Tag Archives: Umberto Eco

General Media Theory, Other

Why We Fight Online: Environmental Polarization in Digital Media

3 Comments

Introduction

Even though everyone has come to realize that internet has always been a medium of chaos and conflict, but it has always been mildly confusing for us that while verbal sparring in reality is a relatively mild and civilized form of exchanging viewpoints, online it becomes a genuine battlefield—strangers clash fiercely over differing opinions, or sometimes simply to provoke, with conflicts erupting openly for all to see. I’ve also seen many ordinary content creators who share their daily lives eventually forced to turn off private messages after gaining attention, because clearly, many people use such channels like random assailants, aiming only to wound without reason. 

If aliens studying Earth were to witness the spectacle of online discourse, they might be astounded by the stark contrast with the polite and respectful demeanor most people display in real life. What causes such a clear divide in behavior between the online and offline worlds for the same individuals? Does the digital environment inherently make people more irritable, less tolerant, and unwilling to understand others? In this article, we will explore this very question—specifically, the causes of environmental polarization and the role the media plays in it.

Network Polarization and the Online Environment 

Network polarization refers to the phenomenon where issues that might be understandable in real life are continuously amplified and fixated upon by online communities to the point of harsh criticism. People become less tolerant of differing viewpoints online, while growing increasingly exclusive within their own labeled groups—even if their so-called “allies” might struggle to hold a two-sentence conversation with them in real life. Environmental polarization makes everyone more sensitive and defensive. In this climate of pervasive insecurity, individuals seek solace in groups, yet this very process only deepens the divides between people. While cooperation and understanding thrive offline, online, certain opinions are immediately branded as heresy worthy of burning at the stake—judged with absolute, uncompromising harshness.

If we look back at the online environment around 2000, although media technology was far less efficient and accessible than today, the atmosphere of communication was generally much healthier than the current state, where a single comment can rapidly poison a community. Does this mean the advancement of media technology is not truly a positive development? Perhaps, as Umberto Eco wrote in Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2017), “Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs.” While Eco was mainly discussing the unnecessary “diversification” of physical inventions that replace what already exists, I suspect he would also disapprove of today’s digital landscape.

Potential Reasons Behind Network Polarization and the Influence of Media

To understand why online environments intensify conflict, we can turn to Gibson’s ecological perspective, which helps explain why digital environments intensify conflict and relies on what the environment makes available to us. Applied to online usage, this suggests that when people use social and online platforms, they shape the exact platform they are using while the platform itself simultaneously shapes them. 

In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson emphasizes that the “animal and the environment make an inseparable pair” (p. 8). Gibson writes that the perceiver is always surrounded by “the medium in which animals can move about (and in which objects can be moved about) is at the same time the medium for light, sound, and odor coming from sources in the environment.” (p. 13), meaning that perception is shaped by whatever information the environment supplies.

One major factor of polarization is selective perception. Our online feeds are not a neutral environment, as algorithms curate and amplify content that they assume the user appears to be “looking for.” This makes polarization feel natural and unavoidable because the environment reinforces the observer. Online, this means users often search for confirmation validation that aligns with existing emotions and beliefs.

Gibson also reminds us that perception is active, not passive. He states, “we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive. ” (p. 213). Online, there is constant “movement” in scrolling, liking, and reposting, which affects what the users perceive next based on the algorithm. The environment is always refreshing, adjusting to user behaviour. This repeated cycle then boosts reactions and reinforces patterns, making it easier for polarization to become a way of interacting.

Looking into Media: a Tool or an Amplifier?

Concluding from Gibson, we can say that the internet we are looking into is not a neutral environment, and media does not only act as a tool for our voices. Depending on algorithms, the pages shown to everyone are different, designed for our own taste. By manipulating what people perceive, media and the internet can easily influence the opinions of people, and the information cocoon will naturally feed towards the minds of the opinions already there, making the opinions increasingly polarized and entrenched. People use the internet to voice themselves, but the internet will also amplify what they are saying to other people’s ears. 

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Have we really invented so much?”. Chronicles of a Liquid Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofliqu0000ecou 

Gibson, James. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press

. 2015. https://library.uniq.edu.iq/storage/books/file/The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Approach/1667383098The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Classic%20Edition%20(James%20J.%20Gibson)%20(z-lib.org)%20(1).pdf

Törnberg, K.P. (Petter). “Social media polarize politics for a different reason than you might think”. University of Amsterdam. 2022.https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-maatschappij-en-gedragswetenschappen/news/2022/10/social-media-polarize-politics-for-a-different-reason-than-you-might-think.html?cb

Collaborators:

Siming Liao, Aubrey Ventura

Critical Response

The Living Library: Mediating Morality in Books

In early October, Ela Chua published a response to Umberto Eco: A Library of the World and intertwined its themes with Tim Ingold’s Making. Though we have since moved past Eco’s work in our course, I continue to reflect on the combination of ideas that Ela illustrated. Most notably, the concepts of “vegetal memory” and physical media become newly relevant when seen through Bollmer and Verbeek’s insights on materializing media and morality.

Ela’s original post analyzes Umberto Eco: A Library of the World as a meditation on the relationship between media, materiality, and knowledge. She draws parallels between Eco’s physical engagement with books and Ingold’s concept of “making,” emphasizing that media are living things, not static objects. Her discussion of Eco’s notion of “vegetal memory” positions books as dynamic participants in collective knowledge rather than mere commodities. I would argue that Umberto Eco: A Library of the World represents one of the most pivotal moments in our course for connecting abstract concepts in media theory with tangible examples from material culture. Ela effectively reframes reading and archiving as material practices that blur the boundaries between mind, media, and memory, and while she beautifully captures the idea of a living and ever-changing archive, my recent engagement with Bollmer (2019) and Verbeek (2006) has inspired me to extend this conversation into the realm of design and mediation. Through their frameworks, I reinterpret Eco’s cherished books – and his broader “library of the world” – as a technological system that performs ethical and cognitive mediation, revealing how books themselves reconfigure and deliver information in ways that shape our collective morality and behaviour.

Ela adeptly presents Eco’s library as a living archive that mediates the relationship between media and memory, providing insights into how books shape thought, culture, and history. However, on a higher level, I argue that Eco’s “library of the world” acts as designed systems of mediation that directly influence a user’s perception of information and subsequent actions. Both Bollmer and Verbeek argue against the common misconception that media and technology are neutral, immaterial tools, and instead posit that technologies are deeply performative: they shape how we act, think, and relate to the world around us. Bollmer’s (2019) point of performative materialism states that in order to know what media are, the concentration should not be on the content that it presents but rather what actions they create in the material world. Verbeek echoes this sentiment through his concept of technological mediation, or the role of technology in human action (how we are present in their world) and human experience (how the world is present to us). For example, cataloguing systems such as the Dewey Decimal system or Eco’s personal organization shape what readers see as “related knowledge.” Bollmer (2019)’s idea that “relations of opposition and conflict” are inseparable from design’s performative agency (pp. 174–176) is relevant when we consider the political implications of archival organization, such as the separation of “national” and “local” history based on the dominant ethnic groups (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998). The mediation in this technological system occurs not only through absorbing the content presented by the books themselves but through the way information is structured and retrieved. 

Eco’s focus on physical media and the surrounding space of library archives displays the unique expectations and material effects that translate from the archival system to human behaviour. Verbeek (2006) draws from Don Ihde’s notion that technologies have “intentions” embedded in their design to argue that media artifacts are able to influence moral human decisions. He introduces the concept of scripts, or implicit instructions that artifacts have immersed in their material design (p. 367). For example, books have the script “flip my pages slowly so they don’t rip”, and we follow this instruction because of what it signifies, not because of its material presence in the relation between humans and the world. This inherent prescription encourages ethical learning through slowness and touch. Bollmer’s concept of neurocognitive materialism (2019, pp. 171–175) highlights how the body, brain, and media form a single interactive system, and speak to the physical relationship Eco holds with his books. Eco demonstrates how media reconfigures human cognition and sensation with his refusal to put on gloves to preserve a book’s material, rather letting it decay, breathe, and live in its environment. In comparison to digital systems, the tangible experience that libraries create for users also directs certain actions and behaviours from its users. For example, a Google search flattens knowledge into relevance rankings and a convenient AI summary, whereas Eco’s physical search forces conscientiousness and slowness, changing the ethical and cognitive nature of how we “find” information. Eco’s books literally embody moral mediation by encouraging reflective engagement rather than passive consumption. Thus, it is clear that the library, as a system, trains perception and shapes patterns of thought just as modern interfaces (such as smartphone swipes) train behavioral habits. Overall, Verbeek and Bollmer stress that as media consumers and creators, we must recognize that these artifacts literally shape the embodied experience of being human.

This added perspective of design mediating morality shifts the conversation of media theory past the immaterial/material binary and a physical vs. digital debate to show that media, regardless of the form it takes, always performs important ethical work by shaping perception and behaviour. Overall, my own reflection has inspired some questions for us as media students and creators: how might digital design learn from Eco’s tactile ethics of reading? Can we design interfaces that nurture moral reflection rather than automate it? Whether through pages or pixels, designers and users alike participate in the ongoing ethical mediation of knowledge. As Bollmer (2019) concludes, “If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters.” 

Citations:

Bollmer, G. (2019). Materialist media theory: An introduction. Bloomsbury Academic.

Brown, R. H., & Davis-Brown, B. (1998). The making of memory: The politics of archives, libraries and museums in the construction of national consciousness. History of the Human Sciences, 11(4), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519801100402

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

Ferrario, D. (Director). (2022). Umberto Eco: A library of the world [Film]. Stefilm, Altara Films.

Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(3), 361–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243905285847

Critical Response

Making… In a Silent Search

2 Comments

Tactility and silence are essential conditions of meaningful learning. The blog post, “In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World”, by Maryam Abusamak, is a film analysis of the documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022), directed by Davide Ferrario. In this blog post, Abusamak summarizes the core themes of the documentary; she demonstrates how the library of the famous philosopher, Umberto Eco, acts as a meaningful tool of knowledge production. She proves that in an information-saturated world, this biographical film demonstrates the importance of learning slowly and selectively. To extend her analysis, I propose that this film also exemplifies the cruciality of knowing through being, a concept explained in Tim Ingold’s book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Through connecting Abusamak’s analysis to Ingold’s framework, I aim to show the importance of learning independently and critically through slow-paced and tactile methods; this message is especially important in a world where mis- and disinformation is instantaneously available through simple clicks.

Both Eco and Ingold illustrate inanimate objects as living beings. Interacting with these beings achieves meaningful knowledge production. I place emphasis on the word “with”, as Ingold repeatedly encourages the reader to not think “of” but “with” objects (8). Abusamak perceives Eco’s library, as presented in the documentary, as a “living organism” that “binds matter, meaning, and mediation”. In each book, “matter and meaning are inseparable”, demonstrating Ingold’s view that knowledge is made “in correspondence” with a material rather than extracted “from” it (94, 8). To Ingold, objects are alive due to their everchanging state; a building is never fully completed, as it will experience reconstructions, mold removal, and repainting over time (48), and a statue changes continuously, as it is chiseled by its artist and eventually “worn down by rain” (22). Abusamak’s interpretation of Eco’s library exemplifies this concept metaphorically and physically. She describes his library as a “living system of technical memory”, as well as “living matter” made of “ink” and “paper” (Abusamak). As a result, the individual who peruses this library acts as a maker of knowledge among a collection of living beings. Therefore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view by acting as a “world of active materials” in which the maker is a “participant” (Ingold 21).

Furthermore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view that tactile mediums enable nonconformist learning. Within her blog post, Abusamak claims the library exemplifies Stiegler’s concept of  “epiphylogenesis”–the recording of human evolution through “tools, marks and traces we create” (qtd. in Abusamak). These physical traces externalize memories which survive “across generations” (Abusamak). While Eco favours tactile media consumption, Ingold favours tactile media-making; he believes handwriting, handdrawing, “weaving, lacemaking and embroidery” portray “the stories of the world” (112). He states that human knowledge production should replicate the “ongoing movement of” handdrawn and handwritten lines (Ingold 140). Furthermore, he does not praise “straight-line people” who run from point “A to B” (Ingold 140), but instead promotes “pack-donkey people” who “wander” and learn through “self-discovery” (140, 141). Rather than pursuing a linear path leading from “idea” to “action”, he embraces learning through instinct and curiosity (Ingold 140). This idea is upheld by Eco’s library, which “resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity” (Abusamak). Altogether, Eco’s library promotes knowing through being; its collection of non-chronological memories embraces the whimsical, unconventional learning promoted by Ingold.

Lastly,  Eco’s library and Ingold’s theory express skepticism towards virtual learning. According to Eco, “clicking a button” brings about a “bibliography of 10,000 titles” that is “worthless” due to its sheer ubiquity; however, if one discovered three library books, they “would read them… and learn something” (qtd. in Abusamak). Ingold agrees with this statement; he believes modern consumers abandon learning as soon as they “[fill] [their] bags” with information (5). Like Eco, he condemns the mindless clicks produced by our fingers. He states that when ubiquitous information “is at our fingertips” it is simultaneously “out of our hands” (122). Additionally, he promotes Heidegger’s views of the “hand” as a symbol of sentience; when it writes with pen, “it tells” (Ingold 122). Therefore, he argues traditional penmen produce emotional “gesture and inscription”, while modern typists do not “feel” their “letters” (Ingold 122, 123).  He shows that in order to generate true making, we must engage the entire human hand, rather than press buttons that enable machinic processes. To Ingold and Eco, technological advancement, sensitive to the touch of our fingertips, has decimated emotionally-engaged learning and impactful media consumption.

In a distracting, information-saturated world, Eco and Ingold emphasize the importance of learning through instinctual, nonconformist, and tactile means. Rather than gathering ubiquitous information through a mindless press of a button, individuals must attentively engage with physical materials to produce meaningful knowledge. As Abusamak states, Eco’s philosophy “challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge”; instead he attributes intellect to thinking slowly and selectively. According to Abusamak, Eco’s library relates to our curriculum through its transformation of media theory into “something we can see and feel”; her physical description of Eco’s library and its ability to evoke curiosity demonstrates the importance of slow, tactile learning. As a result, Eco’s library is an example of a tool that enacts Ingold’s concept of “knowing” occurring “at the heart of being” (6). Instead of instantaneously summoning innumerous sources of digestible information, we can engage directly with a physical environment, such as that of a library, to independently conceive truth.

Works Cited

Abusamak, Maryam. In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World, UBC Blogs, 9 Oct 2025, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/394 .


Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055.

Image Taken by Emily Shin (Page 83 of George Orwell’s 1984)

Post Written by Emily Shin

Other

Silence in the Age of Noise: Eco’s Library of Meaning 

“The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.”
– Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was many things, an Italian medievalist, philosopher, novelist, semiotician, cultural critic, and above all, a lifelong lover of knowledge. In Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo film, we see him as a scholar surrounded by books, someone whose entire being seems shaped by them. From the outside, Eco appears calm, curious, and quietly humorous, and a man who treats his library as if it were a living mind.

As a cultural critic, Eco spent his life examining how meaning is made, distorted, and forgotten in the age of mass media. Long before the rise of social networks and the internet, he warned about the danger of information overload, of a world where knowledge could be reduced to noise. The film captures that concern through the physicality of his library, where every book is resistance against digital amnesia. Unlike the virtual world, Eco’s shelves preserve the weight of memory and resist the illusion that everything should be fast, accessible, and infinite.

A central theme that emerges from the film, and that we try to explicate here, is media and memory.

The Living Library: Memory as Being & the Foundation of Knowledge

Eco describes his library as a living organism. It is more than just a collection of written archives. Rather, the library is a being that holds memory and transforms as collections are added or moved around. The film opens with Eco speaking about memory, referring to the library as a “symbol and reality of universal memory” (2:01). He categorizes memory into three forms: vegetal, organic, and mineral. The library represents vegetal memory, full of physical books that originate from trees, knowledge rooted in nature. Organic memory lives within us; it is the memory we carry in our minds. When humans say “I,” Eco explains, it is our memory speaking. Stories that are written or passed forward, imagination, fiction, all of that is memory taking the shape of culture, entertainment, conversation, etc. Finally, mineral memory is what the digital world represents, vast collections of knowledge stored as data on the silicon of computer chips. Eco emphasizes that memory is imperative to building a future. Having knowledge about what came before us and reflecting on the past, is what gives us enough insight to build a future that is worthwhile. 

“We are beings living in time. Without memory, it’s impossible to build a future.” (11:08).

In Critical Terms for Media Studies, Bernard Stiegler discusses how humans have always relied on external tools to anchor memory or “exteriorize” it through language, writing, and technology. With the digital age we currently live in, and the extensive reach of information through the internet, this only gets amplified to an unfathomable magnitude, where millions of people have the ability to not only consume, but also to produce content abundantly. Stiegler elaborates on how humans have a retentional finitude. “It is because our memories are finite that we require artificial memory aids” (p.65).

These ideas align closely with Eco’s reflections in the film. He talks about how, though it is important to preserve knowledge, one needs to be selective about what they consume in order to make sense of it. An example he shares is that of a character who has the ability to remember all that he sees, and yet he is an “idiot” because all of that input is too much for a mind to conceive. Such is the state of the internet. The vastness of it is overwhelming and is, in fact, counterproductive to gaining knowledge. Eco says,

“The moment we think we have limitless knowledge, we lose it.” (26:40)

Individual organic memory, on the other hand, is selective. It acts as a limiter and rejects what is unnecessary or too complicated to perceive. This is favourable as it separates value from noise.

Knowledge, Noise, and the Loss of Meaning

We noticed that, for Eco, knowledge is not something that can be separated from the medium that holds it. He resists the idea that information should be instantly accessible, clickable, and endlessly reproduced. In the film, he says,

“Information can damage knowledge, like nowadays, with mass media and internet, because it’s too much. Too many things together produce noise, and noise is not a tool of knowledge.”(31:30)

We thought this reflects Bill Brown’s idea of the dematerialization hypothesis, the fear that digital media, by turning everything into data, threatens our “engagement with the material world” where physical objects once held meaning (p. 51). Eco resists this by grounding knowledge in material form, books that can be touched, smelled, and remembered. His library shows that thought itself has a materiality, what Brown calls “the process of thinking as having a materiality of its own” (p. 49). 

It caught our attention that Eco uses the term noise to describe how the overflow of digital information harms knowledge. Bruce Clarke, in his chapter on Information, uses the very same word to describe the way excess information disrupts meaning. “Information theory translates the ratios or improbable order to probable disorder in physical systems into a distinction between signal and noise, or ‘useful’ and ‘waste’ information, in communication systems” (p. 162). He explains that information and knowledge are not the same. Information is “a virtual structure dependent upon distributed coding and decoding regimes” and can exist only when interpreted by a mind (p. 157).

Like Eco, Clarke shows that while the digital world allows infinite copies and speed, it also breeds instability and forgetfulness: “what the virtuality of information loses in place and permanence, it gains in velocity and transformativity” (p. 158). In this sense, Eco’s silence-filled library resists the entropy of digital culture. Where Clarke sees noise as both inevitable and revealing, Eco insists that too much of it actually corrupts knowledge. We think that both of them agree that without slowness, form, and material grounding, meaning dissolves into static. Noise. Meaningless.

Authenticity in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Eco’s phone is always off, and that’s exactly the point.

“It’s always out. People believe they can reach me and they cannot… I don’t want to receive messages and I don’t want to send messages!” (21:59)

He might seem quirky, but this is resistance. He’s resisting a world flooded with messages that “each of them says nothing” (22:37). It’s a world overloaded with information where meaning gets drowned in noise, a point he also makes when warning that “the risk is losing our memory on account of an overload of artificial memory.” Instead of reading and remembering, we click a button and generate a list of tens of thousands of sources we’ll never look at. “A bibliography like that is worthless,” he warns, “you can just throw it away” (26:10).

John Durham Peters, in the Mass Media chapter, critiques this same media logic. He describes mass media as a system of “one-way traffic” where the sender and receiver are separated and messages become generic and impersonal (p. 273). In contrast, Eco really values slowness, intentionality, and presence. He seems to refuse to play along with a digital, information-saturated world obsessed with sending and reacting. In that refusal, we feel he makes a statement that not replying can be its own form of meaning. 

Connecting this to Walter Benjamin, we see a shared concern with how technological ease erodes authenticity. Benjamin warns that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (Section II/p. 221). The aura, for Benjamin, is about presence, time, and uniqueness, which are all qualities destroyed by endless replication. Eco’s fear of artificial memory speaks to this same loss. When we can generate a list of 10,000 sources in a second, the search itself becomes meaningless. Nothing is earned, and so nothing is remembered. Meaningless.

Both thinkers push back against the fantasy of instant access. The idea that more access equals more knowledge is an illusion. They urge us to resist, to slow down, and to remember that real meaning is not something you download or scroll through, it’s something you cultivate.

Reclaiming Presence & Silence in the Age of Noise

In today’s digital world, we’re constantly connected yet barely present. We scroll, click, react, and call it communication. But Eco reminds us that just because something is sent doesn’t mean it’s meaningful. All the things that he warned about, the web being an unnecessarily huge record that “causes memory to blackout,” are even more true in today’s world, where social media is an endless scroll full of options and irrelevant information, accessible at any place, right in the palm of your hands.

Eco’s refusal to be always reachable, his love for slow reading, and his quiet library all push against a world obsessed with speed and saturation. We’re taught that more information is better, but at what cost? Eco shows us the cost is lost memory, lost presence, lost meaning.

Maybe the lesson here isn’t how to keep up but how to pause. How to be intentional. How to let silence speak louder than noise. If we want to hold onto meaning in a world that drowns us in messages, maybe it’s time to stop replying and start actually listening.

Written by Kenisha Sukhwal & Maryam Abusamak

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969.

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–54.

Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 155–170.

Peters, John Durham. “Mass Media.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 263–276.

Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo. Directed by Davide Ferrario, produced by Rosamont and Rai Cinema, 2021.

Screenshot from the film (31:51).

Cover image by Kenisha Sukhwal.

Other

Memory is Soul:

1 Comment

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.

Other

Touch your books: that’s kind of what they’re for

5 Comments

Within (and for) this course, I have read, reflected, said and written so much about materiality of media, that it has become a challenge to not comment on the materiality of every evocative object I see on our blogsite. This, of course, is in large part due to the very first assignment which gave me this new lens to look at things through. Now I get to analyse the importance of materiality in everything I touch and loan the only physical copy of “Making” in the library over and over again (sorry). So, obviously, I cannot go past the question of materiality of books and knowledge in the case of Umberto Eco and his majestic library of the world. 

Library of the world

A large part, if not all, of the documentary either takes place in or is based around Umberto Eco’s impressive library of over 30,000 books: it is mentioned that civil engineers were worried Eco’s collection would be too heavy for the building to hold it (which is wildly impressive if you ask me). 

It is natural that a scholar, professor and thinker would have a large library of his own. Umberto Eco valued physical books deeply and has been gathering them throughout his life – academic writings, comics and manga, encyclopedias, anything that he found interesting, really. But Eco’s library was not just for storing, – this can be done online, too, – but accumulating over time, displaying and, most importantly – interacting with books, which is what brings the importance to physicality of his library. Interacted by adults who get to curate, annotate, leave their bookmarks in, but also by Eco’s grandson. He remembers reading practically ancient books as a child. Because knowledge cannot and must not be simply accumulated by one person without sharing it, and because most grandparents have a soft spot for their grandkids. I think this particular moment stuck with me the most, because we are so used to seeing older books protected from destruction, and it was so fascinating to hear about the other perspective on that. I doubt my grandparents would ever let me touch a medieval book should they’ve had it (they’re both historians, so I would actually expect them to). In the documentary, Eco describes the difference between a bibliomaniac and bibliophile as such: the former would secretly flip through his collection in the evening like Scrooge McDuck bathing in his dollars, the latter would want people to know about the wonder of the book they are holding. 

Given Umberto Eco’s openness about his library and its treasures, given that his family donated it to the public and I doubt they’d go against his will, I believe it is safe to assume Umberto Eco was a bibliophile. 

Physicality

When explaining the inconvenience of e-books for him, Eco says books “must be touched with hands”, re-read, underlined, dog-eared. If you cannot interact with the book meaningfully, it is a different, less fulfilling process, so why settle for a book in your phone, if you can have it in your lap? 

This, of course, brings us to “Making”, in which Ingold argues that meaning and knowledge is co-produced through human-material interaction, not simply transmitted through abstract content. In the same way as a potter both changes and is changed by the clay through the means of a pottery wheel, so does the reader both affect and be affected by the knowledge through the means of a physical book. The reader adds to the knowledge in the book by meaningfully interacting with it: underlining what matters, questioning paragraphs that don’t make sense, dog-earing the most important pages. And the knowledge, obviously, also changes the reader: their perception of the world, their thoughts, their actions, in the best of scenarios. We read with the book, as Ingold would say.  

True or real?

Another connection between Eco’s library and physicality is the question of truthfulness. One of the most beautiful things about Eco’s library is his passion for untrue knowledge: scholars who have been proven wrong, theories that were debunked, conspiracy theories, you name it. In Eco’s library, the discredited is not discarded: it is archived, annotated, and re-read with attention and affection.

The documentary focuses, in part, on Athanasius Kircher, a German polymath: jack of all trades, a master of both all trades, but also somehow not really. He managed to both completely misinterpret Egyptian hieroglyphics and notice the inconsistency in magnetic north. He suggested plague’s reasons lying in microorganisms and went on to describe dragons with the same vigor. But wrong or not, Kircher is forever remembered for his writings and drawings: Eco specifically implies their significance. The schemes, diagrams, illustrations all provide a layer of validity to the information, because lies are more interesting to prove.

Authority of the physical

But more interestingly, I want to discuss the effect of materiality on the perceived truthfulness of the media. In “Always Already New”, Lisa Gitelman explores how the physicality of print media has influenced perceptions of the written word as authoritative and truthful. She claims that physical qualities of books, such as their weight and texture, mediates to the viewer the sense of legitimacy that digital media often lacks. In the nineteenth century, Gitelman explains, print’s authority was derived from its tangibility: its position of a fixed media created the assumption of stability and truth. This “fixity”, as James Secord calls it, glorifies “textual authenticity and legitimates textual evidence”, says Gitelman. 

But once the industrial revolution did its thing and industrial printing rose, so did the mass literacy and so did the critical attention to those texts. I find it very insightful how Gitelman explains it: she says that before the mass publications, reading went hand in hand with appreciation of the text, not its interpretation. Now that more and more people were able to publish anything, “mass literacy met cheap editions” and it changed the public’s perception of physical media’s authority. So here is a quick reminder that truth is not guaranteed by any one medium but negotiated through it.

Eco’s library, of course, mostly comes from the times before industrial printing, the books there often being as wrong about the world as they seem to be correct: the books are heavy, large, leather-bound, old as time and therefore radiate the aura of higher knowledge and ultimate wisdom. This is why, I believe, it is so interesting to study this contrast between the authority-mediating form and the dilly-dally content.

Conclusion

In Eco’s library, in Ingold’s book, and in Gitelman’s reflections on print and digital media, the material form of knowledge is inseparable from its content and meaning. Truth and understanding are not abstract or disembodied, they are shaped through interaction. By underlining your favourite quotes, by weaving baskets, by touching what you read. If knowledge lives through material contact, a book is never only a vessel for ideas – it is a collaborator in their creation. I’m sorry, but the medium is still the message. To read, make, or preserve knowledge is always to engage with its material body. So go touch a book. Maybe ask me to return “Making” to the library so you can loan it yourself. 

Works cited:

Ferrario, Davide. Umberto Eco: The Library of the World. Italy: Rossofuoco, 2022. Documentary Film.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013.

Picture and text by Bara Bogantseva

Other

Making in the Eco Chamber

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

― Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World is a documentary that delves into Italian literary critic and semiotician Umberto Eco’s life and his personal library, which houses over 30,000 volumes of novels and 1,500 rare and ancient books. Director Davide Ferrario discusses with Eco, conducts interviews with his family and friends, and retrieves archival footage of Eco to beautifully encapsulate Eco’s life through his love and passion for books and the exploration of the truth. The 80-minute film presents Eco’s library as a living archive that mediates the relationship between media and memory, providing insights into how media shapes thought, culture, and history. Expanding to the scope of this course, the film explores the importance of the distinction between material and digital media, semiotics, and the body. I will connect these concepts to Tim Ingold’s novel Making, specifically, with Ingold’s claim that media as living matter and his distinction between ‘objects’ versus ‘things’. I argue that Eco’s approach to media and memory through books parallels Ingold’s concept of making as a continuous process between the conscious and material world.

The film’s themes of media and material knowledge emerge most vividly through Eco’s private library, which serves as both a physical living archive and a conceptual framework for understanding his worldview. The library, which is a growing personal collection of Eco’s books, then becomes a symbol of a living system of knowledge, rather than a static collection of objects. The film strengthens this idea by presenting Eco’s notion of vegetal memory, which mediates memory and knowledge through paper and books. Eco claims, in his paper on vegetal memory, that libraries are ‘the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom’ (Eco, 1). For him, books and their mass presence through the space of a library become a physical thing that mediates memory, linking memory to material forms. This idea parallels Ingold’s argument that material form is flowing, not fixed. He claims that the material world and human thought are mediated through correspondences, where the flow of materials and the flow of consciousness are intertwined, where making becomes a process of mediation (Ingold, 21). For Eco, making comes in the form of curating books for his personal archive, where he engages thought and memory with the physicality of books. Ingold proposes that making is an embodied interaction that occurs before and during meaning is made (Ingold, 96). Eco mirrors Ingold’s claims as he physically turns the page of each book, engaging with it at every turn. Beyond completing the reading, he continues to engage with the material by keeping a collection of books. Here, the meaning of books changes before, during, and after the activity of reading the actual contents of the object. With embodied interaction with its material, as Eco refuses to put on gloves to preserve its material, rather letting it decay, breathe, and live in its environment, the books transform from a commodity to a physical vessel of memory and knowledge.

To further explore the library as a metaphor for collective knowledge, Eco’s fascination with semiotics exhibits many parallels with Ingold’s distinction between objects and things and their affordances. Eco connects semiotics, the study of signs as a means of meaning-making, back to vegetal memory, where every book is a sign whose contents reference other signs and histories. Through these signs and the curation of other signs through books, humans can form frameworks to understand the world. Because of this, Eco’s library transforms into a semiotic system that not only houses these vessels of signs and knowledge but also creates a network that connects books through categories and cross-referencing. Furthermore, Ingold’s interpretation of seeing things as things, rather than as objects, is extremely relevant in exploring how Eco engages with books through a semiotic lens.

Ingold quotes philosopher Martin Heidegger’s claim that objects are complete in themselves, where correspondence does not occur because it does not interact with the world and its surroundings (Ingold, 85). On the other hand, Ingold claims that things are with us as opposed to objects being against us. Things can be experienced in a way that corresponds with their surroundings, rather than merely witnessing or existing alongside an object. A thing is a dynamic gathering of material matter that engages with other things, such as people or the environment (Ingold, 85). Ingold concludes his claim by stating that things exist and persist because they leak, where materials interact with each other physically across the different surfaces they encounter. Through these types of leakages and interactions, things can be living and dynamic and possess a sort of bodily agency that can die, decay, or transform over time (Ingold, 95). With this distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things,’ it is clear that Eco’s books are not static or to be read and stored once completed. Rather, his consciousness corresponds with the book’s materiality, and even goes beyond his personal interpretations of his texts when he connects different texts and shares his understanding with the public. As mentioned in the quote at the start of this post, Eco’s passion for books goes beyond viewing them as a mere object or commodity; rather, it affords him knowledge and understanding of the world around him. Through this ongoing dialogue between mind and material, Eco transforms reading into a living practise, one that blurs the boundaries between individual memory and the collective intelligence stored within his library.

Ultimately, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World reveals that knowledge is never static but is continually made and remade through our material and intellectual engagements with media. Through the lens that books are dynamic ‘things’ rather than ‘objects,’ the film presents Eco’s books as a living, constantly growing system of knowledge. A point in the film that struck me the most was the intimate moments of Eco physically interacting with his books. Sensory actions such as touching the covers or each page, smelling the books, or rearranging books in categories became systems and processes of thinking. This reminded me that reading is not just an intellectual activity, but also a tactile and relational practise. Reflecting on our course discussions, I found parallels with the Critical Terms chapter I read for my presentation, “Writing,” where theorist Andre Leroy-Gourhan emphasises graphism in writing. Specifically, how literacy is not only used as a means of communication but as a tool that links mind, body, and material. The film offers a powerful reminder that media are not passive containers of knowledge but active participants in the making of knowledge itself.

Works Cited

​​Eco, Umberto. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Eco, Umberto. “Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books.” Academia.Edu, 21 June 2015, www.academia.edu/13152692/Vegetal_and_Mineral_Memory_The_Future_of_Books_by_Umberto_Eco. 

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Cover image from The Belcourt Theatre

Critical Concept Explication, Critical Response, Other

Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet

2 Comments

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 Materials, The Readymade, and The Counterfeit: Inauthenticity of Objects According to Ingold and Eco

3 Comments

“The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” courtesy of The New Yorker.

Introduction

We tend to think of our objects as authored: whether they are made according to the drawing of a designer, the externalization of an artist’s emotions, or the disciplinary work of a scientist with a particle accelerator. Objects, as we have been studying, are a kind of media– the study of which is full of discussions around the auteur, authorship, and authorial intention versus audience perception. Both Tim Ingold and Umberto Eco question the assumption of authorship in object creation as a part of their scholarship. For Ingold, Chapter 2 of Making, “The materials of life”, sharply criticizes the hylomorphic model (aka, our understanding of objects as static forms born from a predestined image in the mind of a maker). For Eco, a semiotician, the idea of the counterfeit object relies on a complex ethical system for understanding what qualifies as a falsification. His understanding of objects in the essay “Untruths, Lies, Falsifications” (found in On the Shoulders of Giants), is that their authorship is fleeting and highly conditional. 

The Materials

At the beginning and the end of an object’s life cycle are materials. Ingold introduces a model in Making to help readers reframe their understanding of objects as final products, born from a design and static for all time. Instead, objects are mere “stoppage” points along a flow of materials, just as images are stoppage points along a flow of consciousness (20). The image and the object can correspond, Ingold says, but it is not one that determines the other. To illustrate this point, he gives us two salient examples of how objects transform from their presumed final state: one according to human intention, and the other according to natural forces.

“Householders might think of pots and pans as objects […] but for the dealer in scrap metal, they are lumps of material” (19). The process of regeneration and the value of objects and materials is here called into question. The notion of value in the object and its subsequent replications is also interesting to Eco, as I will explain later on. Human intention is seemingly both a force that informs an object’s creation, and also one that determines the object’s fraudulency. 

Secondly, Ingold provides an example of making as a process of growing and changing by describing the natural form-generating process: “The difference between a marble statue and a rock formation such as a stalagmite […] is not that one has been made and the other not. […O]nly this: that at some point in the formative history of this lump of marble, first a quarryman appeared on the scene who, with much force and with the assistance of hammers and wedges, wrested it from the bedrock, after which a sculptor set to work with a chisel in order, as he might put it, to release the form from the stone. But as every chip of the chisel contributes to the emergent form of the statue, so every drop of supersaturated solution from the roof of the cave contributes to the form of the stalagmite. When subsequently, the statue is worn down by rain, the form-generating process continues, but now without further human intervention” (21-22). 

The Readymade

The world of art and art history has taken major issue with this subject of form generation, in no way more obvious than in trying to define the “readymade object”. What happens when an artist takes something already composed from materials and puts it in a new context? Is this act of human intervention a form of making itself? To this question, Ingold might respond by asking an artist to describe their engagement with the materials in the work (in this case, the readymade object or objects, plus any other mediums used). “Even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials”, he says. “Time and again, scholars have written as though to have a design for a thing, you already have the thing itself. Some versions of conceptual art and architecture have taken this reasoning to such an extreme that the thing itself becomes superfluous. It is but a representation – a derivative copy – of the design that preceded it (Frascari 1991: 93). If everything about a form is prefigured in the design, then why bother to make it at all?” (22). If the evolution of the object only exists in the mind of an artist or a viewer, has anything really been made at all?

The idea of originals and copies is exactly where Umberto Eco’s work comes in to expand Ingold’s ideas and consider what our current normative understanding of creation/ authorship versus copying/ counterfeit comes from. His work is also especially relevant to the art world, where collector’s items, originals, and fakes are fetishized and contentious. In particular, the passing of replica paintings for their originals has had unimaginable monetary and emotional costs. 

The Counterfeit

What is a counterfeit? “The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circum-stances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical  circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun” (183-4). Here Eco starts his argument by assuming the innocence of the counterfeiter. What really gets our goat, he argues, is how a third party– which he nicknames the Identifier– evaluates the original versus the copy. “A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have the pertinent features prescribed in an abstract type. […] Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value”(185). 

This may sound like a simple argument that explains how historical or sentimental value attached to the “original” version of a particular object is reflected in its cultural and/or monetary value. However, Eco’s argument then digs in and questions the fidelity of original works with the following paragraph:

“Sometimes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful  restorations are carried  out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient  works  of  art  that  we  consider  originals  have  instead  been  transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a ‘white’ Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored. But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself”(186-7).

Here is where I believe Ingold and Eco to be taking two different approaches towards the same issue. Ingold would say that a Greek sculpture is undergoing a continual process of growth as time and the elements wear away its colourful paint. Meanwhile, Eco would say that the image in our heads of an “original Greek sculpture” actually corresponds to a counterfeited version. The only difference between counterfeit like this and fraudulent counterfeit, he suggests, may be owed to the human intention behind the act of creating a copy or altering an original. 

Conclusion

“What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed– in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone?” Eco asks innocently, breaking his unending flow of evidence and reference (187). His argument suggests to us that the image of the original is actually ascribed such importance culturally and societally, that no matter how much the materials of an object flow– whether they are renovated and mended, or reduced to ruins and rubble– the image remains fixed at its “stoppage point”. 

Ingold details how we work through and make meaning from materials, and yet Eco supports a theory that we work through and make meaning from images. When our conscious experiences as a society join around these common images, perhaps we understand one another better through a shared culture. Both Ingold and Eco can be “correct” in their dialectical understandings of the object and the image, but who will help us to understand Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, or photos animated with Snapchat AI? The questions of making, re-making, and counterfeiting– and what these processes might entail– feel equally if not more important to media studies today than discussing the death of the author. Their relevance to us both as to makers and consumers of media is exceptionally strong.

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. “8. Untruths, Lies, Falsifications”. On the Shoulders of Giants, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2019, pp. 170-195. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674242265-009

Ingold, Tim. “The Materials of Life.” Making, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 17–31, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/download/f3935efc-cf5e-4c85-ab70-2e61f46e8689/book/pdf 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown

Other

The Test of Time: Media and Memory Through Eco and Ingold

3 Comments

Davide Ferrario’s film, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World memorializes many of Eco’s theories, particularly the relationship between media and memory, which works through its connection to history. Eco himself is staunchly committed to physical media, blatantly exhibited through his sprawling library which is featured in the film’s opening credits. These themes of media and memory pervade throughout the film and are evident through the glimpses Eco gives the viewer of his own personal philosophy and conduct. His emphasis on physical media and the unique qualities he attributes to it align with the philosophies that Tim Ingold describes in his book Making. Ingold’s propositions recommending a re-evaluation of how we approach the concepts of learning and making are complementary to Eco’s valuation of physical media. Both theorists approach media in the same way, just from two directions: Eco reflects on a ‘finished’ product, while Ingold proposes restructuring our understanding of media from its inception. 

Physical Media and Memory

Eco espouses the benefits of physical media’s permanence. There are books that are hundreds of years old which can still be read and observed, yet “today’s computers are unable to read what we recorded two decades ago”(Ferrario 21:00-21:20). This longevity sustains physical media’s connection to history–and subsequently memory–in a way that is impossible for digital media.

The immediacy of the digital, while convenient, is not conducive to creating longlasting media that is tied to memory. By lacking memory, digital media offers little learning opportunity in the way that Ingold defines it: the process of accruing knowledge by being taught by the world rather than simply intaking information about it (2). Though the easy discussion forums presented by online media appear to help the flow and interexchange of knowledge, they primarily orchestrate an excessive influx of information that is designed to be consumed quickly and easily, not to facilitate effective and educational discussion. These discussion forums then become performative opportunities for interaction that are dictated by algorithms designed to cater information based on its audience.

Physical media, like Eco’s books, is a published thing. The source information cannot be changed on the same whim as that online, yet it’s this stagnation that allows for further reflection and change of perception over time. This temporal aspect of physical media is what truly makes it a conduct of memory. By remaining the same, the information is the finished object within the dynamic thing of the book (Ingold 85). The book can be altered physically, and through correspondence, because its information is not adapting to the audience.

Physical Media vs. Digital Media

During an interview featured in the film, Umberto Eco is discussing his own digital media habits and how he recently downloaded a copy of Proust’s Recherche onto his iPad. He then expresses frustration that he “could not underline any passage, [he] could not make dog-ears, [he] didn’t smear the pages with [his] dirty thumb”(Ferrario12:18-12:37). Evidently, Eco wants to alter his books as he reads them. He wants to impart his own thoughts onto the already published media, which is a far more dynamic process than simply absorbing the information that the book’s words offer. In this desire, Eco aligns himself with both Ingold’s philosophies of learning, and his views on the treatment of art. Ingold deems the role of students–or in this case readers–is not to mindlessly consume the information offered by an established source, but to “collaborate in the shared pursuit of understanding”(13). Similarly, he encourages us to view art as things that give “direct correspondence [to] the creative processes that give rise to them” rather than simply as “works to be analyzed”(Ingold 7).

Books: An Object or a Thing?

A pillar of Making is Ingold’s discernment between objects and things. An object “is complete in itself” and we cannot “join with it in the process of its formation”(85). Conversely, things are “with us” and allow us to correspond with their materials (Ingold 85). This distinction mirrors that of Eco’s explanation of bibliophiles versus bibliomaniacs. A bibliomaniac reserves his books to himself “because he would fear thieves from all over the world would flock to steal it”, while a bibliophile would “share his wonder with everybody and they’d be proud they knew it was his”(Ferrario 16:52-17:00). 

By this definition, bibliomaniacs view books as prized assets of information, to be hoarded and kept away, effectively rendering them stagnant objects of observation and considering them complete, despite this state of futility. If no one is around to read the books, there is no further knowledge to be gained than that which is printed on their pages. Meanwhile, bibliophiles share the information in their collections, inviting discussion and utilizing books as vessels to obtain further knowledge. Eco’s definition of bibliophile is one that exists harmoniously within Ingold’s definition of learning.

Eco deems books as “irreplaceable”(Ferrario 12:45). Books, and any other physical media, are inherently unique. Walter Benjamin defines this uniqueness using the concept of aura, which is congruent to the memory instilled into a physical medium and is not present in its replications as it is “embedded in the fabric of tradition”(6). The physical process of making a book, and its distribution to its eventual owners, is entirely distinct to another printing of that same book. The initial individuality and aura of physical media again cooperates with Ingold’s definition of making. 

Per Ingold, the process of making does not end with its finished ‘product’, as other factors will continue to act upon it over time (22). In this way, making is “a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming”(Ingold 31). These ideas readily translate to Eco’s beloved physical media. No two books are affected by the world around them in the same way, but a pdf of a text will remain generally unchanged no matter whose device it is on. Furthermore, Ingold defines making as a “process of growth” wherein artists and other forces–in this case, the books’ audiences–work in tandem with the materials they are manipulating/experiencing (21). This approach to making and artistry is synonymous to the way Eco creates a reciprocal relationship between his books and his thoughts.

Mass Media 

The concept of mass media provides an interesting nuance to these theories. It, like any other form of media, must be made. Ingold further defines making as a process of correspondence, where transducers allow interaction between the kinaesthesia and material flow until they become indistinguishable, parallelling John Durham Peters’ definition of media as “symbolic connectors” between messages, means, and agents (Ingold 102, Peters 266). By these definitions the means/transducer creates a bridge from the kinaesthesia/message to the material flow/agents, ultimately creating the media that is observed or discussed. However, a defining characteristic of mass media is the distance and distinction between the senders and receivers, rather than each party taking on an interchangeable role (Peters, 267).

This differentiation of author and audience intrinsically opposes Ingold’s aforementioned definition of learning. The purpose behind mass media is to communicate to the masses (Peters, 268). With this purpose, the process of making is centred around the dissemination of the final product and any discussion that this media spurs is generally between two receivers, not the sender. In this way, mass media features something consumable, not collaborative. 

Mass media as consumption is far more relevant when considering digital mass media versus physical mass media. With the sheer amount of content created and its potential for profit, digital media often becomes a transaction. It attempts to balance its message with enough ease of digestibility, often diluting or changing its message in the name of profit. Through this, digital media becomes a stagnant object because of its dynamic form. The message gradually changes for its audience so it is always meant to be consumed at face value, not discussed at length. In our modern digital media landscape, everything is meant to attract our attention instantly. This quickens the pace at which we consume digital media and the extent to which it is mechanically reproduced effectively removes any aura or memory that was once attached to it, reinforcing Benjamin’s relative disdain for mechanical reproduction (4). Finally, the ease of mechanical reproduction works against the integration of memory into digital media. Umberto Eco says it best: “when everything is recorded, we don’t feel the need to remember it”(Ferrario 22:49-22:53).

Conclusion

Umberto Eco loved his books and, considering Ingold’s theories on making and learning, the opposing affordances between physical and digital media, and Benjamin’s resolution in the plight that is mechanical reproduction, it’s easy to see why. 

Citations

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction”, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969.

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013.

Peters, John Durham. “Mass Media”,  Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 266-279.

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Directed by Davide Ferrario. Performance by Umberto Eco, Zoe Tavarelli, and Giuseppe Cederna. 2022.

Photo by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley