Umberto Eco 13 years ago on the Next Decade in Book Culture

A few days ago Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, posted my piece as part of a series of guest posts on “The Next Decade in Book Culture.” In it, as a lover of literature, I expressed and called for optimism about the changes being wrought by the internet. Umberto Eco, in his 1996 lecture “From Internet to Gutenberg,” expresses well some of my reasons for suggestions that the internet will be the death of literature –in short, history tells us that technological change doesn’t kill earlier artistic forms; rather technological change transforms and enriches earlier artistic forms:

The arrival of new technological devices does not necessarily make previous device obsolete. The car 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 we 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 photographic eye.

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.

I do think that the 13 years that have passed since Eco’s lecture have undermined one of the points he made regarding the need for books (in codex, rather than electronic, form). Eco is convinced that a writer must print his material in order to edit it fully: “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.”

I now teach students who were ten years old at the time of Eco’s lecture, and they grew up writing and editing on-screen. I now write and substantially edit what I write on-screen even though in 1996 I would’ve been convinced that I would never be able to do so. And ebooks don’t cause the eyestrain Eco attributes to computer screens — he did not at all seem to anticipate that reading in electronic form would not necessarily take place in the future only on electronic devices with which he was familiar back in the previous century.