|A lecture presented by Umberto Eco
Columbia University, The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
November 12, 1996
According to Plato (in Phaedrus) when Hermes, the alleged inventor of writing, presented
his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, he praised his new technique that was supposed to
allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But the Pharaoh was
not so satisfied. "My skillful Theut, he said, memory is a great gift that ought to be kept
alive by training it continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any
longer to train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but
by mere virtue of an external device."
We can understand the preoccupation of the Pharaoh. Writing, as any other new
technological device, would have made torpid the human power which it substituted and
reinforced - just as cars made us less able to walk. Writing was dangerous because it
decreased the powers of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of
mind, a mineral memory.
Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing his argument against writing. But he
was pretending that his discourse was told by Socrates, who did not write (since he did
not publish, he perished in the course of his academic fight.)
Nowadays, nobody shares these preoccupations, for two very simple reasons. First of
all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on
the contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts. Only after the invention
of writing was it possible to write such a masterpiece on spontaneous memory as Proust's
La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Secondly, if once upon a time people needed to train their memory in order to remember
things, after the invention of writing they had also to train their memory in order to
remember books. Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.
However, the Pharaoh was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological
achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful,
something that represents for us a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one.
It was as if the Pharaoh pointed first to the written surface and then to an ideal image
of human memory, saying: "This will kill that."
More than one thousand years later Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris, shows us a
priest, Claude Frollo, pointing his finger first to a book, then to the towers and to the
images of his beloved cathedral, and saying "ceci tuera cela", this will kill that. (The book
will kill the cathedral, alphabet will kill images).
The story of Notre Dame de Paris takes place in the XVth century, a little later than the
invention of printing. Before that, manuscripts were reserved to a restricted elite of literate
persons, but the only means to teach the masses about the stories of the Bible, the life of
Christ and of the Saints, the moral principles, even the deeds of the national history or the
most elementary notions of geography and natural sciences (the nature of unknown
peoples and the virtues of herbs or stones), was provided by the images of the cathedral.
A medieval cathedral was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV program that was
supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday lives as well as for
their eternal salvation. The book would have distracted people from their most important
values, encouraging unnecessary information, free interpretation of the Scriptures, insane
During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced
that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being
substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or
other kinds of electronic devices. If not Mc Luhan, certainly many of his readers pointed their
finger first to a Manhattan Discotheque and then to a printed book by saying "this will kill that."
The media needed a certain time to accept the idea that our civilization was on the verge of
becoming an image oriented one - which would have involved a decline of literacy. Nowadays
this is a common shibboleth for every weekly magazine. What is curious is that the media started
to celebrate the decline of literacy and the overwhelming power of images just at the moment in
which, in the world scene, appeared the Computer.
Certainly a computer is an instrument by means of which one can produce and edit images,
certainly instructions are provided by means of icons; but it is equally certain that the computer
has become, first of all, an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there run words, lines, and in
order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read. The new computer generation is
trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable
of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teen-ager. These same teen-agers, if by
chance they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures
and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed.
In this sense one can say that the computer made us to return to a Gutenberg Galaxy.
People who spend their night implementing an unending Internet conversation are principally
dealing with words. If the TV screen can be considered a sort of ideal window through which
one watches the whole world under the form of images, the computer screen is an ideal book
on which one reads about the world in form of words and pages.
The classical computer provided a linear sort of written communication. The screen was
displaying written lines. It was like a fast-reading book.
But now there are hypertexts. In a book one had to read from left to right (or right to left, or up
to down, according to different cultures) in a linear way. One could obviously skip through the
pages, one - once arrived at page 300 - could go back to check or re-read something at page 10 -
but this implied a labor, I mean, a physical labor. On the contrary a hypertext is a
multidimensional network in which every point or node can be potentially connected with any
Thus we have arrived at the final chapter of our this-will-kill-that story. It is more and more
stated that in the near future hypertextual Cd-roms will replace books.
With a hypertextual diskette books are supposed to become obsolete. If you even consider that
a hypertext is usually also multimedial, the complete hypertextual diskette will in the next future
replace not only books but also videocassettes and many other supports.
Now we must ask ourselves if such a perspective is a realistic one or is mere science-fiction -
as well as if the distinction we have just outlined between visual and alphabetic communication,
books and hypertexts is really that simple. Let me list a series of problems and possible perspectives for our future.
Even after the invention of printing books have never been the only instrument for acquiring
information. There were paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. One can
say that books were in any case the most important instrument for transmitting scientifical
information, including news about historical events. In this sense they were the paramount
instrument used in schools.
With the diffusion of the various mass media, from cinema to television, something has changed.
Years ago the only way to learn a foreign language (outside of traveling abroad) was to study a
language from a book. Now our kids frequently know other languages by listening to records,
by watching movies in the original edition, by deciphering the instructions printed on a beverage
can. The same happens with geographical information. In my childhood I got the best of my
information about exotic countries not from textbooks but by reading adventure novels
(Jules Verne, for instance). My kids very early knew more than me on the same subjects from
watching TV and movies. One could learn very well the story of the Roman Empire through
movies, provided that movies were historically correct. The fault of Hollywood is not to have
opposed its movies to the books of Tacitus or of Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp-
and romance-like version on both Tacitus and Gibbon.
A good educational tv program (not to speak of a CD-ROM) can explain genetics better than a
Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of literacy must take
into account the possibilities of all of these media. Educational preoccupation must be extended
to the whole of media. Responsibilities and tasks must be carefully balanced. If for learning
languages, tapes are better than books, take care of cassettes. If a presentation of Chopin, with
commentary on compact disks, helps people to understand Chopin, don't worry if people do not
buy five volumes of the history of music.
Even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the
problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both.
In the Middle Ages visual communication was, for the masses, more important than writing.
But Chartres Cathedral was not culturally inferior to the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun.
Cathedrals were the TV of those times, and the difference from our TV was that the directors of
the medieval TV --read: good books-- had a lot of imagination, and worked for the public profit
(or, at least, for what they believed to be public profit).
The real problems lay elsewhere. Visual communication has to be balanced with the verbal one,
and mainly with the written one for a precise reason. Once, a semiotician, Sol Worth, wrote a
paper, "Images cannot say Ain't". I can verbally say "Unicorns do not exist" but if I show the
image of a unicorn the unicorn is there. Moreover, is the unicorn I see a unicorn or the unicorn,
that is, does it stand for a given unicorn or for the unicorns in general?
This problem is not as immaterial as it can seem, and many many pages have been written by
logicians and semioticians on the difference between such expressions as a child, the child, this
child, all children, childhood as a general idea. Such distinctions are not so easy to display
through images. Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art wondered if a picture representing a
is the representation of Women in general, the portrait of a given woman, the example of the
general characteristics of a woman, the equivalent of the statement there is a woman looking at
One can say that in a poster or on an illustrated book, the caption or other forms of written
material can help to understand what the image means. But I want to remind you about a
rhetorical device called example, on which Aristotle spent some interesting pages. In order to
convince somebody about a given matter, the most convincing is a proof by induction. In
induction I provide many cases and then I infer that probably they instantiate a general law.
Suppose I want to demonstrate that dogs are friendly and love their masters: I provided many
cases in which a dog has proved to be friendly and helpful and I suggest that there must be a
general law by which every animal belonging to the species of dogs is friendly.
Suppose now I want to persuade you that dogs are dangerous. I can do this by providing you
with an example: "Once, a dog killed its master...." As you easily understand, a single case does
not prove anything, but if the example is shocking I can surreptitiously suggest that dogs can
even be unfriendly, and once you are convinced that it can be so, I can unduly extrapolate a
law from a single case and conclude: "this means that dogs cannot be trusted." With the
rhetorical use of the example I shift from a dog to all dogs.
If you have a critical mind you can realize that I have manipulated a verbal expression (a dog
was bad) so to transform it into another one (all dogs are bad) which does not mean the same
thing. But if the example is a visual rather than a verbal one, the critical reaction is made more
difficult. If I show you the poignant image of a given dog biting its master it is very difficult to
discriminate between a particular and a general statement. It is easy to take that dog as the
representative of its species. Images have, so to speak, a sort of Platonic power: they transform
individuals into general ideas.
Thus by a purely visual communication and education it is easier to implement persuasive
strategies that reduce our critical power. If I read on a newspaper that a given man said "we
want mister X as president" I am aware that I was given the opinion of a given man. But if I
watch on the TV screen a man saying enthusiastically "we want mister X as president" it is
easier to take the will of that individual as the example of the general will.
Frequently I think that our societies will be split in a short time (or they are already split) into two
classes of citizens: those who only watch TV, who will receive pre-fabricated images and therefore
prefabricated definitions of the world, without any power to critically choose the kind of information
they receive, and those who know how to deal with the computer, who will be able to select and to
elaborate information. This will re-establish the cultural division which existed at the time of Claude
Frollo, between those who were able to read manuscripts, and therefore to critically deal with religious,
scientifical or philosophical matters, and those who were only educated by the images of the cathedral,
selected and produced by their masters, the literate few.
A science fiction writer could elaborate a lot on a future world where a majority of proletarians will
receive only visual communication planned by an élite of computer-literate people.
There are two sorts of books: these to be read and these to be consulted.
As far as books-to-read are concerned (they can be a novel, or a philosophical treatise, or a sociological
analysis, and so on) the normal way of reading them is the one that I would call the detective-like story.
You start from page 1, where the author tells you that a crime has been committed, you follow every
path of the detection until the end, and finally you discover that the guilty one was the butler. End of the
book and end of your reading experience. Remark that the same happens even if you read, let us say,
Descartes' Discourse de la methode. The author wanted you to open the book at its first page, to follow
the series of questions he proposed, to see how he reaches certain final conclusions. Certainly, a
scholar, who already knows that book, can re-read it by jumping from one page to another, trying to
isolate a possible link between a statement of the first chapter and one of the last one... A scholar can
also decide to isolate, let us say, every occurrence of the word Jerusalem in the immense opus of
Thomas Aquinas, thus skipping thousands of pages in order to focus his or her own attention on the
only passages dealing with Jerusalem... But these are ways of reading that the layman would consider
Then there are the books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopedias. Sometimes handbooks
must be read from the beginning to the end; but when one knows the matter enough, one can consult
them, so selecting also certain chapters or passages. When I was in high-school I had to read entirely,
in a linear way, my handbook on mathematics; today, if I need a precise definition of logarithm, I only
consult it. I keep it on my shelves not to read and re-read it every day, but in order to keep it up once in
ten years, to find the item I need to consult it about.
Encyclopedias are conceived in order to be always consulted and never read from the first to the last
page. Usually one pick up a given volume of one's encyclopedia to know or to remember when
Napoleon died or what is the formula of sulfuric acid. Scholars use encyclopedias in a more
sophisticated way. For instance, if I want to know whether it was possible or not that Napoleon met
Kant, I have to pick up the volume K and the wolume N of my encyclopedia: I discover that Napolen
was born in 1769 and died in 1821, Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, when Napoleon was
already emperor. It is not impossible that the two met. I have probably to consult a biography of Kant,
or of Napoleon - but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, this
possible meeting with Kant can be disregarded, while a in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon
should be recorded. In brief, I must leaf through many books in many shelves of my library, I must
take notes in order to compare later all the data I collected, and so on. In short, all this will cost to me a
painful physical labor.
With a hypertext, instead, I can navigate through the whole encyclopedia. I can connect an event
registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated all along the text, I can compare
the beginning with the end, I can ask for the list of all the words beginning by A, I can ask for all the
cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant, I can compare the dates of their
birth and death - in short, I can do my job in few seconds or few minutes.
Hypertexts will certainly render obsolete encyclopedias and handbooks. In few Cd-roms (probably
soon in a single one) it is possible to store more information than in the whole Encyclopedia Britannica,
with the advantage that it permits crossed references and non-linear retrieval of information. The whole
of the compact disks , plus the computer, will occupy one fifth of the space occupied by an
encyclopedia. The encyclopedia cannot be transported as the CD-ROM can, the encyclopedia cannot
be easily updated. The shelves today occupied, at my home as well as in public libraries, by meters and
meters of encyclopedia could be eliminated in the next future, and there will be no reasons to complain
for their disappearance.
Can a hypertextual disk replace the books to be read? This question conceals in fact two different
problems and could be rephrased as two different questions.
(I) First, a practical one: Can some electronic support replace the books-to-read?
(II) Second an theoretical and an esthetical one: Can a hypertextual and multimedial CD-ROM transform
the very nature of a book-to-read, such as a novel or a collection of poems?
Let me first answer the first question.
Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to
read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it. To read a
computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think to the process of learning a new computer
program. Usually the program is able to display on the screen all the instructions you need. But usually
the users who want to learn the program either print the instructions and read them as if they were in
book form, or they buy a printed manual (let me underevaluate the fact that presently all the computer's
Helps are clearly written by irresponsible and tautological idiots, while commercial handbooks are
written by smart people). It is possible to conceive of a visual program that explains very well how to
print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write (or how to use) a computer
program, we need a printed handbook.
After having spent no more than 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and
I feel the need of sitting comfortably down in an armchair and reading a newspaper, and maybe a good
poem. I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the
intellectual needs they are stimulating.
In my hours of optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a computer
screen, gets acquainted with reading, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different,
more relaxed and differently-committing form of reading.
During a symposium on the future of books held at the university of San Marino (the proceedings are
now published by Brepols), Regis Debray has observed that the fact that Hebrew civilization was a
civilization based upon a Book is not independent on the fact that it was a nomadic civilization. I think
that this remark is very important. Egyptians could carve their records on stone obelisks, Moses could
not. If you want to cross the Red Sea, a scroll is a more practical instrument for recording wisdom. By
the way, another nomadic civilization, the Arabic one, was based upon a book, and privileged writing
But books also have an advantage in respect to computers. Even if printed in modern acid paper, which
lasts only 70 years or so, they are more durable than magnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer
of power shortage and black outs, and are more resistant to shocks. Up to now, books still represent
the more economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at a very low cost.
Computers communication travels ahead of you, books travel with you and at your speed, but if you
shipwreck in a desert island, a book can serve you, while you don't have any chance to plug a computer
anywhere. And even though your computer has solar batteries you cannot easily read it while laying on
a hammock. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the Day After.
For scholarly purposes a book-to-read can be transformed into a hypertextual CD-ROM. A scholar may
need to know, let us say, how many times the word good appears in the Paradise Lost.
However there are today new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a
poem can be transformed into a hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the
problem is no more a practical one: it concern the very nature of the reading process.
Conceived in a hypertextual way even a detective story can be structured in a open way, so that its
readers can even select a given reading-path, that is, to build up their own personal story - even to
decide that the guilty one can and must be the detective instead of the butler.
Such an idea is not a new one. Before the invention of the computer, poets and narrators have dreamt
of a totally open text that the readers could infinitely re-write in different ways. Such was the idea of
Le Livre, as extolled by Mallarmé; Joyce thought of his Finnegans Wake as a text that could be read
by an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In the sixties Max Saporta wrote and published a
novel whose pages could be displaced so as to compose different stories. Nanni Balestrini gave one
of the early computers a disconnected list of verses that the machine put together in different ways so
to compose different poems; Raymond Queneau invented a combinatorial algorithm by virtue of which
it was possible to compose, from a finite set of lines, billions of poems. Many contemporary musicians
have produced musical movable scores, and by manipulating them one can compose different musical
As you have probably realized, even here one is dealing with two different problems. (I) The first is the
idea of a text which is physically movable. Such a text should give the impression of the absolute
freedom on the part of the reader; but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom. The only
machinery that allows one to produce infinite texts already existed from millennia, and it is the alphabet.
With a reduced number of letters one can produce, really, billions of texts, and this is exactly what has
been done from Homer to the present days. A stimulus-text which provides us not with letters, or
words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent
anything we want. We are only free to move in a finite number of ways pre-established textual chunks.
But I, as a reader, do have this freedom even when I read a traditional detective novel. Nobody forbids
me from imagining a different end. Given a novel where two lovers die I, as a reader, can either cry on
their fate, or to try to imagine a different end in which they survive and live happy forever. In a way I,
as a reader, feel more free with a physically finite text, on which I can muse for years, than with a
movable one where only some manipulations are permitted.
(ii) This possibility leads us to the second problem which concerns a text which is physically finite
and limited but that can be interpreted in infinite, or at least in many ways. This has been in fact the
aim of every poet or narrator. But a text which can support many interpretations is not a text which
can support every interpretation.
I think that we are confronted with three different ideas of hypertext. First of all, we should make a
careful distinction between systems and texts. A system (for instance a linguistic system) is the whole
of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language. Every linguistic item can be interpreted in
terms of other linguistic or other semiotic items, a word by a definition, an event by an example, a
natural kind by an image, and so on and so forth. The system is perhaps finite but unlimited. You go
in a spiral-like movement ad infinitum. In this sense certainly all the conceivable books are comprised
by and within a good dictionary and a good grammar. If you are able to use the Webster you can write
both the Paradise Lost and Ulysses.
Certainly, if conceived in such a way, a hypertext can transform every reader into an author. Give the
same hypertextual system to Shakespeare and a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing
Romeo and Juliet.
However a text is not a linguistic or an encyclopedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or
indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe. Finnegans Wake is certainly open
to many interpretations, but it is sure that it will never provide you the demonstration of Fermat's
theorem, or the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of
irresponsible deconstructionists was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This
is blatantly false. A textual hypertext is finite and limited, even though open to innumerable and original
Hypertext can work very well with systems, they cannot work with texts. Systems are limited but
infinite. Texts are limited and finite, even they can allow for a high number of possible interpretations
(but they do not justify every possible interpretation).
There is however a third possibility. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite.
Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazz-like unending story. At this point
the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free
creativity. Being the author of the Open Work I cannot but hail such a possibility. However there is a
difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts.
We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinite texts and
interpreting precise and finite texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate
differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans Jam Session.
We are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist
with textual interpretation. I like this. But we must not say that we have substituted a old
thing with another one. We have both, thanks God. TV zapping is a kind of activity which
has nothing to do with watching a movie. A hypertextual device that allows us to invent
new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.
There is still another confusion between and about two different questions: (a) will
computers made books obsolete? and (b) will computers make written and printed
Let us suppose that computers will make books to disappear. This would not mean the
disappearance of printed material.
The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents. In
order to re-read a text, and to correct it properly, if it is not simply a short letter, one needs
to print it, then to re-read it, then to correct it at the computer and to reprint it again. I do
not think that one is able to write a text of hundreds of pages and to correct it without
printing it at least once.
We have seen that - if by chance one hoped that computers, and specially word processors,
would have contributed to save trees - that was a wishful thinking. Computers encourage
the production of printed material. We can think of a culture in which there will be no
books, and people will go around with tons and tons of unbound sheets of paper. This
will be pretty difficult, and will pose a new problem for libraries.
People desire to communicate with each other. In ancient communities they did it orally; in
a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. Most of the books which are
displayed in a bookstore should be defined as products of Vanity Presses, even if they are
published by a university press. But with computer technology we are entering a new
Samisdazt Era. People can communicate directly without the mediation of publishing
houses. Lot of people do not want to publish, they simply want to communicate each
other. Today they do it by E-mail or Internet, will result in being a great advantage for
books, books' civilization and books' market. Look at a bookstore. There are too many
books. I receive too many books every week. If the computer network will succeed in
reducing the quantity of published books, it would be a paramount cultural improvement.
One of the most common objections against the pseudo-literacy of computers is that young
people get more and more accustomed to speak through cryptic short formulas: dir, help,
diskcopy, error 67, and so on. One of the closing formulas used in the networks is cul8r.
Is that still literacy? FIG 7
I am a rare-books collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles
that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's
movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy
formulas praising the ideal Addressee, usually an Emperor or a Pope, and lasted for pages
and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to
If Baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified.
Introductions are one page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some
National or International Endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book
has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some
children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand
perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the
hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers
eaten in a hurry..
But let me guess that in the near future we will have three lines saying: "W/c, Smith,
Rockefeller," (to be read as: I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently
revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation.")
That would be as eloquent as a Baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of
acquaintance with a given rhetoric. I think that in the coming years passionate love
messages will be sent in the form of a short instruction in Basic language, under the form
"if... then", so to obtain, as an input, messages like "I love you, therefore I cannot live
with you," (beautiful verse from Emily Dickinson).
Besides, the best of English mannerist literature was listed --as far as I remember-- in some
program language: 2B OR/NOT 2B " FIGURE 9
There is a curious idea according to which the more you say in verbal language, the more
you are profound and perceptive. Mallarmé told us that it is sufficient to spell out "une
fleur" to evoke a universe of perfumes, shapes, and thoughts. Frequently for poetry, the
fewer the words, the more the things. Three lines of Pascal say more than 300 pages of a
long and boring treatise on morals and metaphysics. The quest for a new and surviving
literacy ought not to be the quest for a pre-informatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are
Until now I have tried to show that the arrival of new technological devices does not
necessarily made previous device obsolete. The car is goes faster than the bicycle, but cars
have not rendered bicycles obsolete and no new technological improvement can make a
bicycle better than it was before. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role
is too much simplistic. After the invention of Daguerre painters did not feel obliged to
serve any longer as craftsmen obliged to reproduce reality such as we believe to see it. But
it does not mean that Daguerre's invention only encouraged abstract painting. There is a
whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model,
think for instance of hyper-realism. Reality is seen by the painter's eye through the
Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has made literature free from certain
narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like post-modern
literature, it exists just because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema.
For the same reason today I do not need any longer a heavy portrait painted by a modest
artist and I can send my sweetheart a glossy and faithful photograph, but such a change
in the social functions of painting has not made painting obsolete, except that today painted
portraits do not fulfill the same practical function of portraying a person (which can be
done better and less expensively by a photograph), but of celebrating important
personalities, so that the command, the purchasing and the exhibition of such portraits
acquire aristocratic connotations.
This means that in the history if culture it has never happened that something has simply
killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else.
I have quoted McLuhan, according to which the Visual Galaxy had substituted the
Gutenberg Galaxy. We have seen that few decades later this was no longer true.
McLuhan stated that we are living in a new electronic Global Village. We are certainly
living in a new electronic community, which is global enough, but this is not a Village -
if by village one means a human settlement where people are directly interacting each other.
The real problems of an electronic community are the following: (1) Solitude. The new
citizen of this new community is free to invent new texts, to cancel the traditional notion
of authorship, to delete the traditional divisions between author and reader, but the risk is
that - being in touch with the entire world by means of a galactic network - one feels
alone.... (2) Excess of information and inability to choose and to discriminate. I am used
to saying that certainly the Sunday NYT is the kind of newspaper where you can find
everything fit to print. Its 500 hundred pages tell you everything you need to know about
the events of the past week and the ideas for the new one. However, a single week is not
enough to read the whole Sunday NYT. Is there a difference between a newspaper which
says everything you cannot read, and a newspaper which says nothing, is there a difference
between NYT and Pravda?
Notwithstanding this, the NYT reader can still distinguish between the book review, the
pages devoted to the tv programs, the Real Estate supplement, and so on. The user of
Internet has not the same skill. We are today unable to discriminate, at least at first glance,
between a reliable source and a mad one. We need a new form of critical competence, an
as yet unknown art of selection and decimation of information, in short, a new wisdom.
We need a new kind of educational training.
Let me say that in this perspective books will still have a paramount function. As well as
you need a printed handbook in order to surf on Internet, so we will need new printed
manuals in order to cope critically with the World Wide Web.
Let me conclude with a praise of the finite and limited world that books provide us.
Suppose you are reading Tolstoj's War and Peace: you are desperately wishing that
Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel who is Anatolij; you
desperately wish that that marvellous person who is prince Andrej will not die, and that
he and Natasha could live together happy forever. If you had War and Peace in a
hypertextual and interactive CD-rom you could rewrite your own story, according to
your desires, you could invent innumerable War and Peaces, where Pierre Besuchov
succeeds in killing Napoleon or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats
Alas, with a book you cannot. You are obliged to accept the laws of Fate, and to realise
that you cannot change Destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice
freedom and creativity, and I hope that such a kind of inventive activity will be practised
in the schools of the future. But the written War and Peace does not confront us with the
unlimited possibilities of Freedom, but with the severe law of Necessity. In order to be
free persons we also need to learn this lesson about Life and Death, and only books can
still provide us with such a wisdom.