A Response to “Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” By Christine Choi and Aminata Chipembere

Introduction: 

In Davide Ferrario’s documentary Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, the viewers are given a tour of the inner workings of Umberto Eco’s mind. The audience has the chance to revisit many of his influential theories on materiality, memory, and knowledge. Early in the film, Eco asserts that “Memory is Soul,” setting up his reflections on the human need to preserve and seek out knowledge. Eco introduces an intersection between libraries and memory. For him, a library is more than just a collection of books; it is “mankind’s common memory”. It serves as a living embodiment and symbol of humanity’s collective effort to make sense of the world. 

The concept of the library being a vessel for memory connects to Eco’s broader reflections on archives and materiality. Eco’s attachment to physicality resonates with the knowledge introduced by Bill Brown in Materiality, which considers how physical objects reshape one’s lived experience. Eco’s theories warn about the dangers of the internet and overcomposition. These theories can be explored in relation to Annalee Newitz’s My Laptop, which describes how digital technologies have transformed our relationship with information. Eco’s work alongside these theories highlights the evolving relationship between memory, materiality, and media. Reminding audiences that the mediums in which we store knowledge reshape the way we remember and understand. 

Memory & Information: 

In the documentary, Umberto Eco introduces three types of memory: Organic, Vegetal, and Mineral. Organic memory resides in the brain, “made of flesh and bone” (Eco), and encompasses our ability to recall and forget. Vegetal memory refers to written media (books, papyrus) and represents memory in its physical form. Mineral memory, the newest form, is stored in silicon or digital technology. This form highlights technology’s ability to hold and collect knowledge. While each of these forms serves its own purpose and works to expand knowledge. Eco suggests that mineral memory introduces a paradox: an overload of information that could eventually overwhelm rather than benefit. 

Eco warns that human beings aren’t meant to know everything, stating that “if we knew all that is contained on the web, we’d go crazy.”(Eco). He points to the flood of digital content as the main reason behind what he calls information noise, the idea that so much information exists that it becomes impossible to distinguish meaning from distraction. He argues that the world is constantly overloaded with messages that often say nothing. He warns that this noise disrupts one of the core functions of memory: the ability to select, filter, and prioritize important information. In this era, dominated by mineral memory, this filtering process is breaking down. The internet, as Eco puts it, functions as “an encyclopedia where everything is potentially recorded, but without the tools to filter its content.” Eco highlights an important issue with the ability to filter information and organize its content; its usefulness diminishes. 

In discussing the overflow of digital content, Eco causes us to reconsider this dependence on mineral memory. Over time, humanity has become increasingly more reliant on technology and has slowly turned away from organic memory. This is evident in Annalee Newitz’s work, My Laptop, where she describes that she relies on digital tools to store and recall information. She writes, “It’s practically a brain prosthesis.”(Newitz 88), highlighting the extent to which her laptop has replaced her own cognitive abilities. This dependence serves as a real-world example of Eco’s fears coming true, that technology, instead of working alongside organic and vegetal memory, has begun to replace them entirely. As we continue to store our memories in technology, we risk weakening our own abilities to process and record information. This raises the question, what is the point of remembering, writing or archiving, if everything can be conserved online? The answer to this dilemma lies in Eco’s ideas on the importance of materiality. 

Memory & Materiality: 

It is no wonder, then, that Eco has a preference for physical books over digital files when it comes to reading, citing reasons such as how you are unable to underline passages, make dogears, nor smear the pages with a dirty thumb when reading on a digital interface. This, too, reveals a part of the memory that is held within the books themselves, giving them their own uniqueness and individuality. As Bill Brown quoted in the Materiality chapter of Critical Terms for Media Studies, “Information, delaminated from any specific material substrate, could circulate—could dematerialize and rematerialize—unchanged (55).” This unchanging and immaterial nature of digital media (or “new media”), would lead us to believe that it comes with immortality since it appears immune to the environmental changes and deterioration that physical media tend to be prone to—which is why we often see digitization of physical media as a form of preservation. However, Brown argues that “digital media are themselves subject to deterioration” since “they still require physical support”. This, too, highlights the threats that come with shifting towards depending on mineral memory more than vegetal memory as Brown also notes that “all media may eventually be homogenized within the hegemony of the digital” (53). 

Brown further asserts the threat that the digital landscape brings to materiality as more and more media get “dematerialized” (51). With the increase of communication occurring in our digital devices, it is also just as susceptible for it to vanish without the physical traces that take its form in our physical world, and with it, the memories of them would be forgotten to time. This sort of archaeological view of the media that we leave behind is, of course, great concern as media academics. As Eco stated, “we are beings living in time. Without memory, it’s impossible to build a future,” and without the vegetal memory that we can refer back to, it could end up compromising the very foundations and integrity that media studies is built upon. This is also the type of future that Brown is concerned with, as he states, “the homogenizing, dematerializing effects of digitization,” which would result in “the human body thus becom[ing] the source for “giv[ing] body to digital data” (58).” As a result, this affects the way we, as human subjects and media consumers, are mediated and facilitated by the information in our environment. 

Conclusion:

From Eco, Newitz, and Brown, we have seen how our modern-day society has a complicated dynamic when it comes to organic, vegetal, and mineral memory. We can also see why, then, libraries like Umberto Eco’s would be so significant in our current media landscape. From Eco’s teachings and theories brought attention to the pitfalls the over-reliance on technology and the mediation of mineral memory through them. This documentary serves as a reminder that too much information can ultimately cause harm rather than benefit us. It causes us to rethink the constant need to gain more knowledge, as we can easily drown in the noise rather than learn from it. We must distinguish what information is crucial for us to keep and what we can discard. As media theorists, it allows us to think more critically about the fallibilities that we have often overlooked as we continue to adapt and familiarize ourselves with mineral memory in favour of vegetal memory. Much like Eco continued to emphasize throughout the film, “sentimentally, you cannot replace books.”

Citations

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63. 

Ferrario, Davide, director. Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Film Commission Torino-Piemonte, 2023. 

Larsen, Martin Grüner. Umberto Eco in front of the bookshelf in his library which contains books he has written and translations. 9 May 2011. Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mglarsen/5772998464/in/photolist-9N98jh-9N6bdM-9N69ti-9N95nS-9N93EQ-9N8SFU-9N8QWo-9N6g9a-9N8ZtJ-9N63Hg-9N62ya. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025. Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 86–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.