A CONVERSATION ON INFORMATION - parte II *
(entrevista de Patrick Coppock a Umberto Eco,
Fevereiro de 1995)

* (treze anos depois, isto ainda faz sentido?)



Yes, well then, what do you think about the idea of these personal information filters. This idea that you can kind of make a personal profile, and the system will search Internet on the basis of this?

This is what I call the art of decimation...

Decimation?

Decimation. You kill only one person out of ten...

He gestures towards the well-filled bookshelves again.

The number of books that only concern my specific domain, not to speak of the other ones that I receive weekly certainly, exaggeratedly, overwhelms my reading...

Your capability, capacity?

...my capability, my time. If you have a certain experience you are able to... well, you can make a very random decimation. On this or that subject for instance, there may be no more than ten possible new ideas. It is rare that that is the case.

And the working hypotheses you make are based on these?

So .. if I read only one out of ten books, probably there will be an idea in there I can find, and if it is not there, then it will be in the next group of ten books that I pick up. But this is a very random thing.



But it is also very much based on your past experience, obviously?
Oh, sure, it is random, but based upon past experience.

He reaches for a book from his desk and begins to thumb through it.

OK, now I am able to open this at the first page, to look at the summary, to see the bibliography and to understand if the fellow is reliable or not; if there is something new there or not. And since I have long experience, my decimation is oriented. I sense it is better that I read this, and not that etcetera.

So you are able in a way to recognise newness, or innovation?

In a way, in a way. I can commit mistakes of course, but if I make a mistake today, I probably won't do that tomorrow. Possibly I may choose to disregard some book or other and that may be a mistake, but the next week I will come across yet another book, and so on. But a student of 20 years old, or even of 30 does not have this kind of filtering ability. We have to invent a practice, a theory. A practice or training in decimation.



Well now, how do we do that?

Eco leans forward eagerly in his chair.

Well, it still has to be invented. There must be some rules. There are some very elementary rules such as: control the dates of the bibliography for instance. If you are working on a certain subject you may find many references from 1993 and 1994. But in relation to other subjects finding only references from 1993 and 1994 might be negative, you ought to be finding some older dates.

Exactly.

So if you read a book on Kant and you have only a bibliography from the nineteen-nineties then this is suspect. The author is working from secondary sources. If you are reading a book on hypertext and you find an old bibliography then this is suspect, because every day there is something new about this particular field. So there may be some first, elementary rules you can use in order to isolate certain things immediately.

(o resto aqui)

(2008)