Quote:
Originally Posted by SlowRain
I find it ironic that the man who so famously championed the dissemination of knowledge and the folly of blindly adhering to tradition in The Name of the Rose would speak against the most effective way to disseminate knowledge around the world in the 21st century by himself blindly adhering to tradition. His reasoning, at its very core, is no different than that of the very religious teachers he disdains.
|
Yes,it is. He is concerned about the durability of knowledge. The point he brings up about the incompatibility of older technologies with current ones is quite to the point. Also, while electronic texts are the easiest to disseminate, they are not the easiest to consume because they require a specialized reading device. I think the advances made in POD such as the "espresso machine" may combine the best of both worlds and give us easily disseminated yet fully tactile and durable texts.
I also think the comparison to the Taliban is rather apt for the extreme minority of what Jaron Lenier calls "Digital Maoists." These are ideologically driven consumers who see going all-digital not as a matter of convenience but an act of virtue. Books get ripped, scanned, and mashed and remixed to become part of the single "Big Book" which serves as a repository of the collective intellect of the human race. Serve this along side a dessert of singularity induced euphoria and enjoy. The Taliban were/are a mutated cross breed of classical Islam with modernity. The Buddhas Bamyan had stood for over a thousand years after the advent of Islam in Afghanistan. None of the scholars of previous eras called for them to be destroyed. It took an Islam mixed with (post)modern identity politics and geopolitical calculation, an ocean of human experience reduced to a rigid and formulaic ideology, to destroy those statues. And partisans of another rigid ideology do welcome the demise of the book as a matter of ideological purity. I am not saying that the fine participants of Mobileread (or most ebook readers) are partisans of this ideology, but there certainly are a minority of people who wish to never sully themselves with a "tree meat" book again.
Recently, in preparation for a move, I decided that now that I had several ebook readers and a substantial digital library, I could do away with all my public domain books. I donated them to the Book Thing (a non-profit dedicated to distributing free books to whoever wants them), so they weren't destroyed and will be loved, but a few days/weeks later I realized that I had gotten rid of some books that had real sentimental value to me. It
hurt. Shortly thereafter, my Pocketbook 360 mysteriously disappeared. Stolen? Broken and then disposed off without anyone notifying me? Who knows?
I ended up repurchasing several of the books I had donated, especially the Nietzsche collection and the books of the early modern philosophers. I had sold my college texts! My Malebranche, my Spinoza, my Leibnitz! I fully understand and agree with what Eco is stating here. The convenience of electronic reading is powerful, but a complete transition would destroy something valuable.
Luqman