07/06/00


The World According to Eco By Lee Marshall

In this interview, Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco expounds upon the Net, writing, The Osteria, libraries, the continental divide, Marshall Mcluhan,and, well, God.

Eco was behind the unforgettable Mac versus DOS metaphor. That in one of his weekly columns he first mused upon the "software schism" dividing users of Macintosh and DOS operating systems. 

Mac, he posited, is Catholic, with "sumptuous icons" and the promise of offering everybody the chance to reach the Kingdom of Heaven ("or at least the moment when your document is printed") by following a series of easy steps. 

DOS is Protestant: "it allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions ... and takes for granted that not all can reach salvation." 

Following this logic, Windows becomes "an Anglican-style schism - big ceremonies in the cathedral, but with the possibility of going back secretly to DOS in order to modify just about anything you like." 

Eco calls Windows 95 "pure unadulterated Catholicism. Already Windows 3.1 was more than Anglican - it was Anglo-Catholic, keeping a foot in both camps. But Windows 95 of  goes all the way.

Here, we can learn more about Eco's perspective on technology's political implications and the Multimedia Arcade which is a center featuring a public multimedia library, computer training center, and Net access - all under the tutelage of the Bologna Town Council. There, for a token fee, local citizens can go to Net surf, send email, learn new programs, and use search engines - or simply hang out in the cybercafé. (Set to open in late 1997) Multimedia Arcade will offer around 50 state-of-the-art terminals linked together in a local network with a fast Net connection. It will feature a large multimedia, software, and print library, as well as a staff of teachers, technicians, and librarians.

The premise is simple: if Net literacy is a basic right, then it should be guaranteed for all citizens by the state. We don't rely on the free market to teach our children to read, so why should we rely on it to teach our children to Net surf? Eco sees the Bologna center as the pilot for a nationwide and - why not? - even worldwide chain of high tech public libraries. 

"Today, mechanics and housewives may not use the Multimedia Arcade right away. Just like working classes did not immediately sign up for copies of the 42-Line Bible after the invention of printing press; but they were reading it a century later. Despite widespread illiteracy, Luther's translation of the New Testament circulated through all sections of 16th-century German society. What we need is a Luther of the Net.

A few years ago, there were very limited non-English sites.  Now the World Wide Web includes many languages. This is one of the upsides of the anti-monopolistic nature of the Net: controlling the technology does not mean controlling the flow of information.

In 1967 Eco wrote an essay called "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare" in which he argued that the important objective for any committed cultural guerrilla was not the TV studio, but the armchairs of the people watching. In other words: if you can give people tools that help them to criticize the messages they are receiving, these messages lose their potency as subliminal political levers. What are these critical tools? For instance, as a scholar, Eco can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds,  glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs. he does not have those skills for the Net. On the Net bookstore, all the books are lying in heaps on the floor.

How do I make sense of the mess? We may use some signpost, mostly deceptive. URL that ends with .indiana.edu  may have something to do with the University of Indiana. Since there are people using that domain to post all kinds of stuff, most of which has little or nothing to do with education. We have to grope your way through the signs. We have to recycle the semiological skills that allow us to distinguish a pastoral poem from a satirical skit, and apply them to the problem, for example, of weeding out the serious philosophical sites from the lunatic ravings.

Suppose we are looking through neo-Nazi sites. If we just rely on search-engine logic, we might jump to the conclusion that the most fascist site of the lot is the one in which the word Nazi scores highest. But in fact this turns out to belong to an antifascist watchdog group.

We can learn these skills by trial and error, or you can ask other Net users for advice online. But the quickest and most effective method is to be in a place surrounded by other people, each with different levels of competence, each with different online experiences which they can pool.