Eco 2

["Vinicius Albuquerque" <vini1974@hotmail.com>]

Mandar textos grandes está se tornando um (mau) hábito :-) Mas é que esse é 
interessante, outro do Eco, sobre o advento do livro eletrônico. Como grande 
teórico da comunicação é da semiótica, vale a pena ver o que alguém que 
entende tanto de livros tem a dizer sobre uma mudança tào grande no formato 
desse veículo de informação.
[ ]'s

Vinicius

The Future of the Book

By Umberto Eco
From the July 1994 symposium "The Future of the Book," held at the 
University of San Marino.
This essay is also found in The Future of the Book 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520204514/thelibyrinth> (Berkeley; 
University of California Press, 1997). Edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, the 
volume collects twelve papers from the symposium.


Since my arrival at the symposium on the future of the book I have been 
expecting somebody to quote "Ceci tuera cela." Both Duguid and Nunberg have 
obliged me. The quotation is not irrelevant to our topic.
As you no doubt remember, in Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo, 
comparing a book with his old cathedral, says: "Ceci tuera cela" (The book 
will kill the cathedral, the alphabet will kill images). McLuhan, comparing 
a Manhattan discotheque to the Gutenberg Galaxy, said "Ceci tuera cela." One 
of the main concerns of this symposium has certainly been that ceci (the 
computer) tuera cela (the book).
We know enough about cela (the book), but it is uncertain what is meant by 
ceci (computer). An instrument by which a lot of communication will be 
provided more and more by icons? An instrument on which you can write and 
read without needing a paperlike support? A medium through which it will be 
possible to have unheard-of hypertextual experiences?
None of these definitions is sufficient to characterize the computer as 
such. First, visual communication is more overwhelming in TV, cinema, and 
advertising than in computers, which are also, and eminently, alphabetic 
tools. Second, as Nunberg has suggested, the computer "creates new modes of 
production and diffusion of printed documents." And third, as Simone has 
reminded us, some sort of hypertextual experience (at least in the sense of 
text that doesn't have to be read in a linear way and as a finished message) 
existed in other historical periods, and Joyce (the living one) is here to 
prove that Joyce (the dead and everlasting one) gave us with Finnegans Wake 
a good example of hypertextual experience.
The idea that something will kill something else is a very ancient one, and 
came certainly before Hugo and before the late medieval fears of Frollo. 
According to Plato (in the Phaedrus) Theut, or Hermes, the alleged inventor 
of writing, presents his invention to the pharaoh Thamus, praising his new 
technique that will allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise 
forget. But the pharaoh is not so satisfied. My skillful Theut, he says, 
memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by training it 
continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any longer to 
train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, 
but by mere virtue of an external device.
We can understand the pharaoh's worry. Writing, as any other new 
technological device, would have made torpid the human power that it 
replaced and reinforced -- just as cars made us less able to walk. Writing 
was dangerous because it decreased the powers of mind by offering human 
beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind, a vegetal memory.
Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing down his argument 
against writing. But he was pretending that his discourse was related by 
Socrates, who did not write (it seems academically obvious that he perished 
because he did not publish). Therefore Plato was expressing a fear that 
still survived in his day. Thinking is an internal affair; the real thinker 
would not allow books to think instead of him.
Nowadays, nobody shares these fears, for two very simple reasons. 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. Only 
after the invention of writing was it possible to write such a masterpiece 
on spontaneous memory as Proust's Recherche du temps perdu. Second, if once 
upon a time people needed to train their memory in order to remember things, 
after the invention of writing they had also to train their memory in order 
to remember books. Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize 
it.
One is entitled to speculate about that old debate every time one meets a 
new communication tool which pretends or seems to substitute for books. In 
the course of this symposium, under the rubric of "the future of the book," 
the following different items have been discussed, and not all of them were 
concerned with books.
1. Images versus alphabetic culture
Our contemporary culture is not specifically image oriented. Take for 
instance Greek or medieval culture: at those times literacy was reserved to 
a restricted elite and most people were educated, informed, persuaded 
(religiously, politically, ethically) though images. Even USA Today, cited 
by Bolter, represents a balanced mixture of icons and letters, if we compare 
it with a Biblia Pauperum. We can complain that a lot of people spend their 
day watching TV and never read a book or a newspaper, and this is certainly 
a social and educational problem, but frequently we forget that the same 
people, a few centuries ago, were watching at most a few standard images and 
were totally illiterate.
We are frequently misled by a "mass media criticism of mass media" which is 
superficial and regularly belated. Mass media are still repeating that our 
historical period is and will be more and more dominated by images. That was 
the first McLuhan fallacy, and mass media people have read McLuhan too late. 
The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a 
computer-oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that 
it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images. The new 
generation will be alphabetic and not image oriented. We are coming back to 
the Gutenberg Galaxy again, and I am sure that if McLuhan had survived until 
the Apple rush to the Silicon Valley, he would have acknowledged this 
portentous event.
Moreover, the new generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An 
old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer 
screen at the same speed as a teenager. These same teenagers, if by chance 
they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical 
procedures and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at 
a great speed.
In the course of the eighties some worried and worrying reports have been 
published in the United States on the decline of literacy. One of the 
reasons for the last Wall Street crash (which sealed the end of the Reagan 
era) was, according to many observers, not only the exaggerated confidence 
in computers but also the fact that none of the yuppies who were controlling 
the stock market knew enough about the 1929 crisis. They were unable to deal 
with a crisis because of their lack of historical information. If they had 
read some books about Black Thursday they would have been able to make 
better decisions and avoid many well-known pitfalls.
But I wonder if books would have been the only reliable vehicle for 
acquiring information. Years ago the only way to learn a foreign language 
(outside of traveling abroad) was to study a language from a book. Now our 
children frequently learn other languages by listening to records, by 
watching movies in the original edition, or by deciphering the instructions 
printed on a beverage can. The same happens with geographical information. 
In my childhood I got the best of my information about exotic countries not 
from textbooks but by reading adventure novels (Jules Verne, for instance, 
or Emilio Salgari or Karl May). My kids very early knew more than I on the 
same subject from watching TV and movies.
The illiteracy of Wall Street yuppies was not only due to an insufficient 
exposure to books but also to a form of visual illiteracy. Books about the 
1929 crisis exist and are still regularly published (the yuppies must be 
blamed for not having been bookstore goers), while television and the cinema 
are practically unconcerned with any rigorous revisitation of historical 
events. One could learn very well the story of the Roman Empire through 
movies, provided that movies were historically correct. The fault of 
Hollywood is not to have opposed its movies to the books of Tacitus or of 
Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp and romance-like version of both 
Tacitus and Gibbon. The problem with the yuppies is not only that they watch 
TV instead of reading books; it is that Public Broadcasting is the only 
place where somebody knows who Gibbon was.
Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of 
literacy must take into account the possibilities of all of these media. 
Educational concern must be extended to the whole of media. Responsibilities 
and tasks must be carefully balanced. If for learning languages, tapes are 
better than books, take care of cassettes. If a presentation of Chopin with 
commentary on compact disks helps people to understand Chopin, don't worry 
if people do not buy five volumes of the history of music. Even if it were 
true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication the 
problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how 
to improve both. In the Middle Ages visual communication was, for the 
masses, more important than writing. But Chartres cathedral was not 
culturally inferior to the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun. Cathedrals were 
the TV of those times, and the difference from our TV was that the directors 
of the medieval TV read good books, had a lot of imagination, and worked for 
the public benefit (or, at least, for what they believed to be the public 
benefit).
2. Books versus other supports
There is a confusion about two distinct questions: (a) will computers made 
books obsolete? and (b) will computers make written and printed material 
obsolete?
Let us suppose that computers will make books disappear (I do not think this 
will happen and I shall elaborate later on this point, but let us suppose so 
for the sake of the argument). Still, this would not entail the 
disappearance of printed material. We have seen that it was wishful thinking 
to hope that computers, and particularly word processors, would have helped 
to save trees. Computers encourage the production of printed material. We 
can imagine a culture in which there will be no books, and yet where people 
go around with tons and tons of unbound sheets of paper. This will be quite 
unwieldy, and will pose a new problem for libraries.
Debray has observed that the fact that Hebrew civilization was a 
civilization based upon a book is not independent of the fact that it was a 
nomadic civilization. I think that this remark is very important. Egyptians 
could carve their records on stone obelisks, Moses could not. If you want to 
cross the Red Sea, a book is a more practical instrument for recording 
wisdom. By the way, another nomadic civilization, the Arabic one, was based 
upon a book, and privileged writing upon images.
But books also have an advantage with respect to computers. Even if printed 
on acid paper, which lasts only seventy years or so, they are more durable 
than magnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer power shortages and 
blackouts, and are more resistant to shocks. As Bolter remarked, "it is 
unwise to try to predict technological change more than few years in 
advance," but it is certain that, up to now at least, books still represent 
the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at 
a very low cost.
Electronic communication travels ahead of you, books travel with you and at 
your speed, but if you are shipwrecked on a desert island, a book can be 
useful, while a computer cannot -- as Landow remarks, electronic texts need 
a reading station and a decoding device. Books are still the best companions 
for a shipwreck, or for the Day After.
I am pretty sure that new technologies will render obsolete many kinds of 
books, like encyclopedias and manuals. Take for example the Encyclomedia 
project developed by Horizons Unlimited. When finished it will probably 
contain more information than the Encyclopedia Britannica (or Treccani or 
Larousse), with the advantage that it permits cross-references and nonlinear 
retrieval of information. The whole of the compact disks, plus the computer, 
will occupy one-fifth of the space occupied by an encyclopedia. The 
encyclopedia cannot be transported as the CD-ROM can, and cannot be easily 
updated; it does not have the practical advantages of a normal book, 
therefore it can be replaced by a CD-ROM, just a phone book can. The shelves 
today occupied, at my home as well as in public libraries, by meters and 
meters of encyclopedia volumes could be eliminated in the next age, and 
there will be no reason to lament their disappearance. For the same reason 
today I no longer need a heavy portrait painted by an indifferent artist, 
for I can send my sweetheart a glossy and faithful photograph. Such a change 
in the social functions of painting has not made painting obsolete, not even 
the realistic paintings of Annigoni, which do not furfill the function of 
portraying a person, but of celebrating an important person, so that the 
commissioning, the purchasing, and the exhibition of such portraits acquire 
aristocratic connotations.
Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any 
circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive 
information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.
To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think of the 
process of learning how to use a piece of software. Usually the system is 
able to display on the screen all the instructions you need. But the users 
who want to learn the program generally either print the instructions and 
read them as if they were in book form, or they buy a printed manual (let me 
skip over the fact that currently all the manuals that come with a computer, 
on-line or off-line, are obviously written by irresponsible and tautological 
idiots, while commercial handbooks are written by intelligent people). It is 
possible to conceive of a visual program that explains very well how to 
print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write such 
a computer program, we need a printed manual.
After having spent no more than twelve hours at a computer console, my eyes 
are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need to sit comfortably down in an 
armchair and read a newspaper, or maybe a good poem. It seems to me that 
computers are/diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of 
satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating. In my periods of 
optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a 
computer screen, gets acquainted with reading from a screen, but at a 
certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different, more relaxed, 
and differently-committing form of reading.
3. Publishing versus communicating
People desire to communicate with one another. In ancient communities they 
did it orally; in a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. 
Most of the books which are displayed in a bookstore should be defined as 
products of vanity presses, even if they are published by an university 
press. As Landow suggests we are entering a new samizdat era. People can 
communicate directly without the intermediation of publishing houses. A 
great many people do not want to publish; they simply want to communicate 
with each other. The fact that in the future they will do it by E-mail or 
over the Internet will be a great boon for books and for the culture and the 
market of the book. Look at a bookstore. There are too many books. I receive 
too many books every week. If the computer network succeeds in reducing the 
quantity of published books, this would be a paramount cultural improvement.
One of the most common objections to the pseudoliteracy of computers is that 
young people get more and more accustomed to speak through cryptic short 
formulas: dir, help, diskcopy. error 67, and so on. Is that still literacy? 
I am a rare-book collector, and I feel delighted when I read the 
seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look 
like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several 
pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal 
addressee, usually an emperor or a pope, and lasted for pages and pages 
explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text 
to follow. If baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they 
would be horrified. Introductions are one-page long, briefly outline the 
subject matter of the book, thank some national or international endowment 
for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible 
by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and 
credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand 
perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few 
lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable 
frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry....
But I imagine that in the near future we will have three lines saying "W/c, 
Smith, Rockefeller," which we will decode as "I thank my wife and my 
children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made 
possible by the Rockefeller Foundation." That would be as eloquent as a 
baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a 
given rhetoric. I think that in the coming years passionate love messages 
will be sent in the form of a short instruction in BASIC language, under the 
form "if... then," so to obtain, as an input, messages like "I love you, 
therefore I cannot live with you." (Besides, the best of English mannerist 
literature was listed, if memory serves, in some programming language as 2B 
OR/NOT 2B.)
There is a curious idea according to which the more you say in verbal 
language, the more profound and perceptive you are. Mallarme told us that it 
is sufficient to spell out une fleur to evoke a universe of scents, shapes, 
and thoughts. It is frequently the case in poetry that fewer words say more 
things. Three lines of Pascal say more than three hundred pages of a long 
and tedious treatise on morals and metaphysics. The quest for a new and 
surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a preinformatic quantity. 
The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere.
4. Three kinds of hypertext
It seems to me that at this time we are faced with three different 
conceptions of hypertext. Technically speaking, a hypertext document is more 
or less what Landow has explained to us. The problem is, what does a 
hypertext document stand for? Here we must make a careful distinction, 
first, between systems and texts. A system (for instance, a linguistic 
system) is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural 
language. In this framework it holds the principle of unlimited semiosis, as 
defined by Peirce. Every linguistic item can be interpreted in terms of 
itiuistic or other semiotic items -- a word by a definition, an event by an 
example, a natural kind by an image, and so on and so forth. The system is 
perhaps finite but unlimited. You go in a spiral-like movement ad infinitum. 
In this sense certainly all the conceivable books are comprised by and 
within a good dictionary. If you are able to use Webster's Third you can 
write both Paradise Lost and Ulysses. Certainly, if conceived in such a way, 
hypertext can transform every reader into an author. Give the same hypertext 
system to Shakespeare and to Dan Quayle, and they have the same odds of 
producing Romeo and Juliet.
It may prove rather difficult to produce systemlike hypertexts. However, if 
you take the Horizons Unlimited Encyclomedia, certainly the best of 
seventeenth-century interpretations are virtually comprised within it. It 
depends on your ability to work through its preexisting links. Given the 
hypertextual system it is really up to you to become Gibbon or Walt Disney. 
As a matter of fact, even before the invention of hypertext, with a good 
dictionary a writer could design every possible book or story or poem or 
novel.
But a text is not a linguistic or an encyclopedic system. A given text 
reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a 
closed universe. Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, 
but it is sure that it will never provide you with the proof of Fermat's 
Last Theorem, or the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems 
trivial, but the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists or of 
critics like Stanley Fish was to believe that you can do everything you want 
with a text. This is blatantly false. Busa's hypertext on the Aquinas corpus 
is a marvelous instrument, but you cannot use it to find out a satisfactory 
definition of electricity. With a system like hypertext based upon Webster's 
Third and the Encyclopedia Britannica you can; with a hypertext bound to the 
universe of Aquinas, you cannot. A textual hypertext is finite and limited, 
even though open to innumerable and original inquiries.
Then there is the third possibility, the one outlined by Michael Joyce. We 
may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can 
add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At 
this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we 
have a new way to implement free creativity. As the author of The Open Work 
I can only hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between 
implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced 
texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference 
between producing infinitely many texts and interpreting precisely a finite 
number of texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we 
evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new 
instance of a New Orleans jam session.
We are marching toward a more liberated society, in which free creativity 
will coexist with textual interpretation. I like this. The problem is in 
saying that we have replaced an old thing with another one; we have both, 
thank God. TV zapping is an activity that has nothing to do with reading a 
movie. Italian TV watchers appreciate Blob as a masterpiece in recorded 
zapping, which invites everybody to freely use TV, but this has nothing to 
do with the possibility of everyone reading a Hitchcock or a Fellini movie 
as an independent work of art in itself.
5. Change versus merging
Debray has reminded us that the invention of the photograph has set painters 
free from the duty of imitation. I cannot but agree. Without the invention 
of Daguerre, Impressionism could not have been possible. But the idea that a 
new technology abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic. After the 
invention of Daguerre painters no longer felt obliged to serve as mere 
craftsmen charged with reproducing reality as we believe we see it. But this 
does not mean that Daguerre's invention only encouraged abstract painting. 
There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without 
the photographic model: I am not thinking only of hyperrealism, but also 
(let me say) of Hopper. Reality is seen by the painter's eye through the 
photographic eye.
Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has freed literature from 
certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is 
something like postmodern literature, it exists because it has been largely 
influenced by comic strips or cinema. This means that in the history of 
culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something 
else. Something has profoundly changed something else.
It seems to me that the real opposition is not between computers and books, 
or between electronic writing and printed or manual writing. I have 
mentioned the first McLuhan fallacy, according to which the Visual Galaxy 
has replaced the Gutenberg Galaxy. The second McLuhan fallacy is exemplified 
by the statement that we are living in a new electronic global village. We 
are certainly living in a new electronic community, which is global enough, 
but it is not a village, if by that one means a human settlement where 
people are directly interacting with each other. The real problem of an 
electronic community is solitude. The new citizen of this new community is 
free to invent new texts, to annul the traditional notion of authorship, to 
delete the traditional divisions between author and reader, to 
transubstantiate into bones and flesh the pallid ideals of Roland Barthes 
and Jacques Derrida. (At least this is what I have heard said by enthusiasts 
of the technology. You will have to ask Derrida if the design of hypertexts 
really abolishes the ghost of a Transcendental Meaning -- I am not my 
brother's keeper -- and as far as Barthes is concerned, that was in another 
country and besides, the fellow is dead.) But we know that the reading of 
certain texts (let us say, Diderot's Encyclopédie) produced a change in the 
European state of affairs. What will happen with the Internet and the World 
Wide Web?
I am optimistic. During the Gulf War, George Lakoff understood that his 
ideas on that war could not be published before the end of the conflict. 
Thus he relied on the Internet to spell out his alarm in time. Politically 
and militarily his initiative was completely useless, but that does not 
matter. He succeeded in reaching a community of persons all over the world 
who felt the same way that he did.
Can computers implement not a network of one-to-one contacts between 
solitary souls, but a real community of interacting subjects? Think of what 
happened in 1968. By using traditional communication systems such as press, 
radio, and typewritten messages, an entire generation was involved, from 
America to France, from Germany to Italy, in a common struggle. I am not 
trying to evaluate politically or ethically what happened, I am simply 
remarking that it happened. Several years later, a new student revolutionary 
wave emerged in Italy, one not based upon Marxist tenets as the previous one 
had been. Its main feature was that it took place eminently through fax, 
between university and university. A new technology was implemented, but the 
results were rather poor. The uprising was tamed, by itself, in the course 
of two months. A new communications technology could not give a soul to a 
movement which was born only for reasons of fashion.
Recently in Italy the government tried to impose a new law that offended the 
sentiments of the Italian people. The principal reaction was mediated by 
fax, and in the face so many faxes the government felt obliged to change 
that law. This is a good example of the revolutionary power of new 
communications technologies. But between the faxes and the abolition of the 
law, something more happened. At that time I was traveling abroad and I only 
saw a photograph in a foreign newspaper. It portrayed a group of young 
people, all physically together, rallying in front of the parliament and 
displaying provocative posters. I do not know if faxes alone would have been 
sufficient. Certainly the circulation of faxes produced a new kind of 
interpersonal contact, and through faxes people understood that it was time 
to meet again together.
At the origin of that story there was a mere icon, the smile of Berlusconi 
that visually persuaded so many Italians to vote for him. After that all the 
opponents felt frustrated and isolated. The Media Man had won. Then, in the 
face of an unbearable provocation, there was a new technology that gave 
people the sense of their discontent as well as of their force. Then came 
the moment when many of them got out of their faxing solitude and met 
together again. And won.
It is rather difficult to make a theory out of a single episode, but let me 
use this example as an allegory: when an integrated multimedia sequence of 
events succeeds in bringing people back to a nonvirtual reality, something 
new can happen.
I do not have a rule for occurrences of the same frame. I realize that I am 
proposing the Cassiodorus way, and that my allegory looks like a Rube 
Goldberg construction, as James O'Donnell puts it. A Rube Goldberg model 
seems to me the only metaphysical template for our electronic future.



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