(continued from the previous number)
“OK, I see. You are
able to check that kind of thing then. I saw a CD-ROM recently published
by Multimedia World that was quite interesting. It was a kind of CD-ROM
hypertext version of the magazine. But it also had - you know the World
Wide Web - where you make a server and you put pages on it and create
links to other places from these pages?”
Eco nods.
“Well they had put a World Wide Web page on the CD-ROM, so that you
could not only look at what was on the CD-ROM - the kind of enclosed
world of that - but you also had access out onto the World Wide Web. And
of course, once you can get onto World Wide Web, then you can go
anywhere...”
I don’t know about the present state of the Net. I guess I am able to
have on my screen every article published by every newspaper in Rwanda
and Burundi, or at least, if that is not the case now, then it will be
possible...
“...at some time, yes, I’m sure.”
Tomorrow. At this point, OK, there will be other negative aspects. You
will get too much about
Rwanda-Burundi...
“Yes, and it is time to go through it all that’s the problem...?”
And I don’t know if the best article is in the Boston Globe, or the Los
Angeles Times. I have no time to read it all. That is the problem that
we are facing. It exists.
“But again, you can’t get away from this idea of trust and community.
Because, obviously, if you want to find out things, then normally, in
everyday life, you go to people that you trust, who you think have a
fairly good overview, and you ask them, “Well listen, there’s too much
here, can’t you give me a pointer.”
Yes, that is a possibility. But you know one of the first great events
on the early nets was the story of George Lakoff, who wrote this
beautiful article on the Gulf War. He understood that it was too late to
have it published before the war. He didn’t know anything at the time
about the Net, but he gave the article to a friend who had “connections”.
The day after, people were xeroxing this article in Bologna, in
Amsterdam, in Sidney, all over the world! The article propagated because
of a network, but more than that. It was because the opinion of a man
called George Lakoff was...
“...worth reading, yes exactly!”
But then you have this other problem that publishing happens very
quickly. You can publish instantly
on the Net. And with speed, follows brevity. I have noticed that newer
generations of computer users are learning to communicate in very
abbreviated codes.
I discovered recently a new formula they use...
Eco takes out a notebook from the desk, and begins to write.
...which in Italian sounds very obscene: CUL8R, “See you later”. Yes,
you can write a love-letter in this way with the same intensity of
heart...
“This is a kind of phenomenon of virtual communities, because it is so
instantaneous a form of communication, and we also see a merging of oral
and written language in a lot of these discussion groups. There’s very
much a merging of these kinds of things. Do you think this will have an
effect on publishing per se; on the literary norms, on literacy?”
In the longer term I think so, yes, probably.
Eco continues writing.
You know that under the Mona Lisa of Duchamp there is this acronym
-pseudo acronym, which read
“L.H.O.D.O.Q.” - in French this is elle a chaud au cul: “Her ass is
burning”. Obviously this was made by
Duchamp in his Dadaist period, it remained a shibboleth for the happy
few, but I think CUL8R can also become a form.
“So you expect written norms to change?”
Why not? Once I have discovered it, and once I have told it to some
friends, I will use it in my letters.
Why not? This can also change the epistolary style of many people. But
to me this is a minor problem, because there are a lot of technological
innovations that have changed things. For example in 16th century books
they tried to develop the first rights of protection. They called it:
privilege du roi. It was one page saying that the king has decided that
nobody could use what was in the book without permission. Today we have
this:
Eco scribbles a sign on the paper, and shows it to me.
“Yes, copyright ((c)), sure.”
Now today, that is enough. OK, we have observed that it was useless to
have a page of privilege du roi when we have this one which means
exactly the same thing. So it is not something absolutely new. Every new
technology introduces new idioms...
“Or even norms?”
...norms that at the beginning can terrorise the old academic who says
things like: “Oh our language is being corrupted!” They become...
“Accepted and functional in a new way...?
... and independent. In the sixties all the letters I got from the
States ended with “love”, which had lost
its erotic, sexual connotations. I could write, you know, “love”, why
not?
“Peace and love?”
Yes. Once you have accepted the new custom it becomes normalised. Now I
see it has disappeared.
The first time I received it from a friend I said: “Oh, did he become
homosexual?” No, he did not of course.
“In your article from that seminar at San Marino on the future of the
book, you mentioned Rube Goldberg.”
Well, I mentioned Rube Goldberg because somebody there mentioned him, so
it was not an idea of mine but taking up the suggestion of somebody else.
“But you said a Rube Goldberg model seems to you the only metaphysical
template for our electronic future, and that sounds rather interesting.
Metaphysical template, is that some kind of...?”
As far as I remember he quoted Goldberg as a masterpiece of bricolage.
Taking it in isolation in my paper without reference to the previous
tokens it is rather ununderstandable. No, what I want to stress, and
what is perhaps important for a kind of magazine like this is that there
is one kind of discussion item I consider absolutely irrelevant, and one
other kind of item I consider mischievous. The irrelevant one is the
discussion on whether the CD-ROM will abolish the book. Now, that’s
stupid, that’s silly.
(to be continued)
|
-
-
-
-
A chain-smoking and jovial Umberto Eco receives me in his crowded,
untidy but cheerful little office at the Institute for Communication
Studies at the University of Bologna. A bay-window opens out onto a tiny
balcony overlooking the garden of the villa where the institute has its
offices and library. The walls of the office are covered with rows of
well-filled bookshelves; a sofa along one wall is full of piles of
papers, books and articles, a modest writing desk hidden under even more
books and papers. In one corner of the room is an IBM 486 clone with
Windows, a new article or book obviously in progress on the screen. Eco
offers me a chair in front of his desk.In advance I had given him a list of some possible issues we might
discuss so he would have some idea of what was on my mind: Computer
Technology, the Internet Community and Processes of Cultural Change. I
begin by asking: (Patrick Coppock)
-
-
Umberto Eco was born
in 1932 in Alessandria, Italy.
-
He is a
professor of semiotics, the study of communication through signs and
symbols, at the University of Bologna, a philosopher, a historian,
literary critic, and an aesthetician. He is an avid book collector and
owns more than 30,000 volumes. The subjects of his scholarly
investigations range from St. Thomas Aquinas, to James Joyce, to
Superman. He lives in Milan.
-
The following is an
extensive listing of the works of Eco:
-
The Island of the Day Before (1995).
-
Postscript to The
Name of the Rose (1995).
-
The Search for
the Perfect Language (1995).
-
How to Travel
with a Salmon and Other Essays (1994).
-
Apocalypse
Postponed (1994).
-
Six Walks In the
Fictional Woods (1994),
-
Misreading
(1993).
-
Interpretation
and Overinterpretation (1992).
-
Travels In
Hyperreality (1990).
-
The Limits of
Interpretation (1990).
-
Foucault’s
Pendulum (1989).
-
On the Medieval
Theory of Signs (1989).
-
The Aesthetics of
Chaomos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (1989).
-
The Open Work
(1989).
-
The Bomb and the
General (1989).
-
The Three
Astronauts (1989).
-
Meaning and
Mental Representations (1988).
-
The Aesthetics of
Thomas Aquinas (1988).
-
Art and Beauty in
the Middle Ages (1988).
-
Leonardo
Cremonini: Paintings and Watercolors 1976-1986 (1987).
-
Semiotics and the
Philosophy of Language (1984).
-
The Sign of
Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1984).
-
Postscript to The
Name of the Rose (1983).
-
The Name of the
Rose (1983).
-
The Role of the
Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Text (1979).
-
The Theory of
Semiotics (1976)
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