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Critical Concept Explication, Critical Response, Other

Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet

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Throughout his time on earth, Umberto Eco was renowned for his great ideas, works, and qualities — he was an Italian semiotician, novelist, media theorist, philosopher, and, perhaps above all, a critic of the internet. As the internet and digital media rose rapidly in development and public use in the late 90s and early 2000s, Eco addressed this upsurge with the statement that “information can damage knowledge, because it is too much… noise, and that noise is not knowledge” (Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo). Eco vocalized criticism of the way in which information is overly-accessible online, and its detriment to materiality and genuine knowledge. Using Eco’s thoughts to think about digital media nowadays is especially relevant, as we suffer from a paradox: we have never had more access to information with the internet, yet we struggle to turn it into understanding. Amid misinformation, algorithmic feeds, and social media noise, Eco’s ideas feel urgent today. His reflections on digital media reveal that information abundance without critical literacy leads to collective amnesia. His work pushes us to see media as objects that shape, and sometimes distort, how we learn, remember, and communicate.

I recognize myself and my own habits in Eco’s warnings. Everyday, I scroll through my phone and I consume a littany of posts that I forget moments later. It’s as though my attention is on shuffle. Eco might say I am lost in “semiotic overfeeding,” a term he used to describe being bombarded by information without the ability to filter it (Kristo 55). He compared this to a kind of social Alzheimer’s, where the abundance of data infringes on our ability to remember meaningfully. I feel this when I can recall countless fragments, like a certain headline, tweet, or meme, but I still struggle to string them together into concrete knowledge. Still, I don’t see the internet as purely destructive. It connects me to art, ideas, and communities I would never have known otherwise. Eco himself understood this potential: even while critiquing digital excess, he created Encyclomedia, a multimedia platform designed to link history, literature, and culture through the web (Kristo 56). He was not anti-technology; he simply demanded we use it consciously, with care.

In 2000, Eco Umberto contributed a commentary piece on Project Syndicate’s website called “The Virtual Imagination”, which one must make an account to access. In his writing, Eco anticipated the world we live in now: anyone can be a writer, editor, or storyteller via the internet. He described how computers and hypertext were transforming the reading process, allowing users to “ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with Kant” instantly (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”). This, he wrote, would change literacy itself. But he also worried that such “boundless hypertextual structures” would dissolve the boundaries that give stories meaning. If every reader can rewrite War and Peace, he mused, “everyone is Tolstoy” (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”). His distinction between systems (language’s infinite possibilities) and texts (closed, crafted worlds) speaks to our current internet condition, as it is an endless system of signs where meaning is endlessly deferred and interpreted, never settled. In that sense, Eco saw digital media as both a marvel and a mirror. It can reflect the human urge to create while also carrying the chaos of infinite interpretation (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”).

Renata Martini Kristo’s essay Umberto Eco and Emotions in the Time of Internet helps contextualize Eco’s critique in the era of social media. Kristo reminds us that Eco’s famous “legions of idiots” comment — a jab towards the platforms that are now accessible to supposed idiots — was not elitist frustration, but rather a demand for education. Essentially, Eco argued that the real problem wasn’t speech itself, but the lack of filtering and critical thinking. If society lacks the ability or simply overlooks the importance of evaluating the information that is fed to them, society risks drowning in its own noise (Kristo 52-53). Kristo expands on Eco’s view that schools should teach students “how to filter the immense information found in the Internet,” since even teachers, Eco stated, often lack the skills to do so (57). This idea feels strikingly modern; today, our digital environments rely more on algorithmic curation than human criticality. Eco would likely view our For You Pages as dangerous precisely because they mimic discernment while erasing the effort of it. His solution was not disconnection but education, a “discipline of memory,” as Kristo calls it, one that reintroduces intentionality and consciousness to our engagement with and consumption of media.

The AHEH article “Umberto Eco on Culture, Media, and the Internet” extends this by situating Eco’s thought within his semiotic framework of open and closed texts. Open texts invite interpretation, dialogue, and multiplicity; closed texts fix meaning and manipulate perception. Eco admired open systems such as art, literature, or media that provoke critical engagement, but he feared how digital culture could turn open texts into closed circuits of misinformation. He saw mass media as a double-edged sword as it is capable of democratizing knowledge but equally prone to ideological control. In our digital world, both dynamics coexist. The internet can amplify marginalized voices and communities, yet it also fuels misinformation on the daily when its power is placed in the wrong hands. Eco’s cautious middle-ground position calls for media literacy as a form of semiotic resistance. To understand media as objects, in Eco’s sense, is to recognize that every platform, post, and interface is encoded with a certain view and message (AHEH).

Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects collection offers a lens through which to humanize Eco’s theories. In Annalee Newitz’s chapter “My Laptop,” the computer becomes a literal extension of the self, Newitz referring to it as “a brain prosthesis” (Newitz 88). She writes about the emotional intimacy people build with their machines, describing her laptop as both tool and companion, worn down by her hands and filled with her history. Reading Newitz alongside Eco reveals a paradox: where Eco warns that digital media externalize memory and fragment attention, Newitz embraces technology as a vessel of emotional and intellectual connection. Her computer is an “apparatus for the realization of inner-human possibilities,” echoing Vilém Flusser’s idea at the start of the chapter that technology helps us create alternative worlds. This emotional relationship to media complicates Eco’s cautionary stance. The internet may scatter our focus, but it also holds our loves, friendships, and creative selves.

When I think about my own laptop, it feels like both Eco’s nightmare and Newitz’s much happier dream. My laptop contains every essay I’ve written, photos I’ve taken, and countless conversations with friends who live thousands of kilometres away. However, it’s also the source of my distraction — I do love it, but it tires me. Eco might say that I’m caught in a hypertext of my own making, while Newitz would remind me that this machine is an “evocative object,” one that shapes who I am and how I remember. The key, perhaps, is not to reject the medium but to use it mindfully and to build a relationship with technology that honours its materiality rather than erases it. Just as Eco defended the tactile book for its “dog-ears and underlines,” we can reclaim the digital object by using it deliberately, slowing down our consumption to preserve meaning (Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo).

Ultimately, Eco’s work teaches us that media, whether a book or a screen, are not neutral vessels. They embody choices, values, and modes of thought. The danger lies not in technology itself but in our passive use of it. So, when I enter the realm of social media each night, I will try to remember Eco’s message that information without human reflection is just noise. But, I will also keep in mind Newitz’s tenderness towards her laptop, and that our devices can hold love, memory, and imagination. Somewhere between the noise and the meaning, between Eco’s library and Newitz’s laptop, lies the task of our generation as we move forward: to learn how to think with our media without letting anyone else think for us.

Sources

Aheh. “Umberto Eco on Culture, Media, and the Internet.” AHEH, 27 Aug. 2025, www.artshumanitieshub.eu/news/umberto-eco-on-culture-media-internet/.

Eco, Umberto. “The Virtual Imagination.” Project Syndicate, 7 Nov. 2000, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-virtual-imagination.

Kristo, Renata Martini. “Umberto Eco and Emotions in the Time of Internet.” International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation, vol. 4, no. 7, 2017, pp. 51–58.

Newitz, Annalee. “My Laptop.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 87–91.

Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo. Directed by Davide Ferrario, 2018.

Other

The Locket I Never Filled (Until Now): A Heart as Medium for Memory and Intimacy

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Introduction


Growing up as an only child, I received a lot of speculation — usually in the form of little jokes — about my parents absolutely spoiling me. The logic being that, since my parents have only one child, all birthdays, Christmases, and even day-to-day gestures of giving were magnified, as they only had to make one child happy via gifts. Although my parents were generous with the gifts they gave me on the two major celebrations per year, they were, above all, thoughtful with their giving; every gift had to have deep emotional meaning and was usually small, in some form of metal. One of the first gifts that I can remember receiving from my parents was a small heart locket. It is silver, engraved with swirls and now slightly tarnished from years of wear. I have worn it since childhood, and initially, my parents gave it to me so I could place photos inside that represented the subjects that mattered to me deeply at the age of five. I always wanted to put my parents inside of it, but alas, I didn’t have a colour printer for the first nine years of my life, and after that point, I had simply just forgotten about it. For years, the locket sat empty around my neck, enduring the hot waters of many showers and the stinging cold of the winters it brought to the metal. Only recently have I filled it with photos of my partner and me. To me, my locket mediates both potential and presence-in-absence. Even when empty, it carried cultural meaning and expectation; when filled, it enacted intimacy, rendering it a rich example of media theory around hypomnesia, anamnesis, and image as paradox.

Description

Describing my evocative object is fairly simple: if one pictures a heart locket in their mind, there is a high chance that the conjured image will resemble my locket. I wear a thick, 15-inch chain, which has replaced the thin, 20-inch chains that came before and broke due to excessive wear. On the chain sits the pendant itself, which is round and heart-shaped, meant to carry images close to the heart, quite literally. Despite the locket being empty for fourteen years, the absence of the photos did not erase the meaning of the locket for me, as the shell of the pendant reminded me of what is missing, and what is yet to come. As I have recently filled my locket with two images of my partner and me, the locket now mediates and embodies intimacy, love, and continuity.

Mediation

When empty, my heart locket mediated potential and expectation, as it was quite literally an object “waiting” for memory, in the form of special images. In terms of cultural and historical significance, heart lockets have been “associated with love, affection, and emotional connection” (Locket Sisters). Lockets bloomed in popularity as early as the Victorian era, in which lovers would store photos, letters, and even locks of hair from their loved ones — even when a pendant is empty, it stages that possibility of being filled. When filled with sentimental items, most commonly images, the heart locket mediates presence-in-absence: in my case, the photos of my partner stand in for him when apart. The heart locket creates intimacy through selection and scarcity, as the two images that are selected to reside inside the pendant are special and limited in quantity. Furthermore, the ritual of opening and closing the pendant’s hinge is a tactile mediation of memory itself. Empty or filled, the locket is never neutral. Rather, the shift demonstrates that this object and its mediation are dynamic and flexible, never fixed.

Theory

Upon thinking of which object of mine I would like to write about as an evocative object, my heart locket came to mind because of its ties to the theories and discussions we have engaged with in class. In Critical Terms for Media Studies chapter 05 “Memory”, Bernard Stiegler writes about hypomnesis, as the technical and externalized forms of memory, such as photography serving as memory externalizations, and anamnesis, “the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence” (Oxford). The former correlates to the locket when it held no photos, as it was already a technical support of memory. Its very design, with the hinge, cavity, and chain, indicates its intended use, of holding images of ones near and dear to your heart. When I wore my necklace as a child, I was very much aware of what it should contain — this cultural script is a form of hypomnesis as the object outsources memory before it is even filled. Its design and cultural script reminded me of the relationships I may one day want to preserve and honour with my pendant. When I finally placed photos of my partner inside, the locket became a coupling of hypomnesis and anamnesis: the images function as external memory supports, but only matter because they call forth embodied recollections each time I open it. In Stiegler’s terms, the locket demonstrates how technical memory and lived memory are inseparable in mediation (Memory 77).
In chapter 03 “Image”, W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images are always paradoxical — they are both present and absent, here and not-here (Image 35-36). My heart locket demonstrates this paradox in both ways: when it was empty, the absence of images was still meaningful as it reminded me of what should be there, consequently staging the absence as potential presence. Once filled, the photos embody the paradox even more clearly. My partner’s face is materially here in the locket, but he is also not here — only represented. Each time I open it, I experience both recognition and loss, the double-moment Mitchell describes where an image appears as both a physical object and a ghostly apparition (Image 39).

Conclusion

As a mediator, a heart locket is certainly dynamic, as they do not necessarily have to be “used” in the intended manner to mediate meaning. Connecting my evocative object to Stiegler’s theories of memory’s exteriorization and Mitchell’s detailing of image’s paradoxical nature reminded me that mediation is not solely about digital technologies — even small analog objects shape memory, intimacy, and identity. This is something that was also revealed to me in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. However, connecting these theories to an object that I consider mundane and wear every day, is even more revealing, as it suggests that mediation includes both what is present and what is possible.

Works Cited

“Locket Sisters.” Locket Sisters, 2020, thelocketsisters.com/locket-stories/the-meaning-behind-heart-lockets-a-symbol-of-love-connection-and-cherished-memories/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 64–87.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “Image.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 35–38. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025

“Anamnesis.” Oxford Languages, Google, 2025, https://www.google.com/search?q=anamnesis+definition. Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.