Truth + counter truth = emptiness
Posted: October 27th, 2009 | 3 Comments »Great interview (in French, my English translation below) of Umberto Eco about books, the internet, innovation and knowledge:
Ce qui forme une culture n’est pas la conservation mais le filtrage. Il y a du hasard dans la façon dont les oeuvres sont parvenues jusqu’à nous. Nous ne saurons jamais si, parmi les quatre mille rouleaux qui ont brûlé dans la bibliothèque d’Alexandrie à l’Antiquité, ne se trouvait pas un chef-d’oeuvre de l’humanité plus immense qu’Homère. [...] Notre culture est ainsi le produit de ce qui a survécu à des filtres plus ou moins hasardeux, incendies volontaires ou non, censures, ratés, pertes… [...] Et Internet est le scandale d’une mémoire sans filtrage, où l’on ne distingue plus l’erreur de la vérité. Au final, cela produit aussi un effacement de la mémoire.
Il existe une sorte de Larousse encyclopédique admis par tout le monde, même si celui d’un homme de 70 ans est plus fourni que celui d’un jeune de 25 ans. Internet peut signifier à terme la mise en miettes de ce Larousse commun au profit de six milliards d’encyclopédies, chaque individu se construisant la sienne, chacun pouvant à loisir préférer Ptolémée à Copernic, le récit de la Genèse à l’évolution des espèces. Nous courons le risque d’une incommunicabilité complète, l’impossibilité d’un savoir universel…
[[What created culture is not conservation but filtering. There's randomness in how the works have reached us. We will never know if, among the four thousand scrolls burned in the library of Alexandria in ancient times was not a masterpiece of humanity greater than Homer. [...] Our culture is thus the product of what has survived filters more or less hasardous, censorship, failures, losses … [...] And the Internet is the scandal of a memory without filtering, where we can no longer distinguish the truth from error. Finally, it also produces an erasure of memory.
There is a kind of encyclopedia accepted by everyone, even if a man of 70 years knows more than a 25 year old. Internet could mean the eventual demise of the common encyclopedia, replaced by six billion encyclopedias, each individual constructing his own, each of which may prefer leisure to Ptolemy to Copernicus, the story of Genesis to the evolution of species. We run the risk of an inability to communicate, the impossibility of a universal knowledge]
It’s a vast question: is the internet helping standardize knowledge (and therefore unifying it), or is it tearing us all apart into our own encyclopedias? Will society accept that, even if archiving everything is technically possible, it is neither wishable nor something mandatory to the creation of a culture?
Interesting but faulty in its own axioms. I dont see why the net-ecosystem would be so different than real life (except obviously in its speed of course!).
It’s not because there are potentially billions of billions of webpages that :
- some of them will not suffer from “death” itself : yes even on internet things get lost, forgotten, not backuped, unlinked or inaccessible, and yes even if it is copied and pasted everywhere.
- they are all on the same level of accessibility and trustfulness : obviously not. You cant compare the impact on the world’s culture of wikipedia and a couple of lines on the same subject in an obscure blog made by a teenager after a binge on a saturday evening…. Read More
This is the same in real life : if my butcher tells me something about astrophysics I’ll tend to give him less credit than if it is someone from the CERN who published a dozen of well known books on the same question.
For blogs it is the same : there are millions of blogs but how many are really meaningful or have an impact on the society ? Surely not mine or at a very very very low level, but others are much more effective.
The main problem of internet is indeed to organize the knowledge and the access to all the information and counter information that you have and gives the user enough freedom and features to be able to have all the metrics to measure the level of trustfulness of these information but to be honest I think that it was already quite efficient until now. Ok there are concerns that everybody’s using google and that is a corporation etc… (and there are all sorts of other problems too) but it’s kind of working not bad until now, and in the “real life” of the last 2000 years I’m not exactly sure we can say that’s it was optimal either (destruction of loser’s knowledge and history after a war, obscurantism etc…)
His point is interesting and worths the read but I’m a bit disappointed by what I expected from “THE” Umberto Eco, one of the most important thinker of the latest years.
(just to be clear I havent read the book yet, just react to your article on it laurent !)
Décidément, l’internet a bien eu raison des penseurs et des visionnaires du milieu du siècle précédent. Après Séguèla, c’est au tour d’Eco de se risquer à une théorie et un combat perdu d’avance. Refuser la culture Internet revient aujourd’hui à s’isoler. Sans doute, une dernière tentative en forme de provocation…
Le silence, au sujet d’un monde qu’ils ne comprennent plus est la meilleure des attitudes pour laisser intacte leur grandeur passée.
[...] http://liftlab.com/think/laurent/2009/10/27/truth-counter-truth-emptiness/ a few seconds ago from Adium [...]