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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.
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!
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 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
From the publisher:
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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 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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