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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,
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Real title is "Name of the rose" not "In the name of the rose".
I think the best example is probably the domesday book and the domesday project.
,but I think the scots gave'em the finger :-), it's still available today.
:-)
A thousand years ago (more or less) the Domesday book recorded a snapshot of life in England (and Wales I think
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.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
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.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Huh?
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.
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 am, of course, printing this sucker out before I read it.
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.
In Umberto's case, the best argument against paper is that you won't accidentally poison yourself turning the pages of an electronic document.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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 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.
From the publisher:
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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.
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.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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.)
"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"
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
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...
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.
> what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on
I have discovered a truly marvelous solution to this problem that this margin is too narrow to contain.
He wrote "Foucault's Pendulum", which although not as well known as Rose, is a superior book. Lots of interesting digressions on the nature of knowledge...