(entrevista de Patrick Coppock a Umberto Eco,
Fevereiro de 1995)
* (treze anos depois, isto ainda faz sentido?)
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:
Professor Eco, you're a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually functional for you as an author and literary researcher?
Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:
Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralysing results. I will give you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic. Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas.
He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...
Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index, and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the larger, more intensive treatments of the word 'Jerusalem' - I would have found say 10 or 15 tokens of 'Jerusalem' which I would have been able to examine. Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext...
He glances again at the computer in the corner...
and there I found, that there were - well I don't remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000 or so tokens...
Oh my God!
Well at that point I quit!
Yes, that's far too much material at one time, obviously.
Working with 11,000 references is just impossible. That's far too many.
So the system you use doesn't 'filter' well enough in other words?
I cannot manage to scan as many as 11,000 tokens. Now, if I had only my old traditional limitations then I would probably have done something more or less reasonable on that particular topic.
That's because the human person who is searching does it in a kind of sensible, intuitive way, whereas the computer just does it in a very mechanical way and just picks out every single example?
My theory is that there is no difference between the Sunday New York Times and the Pravda of the old days. The Sunday New York Times that can have 600 or 700 pages altogether really just contains old news fit to print. But one week is not enough to read a number of the Sunday New York Times. So therefore, the fact that the news items are there is irrelevant, or immaterial, because you cannot retrieve them. So what then is the difference between the Pravda, which didn't give any news, and the New York Times which gives too much? Once upon a time, if I needed a bibliography on Norway and semiotics, I went to a library and probably found four items. I took notes and found other bibliographical references. Now with the Internet I can have 10.000 items. At this point I become paralysed. I simply have to choose another topic.
So information overload and this extreme, non-intuitive selection of information is the main problem?
Yes, we have an excessive retrievability of information. It is neither ironical nor paradoxical, I think, what has happened with Xerox copies.
Eco picks up a pile of papers from the desk in front of him and waves them.
Once I used to go to the library and take notes. I would work a lot, but at the end of my work I had, say, 30 files on a certain subject. Now, when I go into the library - this has happened frequently to me in American libraries - I find a lot of things that I xerox and xerox and xerox in order to have them. When I come home with them all, and I never read them. I never read them at all!
No, same here: you never seem to have the time, do you? Once you know that it is there, you feel reassured, and so you don't read it.
Exactly...
Xeroxing then can paralyse your reading activity? That's another risk?
Sure...That's another risk which is sometimes very real.
(2008)
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