsolete?" ...this question is a confused one, since it can be formulated in two different ways: (a) will books disappear as physical objects, and (b) will books disappear as virtual objects?

    I'm not going to touch point b, which is an investigation of "hypertext" and multimedia, and most of his observations are pretty interesting. As an academic and a philosopher, he's good at thinking about ideas. However, his opinions on the possibilities of eBooks (which, unfortunately, most literature-industry types will take seriously) are misguided.

    After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls... [computers] are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.

    The only evidence he offers for this "incapability" is that they make his eyes hurt. What kind of "computer console"? This is really important!

    A radiation tube? I hope he had a pair of Clockwork Orange lackeys nearby to administer eyedrops. A desktop LCD? Better on the eyes, but still bad on the back. A laptop is OK, but it pretty much has to stay on the stomach. A tablet PC is even better still, but still to unweildy.

    (and don't get me started on "eBook readers," btw... nobody ever suggested that you should carry a separate PDA for an address book, and another for a calendar, and another for a to-do list; dedicated ebook readers are clearly insane and should be disregarded. That Eco doesn't dismiss them outright shows how little he understands gadgetry and human interface engineering.)

    But what about PDAs? Simple, unassuming backlit LCDs? Granted, they're mostly too small for truly comfortable reading (I think there's a huge, untapped market for a PDA the size of a "trade paperback"), but they're damned close.

    I've read many novels and stories on PDAs (and even one short novel on my cellphone); after reading the Harry Potter books on their Palm handhelds, my sister and her husband now gripe when something they'd like to read can't be found in an "eBook" format. The husband refuses to touch Stevenson's Quicksilver until he can download it, like he did with a bootleg copy of Cryptonomicon.

    Yet, up to now e-books have not proved to be commercially successful as their inventors hoped... In general, people seem to prefer the traditional way of reading a poem or a novel on printed paper.

    When the cellular phones were invented in the 1980s and failed to become widely successful in the marketplace, the engineers did not decide that their idea was a poor one and give up. They recognized that their implementation was flawed, and went back to the "drawing board" (or their MS-DOS-driven copies of Autocad, and I'm sure there's a point to be made there someplace).

    Indeed, there are a lot of new technological devices that have not made previous ones obsolete... The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous one is frequently too simplistic...

    Eco just glossed over the answer. "ebooks" (what a horrible term) will never render all books extinct. They will supplement books.

    You know those boxes that photocopier paper come in? I have 25 of those, stuffed full of books. Each box is damned heavy. As you might guess, I'm one of those people who loves books.

    Many of them -- autographed ones, first editions, books with sentimental value -- I would never give up. But I don't want to (or intend to) part with any of them (I reread nearly all of them). What I'd like is to put 85% of them onto digital media. I just don't need hardcopies of murder mysteries, or pulp sci-fi. Even some of the really good stuff, the Camus and Nabakov and Faulkner, I just don't need to haul around these paperbacks for the rest of my life.

    Modern literature is usually published in two phases, an expensive hardback, and then a consumer paperback. When I'd like to see is the later phase supplemented with digital copies. Nobody who's a fan of these suggests a "death of the book." No way. Just a death of some of them, and in the process, making them cheaper and more ubiquitous.

  • Best Argument in Favor of Electronic (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:27PM (#7577704)
    In Umberto's case, the best argument against paper is that you won't accidentally poison yourself turning the pages of an electronic document.
  • It's reassuring to see that even such a great literate as Umberto Eco can make stupid mistakes:

    Plato was writing ... more or less 14 centuries later Victor Hugo ... narrated the story of a priest

    Plato died ca. 347 BC, Victor Hugo wrote in the 19th century, so it's 22 not 14.

    Take that as a cautonary note for next time you feel smart: you're just one neuronal glitch away from stupidity...

  • Reading: on screen, paper, clay (Score:4, Informative)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @12:46PM (#7577800)
    The presumption that paper is better for extended reading is increasingly less valid. Since a got a large LCD display a few years ago, I find that I seldom print pages anymore. I still like and buy some physical books (fewer than before), but I miss the features afforded by accessing stuff in a digital format. Paper still has higher resolution and physical portability, but this relative advantage is waning.

    I'm sure that paper vs. clay arguments raged in the early days of paper. Paper was flimsy, flammable, and cheap. Clay was solid, serene, and worthy of keeping. A similar set of arguments now embroils the screen vs. paper debate.

    In a few decades, I'd bet that most people will consider paper an anachronism -- hardcopy being too inflexible, bulky, and expensive to use in everyday life. Better screens and from-birth exposure to the advantages of virtual access will lower people's nostalgia for and use of paper. Paper will never go away (after all, we still carve stone tablets) but paper will be marginalized. The percentage of content read on the screen will only increase.
  • I have been told that some hackers, grown up on computers and unused to browsing books, have finally read great literary masterpieces on e-books...

    Nice change to see somebody outside the nerd world using the word correctly. Anybody here prepared to admit to being 'unused to browsing books'? :-)

  • ... an egyptian governmental newspaper. Funny thing is, I work at the French version [ahram.org.eg] ( they have a daily in arabic, a weekly in english, and one in French...) since almost two months now :)

    Nice newspaper, but not one I expected to find on Slashdot's main page!!! That's a fun coincidence!
    (and no I didn't submit the article)

  • Although I enjoy owning and handling paper books, I suspect that works in digital format can be made to survive longer. Library holdings (for example) are often crumbling to dust because nobody during most of the 19th and 20th centuries gave a thought to the acid content of papers and inks then in use.

    I'll also admit that my Palm has been a good companion on long, tedious business trips; a book housed on a PDA means one less item to be lugged through airports.

    Anne
  • I'm quite bothered by the fact that he lumped-together computer chips and stone tablets. Sure, I may be nit-picking, but it's really bothering me.

    Sure, they are made of vaguely similar materials, but are vastly different... Stone tablets resemble paper scrolls more than computer chips... and computer chips resemble a biological brain more than anything else.
    • I've found that Eco often makes some seemingly stupid distinctions - like those 3 kinds of memory - in order to get at more important distinctions. His main point here is to discuss the different ways and reasons that we read. He then discusses the effects these distinctions should have on the way we discuss technologies for reading and passing on knowledge.

      If you can, attribute that first set of 'weird' stuff to Literature, and concentrate on the meat of the essay later on.
  • Eco's point about books (hypertexts, rather) which present a multitude of branches at many points in a "story" reminds me a lot of Stephenson's _The_Diamond_Age_, in which Nell is taught by a book being 'ractored' by people.

    Admittedly, at the beginning of the story, the book is more of a video monitor, with moving pictures and sounds and such, but by the end, when she's matured, it's mainly text.

    What sort of future can _that_ have?

    (P.S. --- a holdover from the "old days"; how many times do
  • > Paper was itself a technology at one point,

    And it stopped being a technology when?

  • Some years ago (Score:3, Interesting)

    by value_added ( 719364 ) on Thursday November 27, 2003 @02:02PM (#7578140)
    I disconnected my telephone answering machine and removed the call-waiting feature. My rationale (at least what I told friends, family and co-workers) was that if I was home, I'd be happy to take their call. If I wasn't, there was no point calling me as I wasn't available to take their call. Over time, the complaints subsided (along with most of the telephone calls) and I resigned myself to a happy, albeit "quaint" and "old-fashioned" lifestyle. My life at that time was such that it afforded me this luxuriously relaxed approach to the outside world with few adverse effects -- picture Sean Connery (without the brogue) in "Finding Forrester" and you've got the idea. There were, however, certain individuals and family members who could neither comprehend nor accept my new "selfishness," and while their comments did prick my conscience from time to time, I refused to consider abandoning my new stance.

    Now to be honest, I did find myself scratching my head on occasion trying to fashion a novel come-back to counter such objections, or provide an analogy by way of example but came up with little. Several months passed and I sat down one evening to read the new issue of Harper's Magazine and came across an article on Umberto Eco. I don't remember much about the article, except that it was well written, interesting, and concerned itself with (what else?) Umberto Eco. What I do remember, however, was the way in which Mr. Eco characterised himself as having no use for email and expressing a strong dislike of telephones. He advised anyone who was inclined to contact him to send a hand written note or letter addressed simply c/o the University of Bologna, the idea being that "it would eventually find its way" to him in due time.

    Reading his words made me laugh (the funniest jokes are always the most personal, it seems) and I realized that even if I didn't live in southern Italy, my refusal to use an answering machine was perfectly justified. If Umberto Eco didn't answer his telephone, I didn't need to either. It was everyone else that had the problem. And if someone really really needed to contact me, they could similarly write a letter.

    Things change for all of us, it seems.

    --
    value_added
    e-mail, cell, pager and ICQ numbers available on request

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