HU520: A Review of Umberto Eco’s "Afterword"

Umberto Eco starts his essay with the quote ceci tuera cela, which he connects with the main theme of the symposium. He says: "One of the main concerns of this symposium has certainly been that ceci (the computer) tuera (we translate as will kill) cela (the book). Further he says that "we know enough about the book but are still uncertain what about is meant by computer.

Eco reminds us about a very ancient idea "that something will kill something else". Is that true? Will writing kill the memory? Commenting on Plato’s worry, Eco says, that "writing was dangerous because it decreased the power of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind, a vegetal memory." (296). Yes, it was a fear in Plato’s time, but not nowadays. On the opposite, "books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it."(296)

In his essay, Umberto Eco summarizes the key discussions of the symposium:

1. Image versus alphabetic culture

    According to Umberto Eco, the new generation will be alphabetic and not image oriented. "The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images." (297)

    Another argument is whether "books would have been the only reliable vehicle for acquiring information." Eco's rsponse is NO. One could learn through different media. Eco says that "the fault of Hollywood is not to have opposed its movies to the book of Tacticus or of Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp- and romancelike version of both tacticus and Gibbon. The problem with the yuppies is not that they watch TV instead of reading books; it is that Public broadcasting is the only place where somebody knows who Gibbon was." (298)

2. Books versus other supports

Eco highlights two questions at the very      beginning of this section:

Will computers made books obsolete?
Will computers make written and printed material obsolete?
The answer is "no". "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 reflect about it… To read the computer screen is not the same as to read a book… Computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs that are stimulating." (300) 

3. Publishing versus communication

    Will publishing exist or will it be substituted by computer communication. "People can communicate—Eco says—directly without the intermediation of publishing houses... a great many people do not want to publish; they simply want to communicate with each other." We may ask: What is the problem with this?" Eco sees "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.error67, and so on." (301) "it is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric." (302)

4. Three kinds of hypertext

"Hypertext can transform every reader into an author";
"A text is not a linguistic or encyclopedic system…A textual hypertext is finite and limited, even though open to innumerable and original inquiries."
Summarizing Michael Joyces essay, Eco states that "we may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something…At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity…However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing text and the existence of produced text. 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."(303)

5. Change versus merging

According to Eco, "the idea …that a new technology abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic… in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else."(304)
"Eco sees the real opposition "not between computers and books, or between electronic writing and printed or manual writing…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…"(305)
The last issue raised by Eco is whether "computers implement not a network of one-to-one contacts between solitary souls but a real community of interacting subjects." And here is the answer: "when an integrated multimedia sequence of events succeeds in bringing people back to a nonvirtual reality, something new can happen…A Rube Goldberg model seems to me the only metaphysical template for our electronic future."(306) It is a good point!

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