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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,
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.
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.
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
Eco misses the whole point. The great advantage of online content is searchability. He describes using an encyclopedia in an "advanced way" to find out if Napoleon ever met Kant.
What are you talking about? What in Eco's article made you believe he didn't realize this advantage of hypertext? What point did he miss?
In fact, he makes essentially your point in the article, which leads me to believe you must only have skimmed through it:
In order to confirm this I would probably need to consult a biography of Kant, or of Napoleon, but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, a possible meeting with Kant can be disregarded, while in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon would be recorded. In brief, I must leaf through many books on many shelves of my library; I must take notes in order to compare later all the data I have collected. All this will cost me painful physical labour.
Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia. I can connect an event registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated throughout the text; I can compare the beginning with the end; I can ask for a list of all words beginning by A; I can ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant; I can compare the dates of their births and deaths -- in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or 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...
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