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Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory
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...."
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.
Trolling is a art,
It's a sad day when we need a huge article to explain to us the differences between paper and a hard drive.
But how many priceless documents have been lost over the millenia? Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.
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.
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.
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.
Trolling is a art,
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 was good enough for da Vinci, but also the library at Alexandria - and how did that fare?
Tom.
Oh arse
Certain ones, of course. I printed out all email between my ex and myself regarding divorce settlements, for example. :) I wouldn't entrust that to electronic media alone if it could cost me thousands of dollars.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article might have been informative...10 years ago; Umberto's a bit behind the times.
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.
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
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
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?)
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.
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.
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).
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.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
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.
All's true that is mistrusted
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.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
When we query Google for that question, we immediately discover that this 2003 talk by Eco is a rehash of a talk he gave in 1995, and a very similar talk he gave in 1996, and again in 1998, and yet again in 2000 . Each of those talks contains the Napoleon/Kant/encyclopedia example. So Eco has been giving much the same talk for almost a decade now.
A search at Amazon.com reveals that Bertrand Russell compared Napoleon and Kant back in 1935, and mentioned that Kant never travelled more than 10 miles from his home town of Konigsberg, Germany. Eco has presumably read Russell, one of the great philosophers and essayists, and may have lifted the Kant/Napoleon example from Russell.
So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think. Before Internet searches, it would have taken considerable scholarly research to discover that. Now, anyone can do it in a few minutes.
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 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...
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Your gall impresses me, to the extent that I doubt whether you are really serious in posting this.
In what way are abstract mathematics, music, or astronomy the sole creation of western civilisation? What justifies your ridiculous "The adored Chinese worldview" ? No one here has suggested anything as idiotic as an absolute classification of superiority between civilisations (an extremely vague term, by the way).
The current situation in China which you cite as an example of the failure of its "worldview" (please define) has more to do with the universal weaknesses of Men before power and the madness of leaders than to the Chinese culture's imaginary lack of abstraction.
Anyone who has in the least studied the Chinese writing system knows that its capacity for abstraction is indeed impressive, which leads to its designation as ideograms and never pictograms (though neither are accurate). This is a system that has been used to write works of extroardinary philosophical value with success, and that has not hindered its users in having had for some time the most culturally and artistically productive culture in the world (while us Europeans were playing with spears in the mud), or the invention of paper, gunpowder, refined medicine...
I would dare say that actually, some of the "advancement" of Western culture might be attributable to its very recklessness in the face of the rest of the World.
I personally think it indisputable that it is a positive concept to posess a cultural bias that does not place Mankind at the very center of things. As for your "Middle Kingdom" quip, I would hazard that the greater part of your post above is itself rather arrogant and self-centered ("in your book" is what matters, right?), and puts you in rather a delicate position to admonish a name which comes from an ancient cultural and geographic situation which has been shared by all cultures (The Odyssey, for example, took on the task of ordering the world outside Ancient Greece, based on its differences from the norm, being the home culture of its author).
This is all however laughable when compared to the arresting courage and/or total lack of thought which doubtless let you describe Chinese culture (and all non-Western ones?) as "primitive". We are all impressed.
The simple reason paper is better than anything else is that you can write in the margins.
And this is from someone who gleefully reads from his palmpilot in trams, trains, queues and bed, and has been doing so for a couple of years now.
And paper doesn't break so easily, and can be read anywhere (like in the sun on the beach).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
And so my phone has essentially turned into email, except that I can pick up if I really want to.
It's reduced my stress level considerably.