Le silence, au sujet d’un monde qu’ils ne comprennent plus est la meilleure des attitudes pour laisser intacte leur grandeur passée.

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 !)