I’ve always been an early adopter as far as technology was concerned and could never really understand what was holding back the next big technological revolution. Then I discovered this article: Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books. Umberto Eco discusses memory and the effect modern technology, like the internet, has had on it.

According to Plato in Phaedrus when Hermes, or Theut, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, the Pharaoh praised such an unheard of technique supposed to allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But Thamus was not completely happy. “My skillful Theut,” he said, “memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by continuous training. With your invention people will no longer be obliged to train their memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtue of an external device.”

Nowadays, nobody shares Thamus’s 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 of spontaneous memory as Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Secondly, if once upon a time people needed to train their memories in order to remember things, after the invention of writing they had also to train their memories in order to remember books. Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotise it. However, the Pharaoh was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could kill something that we consider precious and fruitful.

And this is the same fear that is shared, and demostrated by the general apprehesion around new technology, by most people today. Ok, maybe not entirely, there are a whole wack of reason why people are reluctant to play with new technology. But i’m sure that lose of familiarity plays a significant role.

Indeed, there are a lot of new technological devices that have not made previous ones obsolete. Cars run faster than bicycles, but they have not rendered bicycles obsolete, and no new technological improvements can make a bicycle better than it was before. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous one is frequently too simplistic. Though after the invention of photography painters did not feel obliged to serve any longer as craftsmen reproducing reality, this did not mean that Daguerre’s invention only encouraged abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not have existed without photographic models: think, for instance, of hyper-realism. Here, reality is seen by the painter’s eye through the photographic eye. This means that in the history of culture it has never been the case that something has simply killed something else. Rather, a new invention has always profoundly changed an older one.

The internet has revolutionized our relationship to information, on a personal and global scale. It’s also changed how we share imformation and is profoundly changing how we communicate with each other today. As an early adopter, this change is more evident to me than it is to most of my friends have to yet to embrace the revolution. I only wonder where and in which direction this change will take us once they have.