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...."

Comments

And don't forget the alphabet

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[The Cydonian]

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 by integrating our worldview with theirs, perhaps?

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?

See, exactly what I was talking about. You have a clear-cut linear view, you go from X to Y and then to Z. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but that's not how a few other civilisations look at things. They see things in a unified spectrum; they don't, for instance, cut down the trees in their sacred land not for the trees themselves, but because cutting them down would cause their ancient spirits to become angry, who, in turn, will influence the Cloud Gods, who, again, with the Wind God and the Rain God, will cause havoc to their settlement. A worldview that's, at once, more complex than the usual mode of thought.

I don't know if it's more responsible or not, but all the same, it's an intriguing point to ask what do they see that we don't.

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.

You could say the same thing about the ancient Roman Empire as well. Nothing uniquely Chinese about stagnation.

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.

I was going to post on how stupid that comment is, considering how closed-minded some of the Americans I meet are, but I'll pass. Here's a more positive argument:- heard of Zheng He? At his time, his ships were the largest in the world, at least five times bigger than the equivalent Portuguese ships.

Which brings us to the real point here:- the Chinese, as with the Indians, didn't need to explore the world as much as the then Europeans did. Renaissance-time exploration was actually an effort by the Europeans to take over the trade routes for spices; back then, they didn't have refrigeration, so they had to depend on spices to preserve their meat. Unfortunately for the Europeans, the Arab (this includes Muslim, Jewish AND Christian) middle-men had complete control over this trade, so they set out to find a sea route to the East to capture control over this trade (which they did very easily, mostly because the native rulers in Arabia, India and elsewhere were more experienced in trade negotiations than in political, that is, military, negotiations.)

In short, NOTHING to do with linguistics and everything to do with basic economics.

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.

Two words:- Chamyogya Upanishad. Verse 211 or something.

Unfortunately, this one of those cultural artifacts that are beyond the reach of Google, so you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but let's put it this way:- it's one of the first references in world literature to the fact that the Earth is, as a matter of fact, revolving around the Sun, and not vice versa. This some 3000 years before Copernicus.

Domesday

[Space cowboy]

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 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:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Artifakt]

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.

long-winded, but some interesting points...

[X_Caffeine]

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.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[wideBlueSkies]

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 project I'm working on now. Sure some editing needs to be done, but a lot of the concepts are the same.

Sure, 17 years isn't a LONG time. But I figure that as long as I'm religious about backups and finding 'some way' to bring the text forward to new tech as time marches on, I'll be able to continue to enjoy reading and using all my old stuff.

I used to write some really stupid looking comments when I was a kid writing COBOL and PL/1. ;)

wbs.

Printing out e-mails is good

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell?

You actually trust electronic media to store stuff that may be crucial if you ever end up in court? I've lost dozens of important e-mails because a) I've deleted them accidentally because I thought they were spam, b) the company server had a total meltdown and the backup policy does not include e-mail that's more than a year old and c) the backup cd-r disc had turned unreadable while stored in its jewel box in a dark drawer.

You don't print out your e-mails? Eugh.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[mikerich]

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 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, 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 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.

Hugo the Seer

[randmairs]

Eco synthesized from Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris: "The book will distract people from their most important values, encouraging unnecessary information, free interpretation of the Scriptures, insane curiosity."

Hugo forsaw porn, spam, cults, and Slashdot!!!

I hope you have an enjoyable Thanskgiving.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Greedo]

FYI, a very good read on the problem with microfiche storage is Nicholson Baker's book Double Fold.

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.

Case study: the Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia is a multilingual, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia that is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. As of September 2003, it covers a wide range of subjects and has over 175,000 articles in English (by its own count). It also has over 150,000 articles in other languages. It covers many different topics.

The project started in English on January 15, 2001, and later projects were started to build Wikipedia in other languages.

There are three essential characteristics of the Wikipedia project, which together define its niche on the World Wide Web:

It is, or aims to become, primarily an encyclopedia.

It is a wiki, in that (with a few exceptions) it can be edited by anyone.

It is open content, and uses the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License.

The project started in English on January 15, 2001, and later projects were started to build Wikipedia in other languages.

The idea to collect all of the world's knowledge within arm's reach under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon.

The Chinese emperor Yongle oversaw the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopedia, one of the largest encyclopedias in history, which was completed in 1408, and comprised of over 11,000 handwritten volumes, of which only 800 now survive.

The early Muslim compilations of knowledge in the middle ages, included many comprehensive works, and much development of what we now call scientific method, historical method and citation.

However, these works were rarely available to more than specialists: they were expensive, and written for those extending knowledge rather than (with some exceptions in medicine) using it. The modern idea of the general purpose widely distributed printed encyclopedia goes back to just a little before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. Major university libraries can be seen as museums of monumental encyclopedic endeavors in various countries. Frequently found titles are the English Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Spanish Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada, the German Meyers Konversations-Lexikon and Brockhaus.

The idea to use automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story of a World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex, As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960). Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.

With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop online encyclopedia projects. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the late 1980s when it was suggested as part of several "Millennium Projects" including the United Nations University Millennium Project. Various names were suggested including "Encyclopedia Gaia", "Encyclopedia Terra", and although these projects did not proceed very far they kept the idea alive through the early 1990s, where they began to converge with Ted Nelson's ideas about hypertext and similar proposals from K. Eric Drexler.

In 1993, a project called Interpedia was being discussed; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and it was overtaken by the explosion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of high-quality search engines.

Wikis enables documents to be authored collectively in a simple markup language using a web browser. A single page in a wiki is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected, is called "the wiki".

"Wiki wiki" means "fast" in the Hawaiian language, and it is the speed of creating and updating pages that is one of the defining aspects of wiki technology. Generally, there is no pr

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Kirill Lokshin]

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 impractical to convert all of it.

You might be able to maintain all of your old records personally, but society as a whole won't be able to keep up with the influx of new information produced.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[STrinity]

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.

Anyone else reminded of _The_Diamond_Age_?

[gardyloo]

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 you see post-scripta in emails and other hypertexts, when it's so damned easy to just go back and fit those thoughts in where they should go -- like this one! Anyway, I was too lazy to put in hypertextural links to Stephenson, the book, etc.)

Some years ago

[value_added]

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