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wild encyclopedias
An Umberto Eco article on the role of intellectuals in the information age.
I admire Eco a great deal, and some of his work has been deeply influential in the way I think about the world. But I found this article to be oddly disappointing, revealing a distinct lack of understanding about the way that information technologies such as the Web function in practice.
"With the Web, everyone is in the situation of having to filter information that is so vast, and so unsustainable, that if it isn't filtered it cannot be absorbed. It is filtered unsystematically, so what is the primary metaphysical risk of this business? That we'll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopaedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopaedias is a society in which there is no more communication. ... We could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild."
A few points:
1) Evoking "five hundred billion encyclopedias" strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I'll let that slide.
2) I'm not convinced that a world with some "wild" encyclopedias would be all that bad. Are the encyclopedias we have now truly so utterly free of ideological bias that they need no competition to keep them honest? For instance, a positive example of a "competing" text might be Exhibit A.
3) Most importantly, Eco's notion that working on your own particular set of filters precludes communication with others strikes me as ridiculous, and it completely overlooks the collaborative nature of the Web, which is exactly what has kept me working on the Web so consistently for these past four years. Collaboration, context and cross-reference are fundamental to the Web; they are literally built into the Web by virtue of hyperlink technology. Everyone who I've ever known to work on any kind of Web filter does so because they want to find other similar-minded people to communicate with: often these sorts of Web collaborations work spectacularly.
Someone actually uses the Web, and who thus seems closer to "getting" what it's all about is David Weinberger, of JOHO. From this recent entry in the JOHO weblog:
On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.
Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It's not as if we've never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we've never seen before.
That seems a lot more true to me than Eco's recationary apocalypticism.
Labels: information, internet |
