Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition

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ANALISI DELLE CULTURE

CULTURE DELLANALISI

euro

ISSN 1720-5298

In che modo i diversi concetti e le diverse pratiche dellanalisi

possono essere adattati a un oggetto cos complesso e sfaccettato

come le culture? Lidea di analisi che deriva da una ricca

tradizione filosofica nella quale la civilt della Grecia antica ha

giocato un ruolo centrale spesso basata sullassunzione che se un

certo oggetto viene rappresentato come equivalente a una serie di

componenti e a una serie di relazioni fra di esse osservando e

descrivendo sia le une che le altre attraverso un certo metodo si

produce una conoscenza di qualit superiore a quella che

deriverebbe dallosservazione e dalla descrizione delloggetto nella

sua interezza Ma pu una cultura essere scomposta in una rete di

relazioni fra parti? Lidea di cultura non implica al contrario un

carattere a priori di unit? In altre parole le culture possono essere

analizzate oppure lunico punto di vista che lo studio delle culture

pu adottare allopposto un punto di vista sintetico?

Inoltre in che modo i vari concetti e le varie culture dellanalisi

sono stati influenzati da specifici contesti storici e socioculturali?

Altre civilizzazioni distanti nel tempo eo nello spazio da quella

greca hanno forse sviluppato altre concezioni del significato di

analisi o persino elaborato strategie epistemologiche

alternative? Il pensiero contemporaneo cosa pu imparare dal

paragone fra differenti culture dellanalisi o tra metodologie

analitiche nonanalitiche antianalitiche e sintetiche?


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Lexia

RIVISTA DI SEMIOTICA

nuova serie

/


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LexiaRIVISTA DI SEMIOTICA nuova serie

Direzione /DirectionUgo Volli

Comitato di consulenzascientifica /Scientific committee

Kristian BankovPierreMarie BeaudeDenis BertrandOmar CalabreseDonatella Di CesareRaul DorraRuggero EugeniGuido FerraroBernard JacksonEric LandowskiGiovanni ManettiDiego MarconiGianfranco Marrone

Jos Augusto MouroJos Maria Paz GagoIsabella PezziniMarina SbisFrederik StjernfeltPeeter ToropEero TarastiPatrizia Violi

Redazione/ Editor

Massimo Leone

Editori associati di questo numero /Associated editors of this issue

Kristian Bankov, Carla Bazzanella, Pierre-Marie Beaude,Elena Codeluppi, Cristina De Maria, Guido Ferraro,Claudio Guerri, Stefano Jacoviello, Tarcisio Lancioni,Roberto Mastroianni, Andrea Pascali, Maria Pia Pozzato,

Antonio Santangelo, Marina Sbis, Franciscu Sedda,Lucio Spaziante, Andrea Tramontana, Federica Turco,

Andrea Valle, Ugo Volli, Zdzik Wasik

Sede legale/ Registered Office

CIRCE, Centro Interdipartimentale diRicerche sulla Comunicazionecon sede amministrativa pressolUniversit di TorinoDipartimento di Filosofiavia SantOttavio 20, 10124 TorinoInfo: [email protected] presso il Tribunale di

Torino n. 4 del 26/02/2009

Amministrazione e abbonamenti/Administration

Aracne editrice S.r.l.via Raffaele Garofalo, 133/AB00173 [email protected] Name: aracneeditrice

www.aracneeditrice.it

La rivista pu essere acquistata nella sezioneacquisti del sito www.aracneeditrice.it

vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, conqualsiasi mezzo effettuata compresa la fotocopia,anche a uso interno o didattico, non autorizzata

I edizione: settembre 2010ISBN 978-88-548-3459-0

ISSN 1720-5298

Stampato per conto della casa editrice Aracnenel mese di settembre 2010 presso la tipografia Braille Gamma S.r.l. di Santa Rufina diCittaducale (Ri)

Lexia adotta un sistema di doppio referaggioanonimoLexia is a double-blind peerreviewed journal


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ANALYSIS OF CULTURES

CULTURES OF ANALYSIS

(with the contribution of the Southeast European Center

for Semiotic Studies New Bulgarian University and of

the Human Resources Development Centre Bulgaria)

edited by Massimo Leone


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7

Sommario/Table of Contents

PREFAZIONEMASSIMO LEONE ........................................................................... 11

PARTE II confini semiotici della cultura: tensioni ..................................... 25PARTI

The Semiotic Boundaries of Culture: Tensions ......................................... 25

Al di l delle culture, le strategie della memoriaUGO VOLLI ................................................................................... 27

Machines of Culture Culture of Machines?WINFRIEDNTH ........................................................................... 41

Il punto di vista semioculturaleANNA MARIA LORUSSO ................................................................ 59

Il controllo e la mediazione Cultura e immanenza nellOrga-non semioticoEDOARDO LUCATTI........................................................................ 81

PARTE IILa costruzione semiolinguistica della cultura ............................ 101PARTIIThe SemioLinguistic Construction of Culture ......................................... 101

Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of EruditionKRISTIAN BANKOV ........................................................................ 103


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Sommario / Table of Contents8

Exploring Intercultural Relations from the IntersubjectivePerspectives Offered through Creative Art in MultimodalFormats (SIIM Research Program)

ASUNCIN LPEZVARELA ........................................................... 125

Shifters in Reporting and Recollecting Analyzing Aspects ofCultureANITA KASABOVA ......................................................................... 147

PARTE IIITentativi metaculturali: letteratura, arti, religioni, costume .......... 179PART III

Metacultural Attempts: Literature, Arts, Religion, Custom ......................... 179

Laristotelismo radicale di Guido Cavalcanti come agente diconflitto ideologico nel Duecento europeo (omaggio a MariaCorti)ANDREA PASCALI .......................................................................... 181

Traduzioni e interpretazioni di un testo di mistica medievaleALESSANDRA LUCIANO .................................................................. 205

Estetica dellerrore ed autenticit nella musica elettronica Riflessioni, e il caso dei finlandesi Nu ScienceDARIO MARTINELLI ....................................................................... 217

Danze simboliche dal folclore allavaguardia: Le Sacre duPrintemps e ilPetroushka da Stravinsky a Tero SaarinenVESA MATTEO PILUDU .................................................................. 255

Alla ricerca di una metasemiotica delle culture: analisi di segnie metasegni nella cultura e nello stile interpretativo fondamen-talistiJENNY PONZO ................................................................................ 275


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Sommario / Table of Contents

Lexia, 56/2010

9

Analyzing Early Christianity: Structures and Functions of

Interpretation in the Canonical Gospels

LORENZO L.D.INCARDONA .......................................................... 293

Cultureobjet et Culturesujet De lanalyse de la culture la

culture de lanalyse

HAMID REZA SHAIRI ..................................................................... 307

Sotto il velo dei media. Semiotica dellhijab tra Oriente e

Occidente

SIMONA STANO ............................................................................. 327

Pragmatics of Obituary Posters in BulgariaBORISLAV GUEORGUIEV ................................................................ 349

PARTE IV

Semiotica e politiche della cultura................................................ 367PARTIV

Semiotics and Politics of Culture........................................................... 367

What is Culturalism? The Anatomy of a Contemporary

Disease in Academia and Politics

FREDERIKSTJERNFELT .................................................................. 369

Notes pour une smiotique de la culture marocaine

MOHAMED BERNOUSSI ................................................................. 401

On my Accent Signs of Belonging in Multicultural Societies

MASSIMO LEONE ........................................................................... 415

RECENSIONI /REVIEWS .......................................................... 451


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Sommario / Table of Contents10

Paul Cobley (a cura di), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics. 453

Luigi Berzano e Carlo Genova, I lifestyles nella partecipazione

religiosa ........................................................................................ 463

Note biografiche degli autori ....................................................... 469

Call for Papers:

LImmaginario............................................................................... 477

Call for papers:The Imaginaire .............................................................................. 481


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103

Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition

KRISTIAN BANKOV

Italian title: Culture della navigazione versus culture dellerudizione.

Abstract: The idea of writing this paper comes after years of observation of the cog-nitive attitudes of our students, in particular their approach to knowledge and informa-

tion and their tactics in demonstrating their acquisition of it during various types ofexams. The backbone of the study is Ecos model of culture as encyclopedia. Even

before my interest in this concrete problem, I was struck by how Ecos notion of En-cyclopedia, conceived in the early 1970s, predicted the structure of the informationon the Internet. My main hypothesis concerns the formation of the individual portions

of encyclopedic competence, where the advent of the internet has apparently wroughtradical transformations, evident in the students. I also use another perspective on the

same phenomenon, derived from critical sociology, about the transformation of per-sonal identity in the younger generations. Another theoretical input comes from a

short study on the way in which search engines have evolved and on the reasons forwhich Google now dominates this fundamental component of the internet the

global encyclopedia. As a conclusion I would say that the internet and its accessthrough the intermediation of those quasiminds which are the search engines, isamong the most important factors for the expansion of the postmodern fragmented

identity, i.e. the culture of navigation.

Keywords: semiotics; internet; encyclopaedia; Google; identity.

The idea of writing this paper comes after years of observation of

the cognitive attitudes of our students, in particular their approach to

knowledge and information and their tactics in demonstrating their

acquisition of it during various types of exams. The advent of mass

use of the internet among students in Bulgaria (about 20002002) be-

gan to change their performance in a complex way, which I shall de-

scribe later. During all that time, as a semiotician, consciously or not, I

was trying to formulate an explanation or at least a model of descrip-

tion. Now I think I have reached a sufficient level of awareness of the

New Bulgarian University.


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PARTE IILA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA104

phenomenon in order to put it in a theoretical frame, especially afterhaving done some fieldwork with that purpose.

Eight or seven years ago, after some changes of the standards for

examinations at my university (New Bulgarian University Sofia,

NBU) I started to assign to hundreds of students a year the obligatory

task of writing an essay on various current topics. Very soon I realized

that students were very reluctant to write any text whatsoever them-

selves and most of the times I would receive a bricolage of texts from

the net, which topics more or less coincided with the assignment. On

one hand this was an exciting experience because I found out a lot of

interesting publications in my field of study, but on the other, this

transformed my work from a qualitative evaluation of the essays into amechanical plagiarism control. Already at that time the emerging

search engine Google was the best tool for my new job. Last but not

least, in November 2007 I was a visiting professor at Helsinki Univer-

sity where I taught an intensive course on Semiotics of Consumption.

There were mostly Erasmus exchange students from Italy, France,

Spain, and other countries, as well as Finns. The examination con-

sisted in a written essay and again more than half of the students sent

me papers with texts from the internet.

1. The field work

Scientific interest for that phenomenon had not yet occurred. Ac-

tually, with every new edition of the course I used increasingly con-

vincing methods of persuasion to change this students practice. And I

found out that I was opposing something far deeper than a superficial

laziness and lack of motivation. Many students started to write their

essays themselves (with modest results), but others became increas-

ingly sophisticated in inventing methods for the use of internet re-

sources, in some cases even translating articles from various lan-

guages or changing the word order of entire texts in Bulgarian. Con-sidering the difficulty of the original task, the latter elaborations were

much more time and effort consuming than that. Yet this was what I

was thinking, with my oldfashioned academic training. It was obvi-

ous that those students were not stupid. I found myself in a state of


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Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)

Lexia, 56/2010

105

Peircean doubt about this issue and the fist preliminary hypotheses oc-curred to me. Then I started to approach the phenomenon in a reflex-

ive way. My field work began two years ago when I first included

The contemporary education between the encyclopedia and the

search engine in the suggested 6 essay topics. This was a big success

because more than half of the essays were on that topic and, in addi-

tion, the plagiarized ones were below average. At the end of the spring

semester 2008/2009, I also conducted 5 long interviews with students

about their habits of using the internet. In August 2009, during my in-

tensive course on Technology of Imagination at the Fulbright sum-

mer school in Tryavna, Bulgaria, I organized a discussion with a fully

international audience of 12 students on the same topic.

2. The theoretical framework

The backbone of this study isEcos model of culture as Encyclope-

dia. Even before my interest in this concrete problem, I was struck by

how Ecos notion of Encyclopedia, conceived in the early 1970s,

predicted the structure of the information on the Internet. My main hy-

pothesis concerns the formation of the individual portions of encyclo-pedic competence, where the advent of the internet has apparentlywrought radical transformations, evident in the students. I shall alsouse another perspective on the same phenomenon, derived from criti-

cal sociology. There are a number of authors who, independently from

each other, made converging diagnoses of the transformation of per-

sonal identity in the younger generations. Frederic Jameson uses no-

tions such as the schizophrenic subject, the breakdown of tempo-

rality or unable to form a coherent ego (1991). Zygmunt Bauman

uses the notion of the liquid subject and wearing identities as

cloths (1998, 2000); Jeremy Rifkin the routine formation of multiple

identities (2000); DanyRobert Dufour the desymbolized subject

(2003). The third theoretical input comes from a short study of theway in which search engines have evolved and why Google now

dominates this fundamental component of the internet the global en-

cyclopedia. This will be a further argument in favor of the soundness

of Ecos insights.


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3. Umberto Ecos model of culture as Encyclopedia

[The encyclopaedia] is the recorded sum of all interpretations, objectivelyconceivable as the library of libraries, where library is also the archive of all

non verbal information, registered in some way, from paintings to cinema.[] The encyclopaedia, as the totality of interpretations, also accommodatescontradictory interpretations; textual activity based on the encyclopaedia, andoperating on the contradictions of the latter, continuously introduces a newresegmentation of the continuum; this happens also as the effect of progres-sive experiences and, in time, transforms the encyclopaedia; so [the encyclo-paedias] global representation is impossible, because it would already befalse at the moment in which it is terminated; also, the encyclopaedia, as an

objective system of interpretations, is possessed in different ways by different

users.(my translation, Eco 1984, pp. 10910)

Eco obtains this essential description of the model after passing

through various phases. The first appearance of the notion is in Theory

of Semiotics (1976), where it is opposed to a series of important closed

semantic models, especially to the very influential one by Katz and

Fodor. This work on the encyclopedia model develops into a battle

horse against ontological structuralism and similar approaches, begun

already inLa struttura assente (1968). Although in Theory of Semiot-

ics this model is concretely associated with the name of Quillian

(modello Q, cfr Eco 1976, 2.12.2., but already discussed in 1971), it isEcos means for introducing a major ally in his doctrine Charles S.

Peirce. The Encyclopedia is a regulative hypothesis about the global

semantic structure which is dynamically derivative from living proc-

esses in every cultural community an infinite semiosis, regulated

by pragmatically and temporarily established semantic conventions.

Thus encyclopedia is coextensive with culture, opening the universe

of meaning to an infinite variety of contents, far beyond linguistic cen-

trism.

In A Theory of Semiotics Eco still pays tribute to the notion ofcode, which he then abandons, and this somehow prevents him from

developing the full extent of his hypothesis. I am mostly interested in

the development of the description of the encyclopedias internal

structure, since this is the link with the analysis of the internet and the

search engines. InA Theory of Semiotics Eco explains the functioning


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107

of the cultural units within the encyclopedia with the metaphor of anenormous number of marbles contained in a box1 (1976, p. 124). The

social life of the cultural community provokes a permanent motion of

those marbles, i.e., associations between cultural units. What guaran-

tees rules in the movement of the marbles/cultural units, thus prevent-

ing entropy and enabling communication is a certain magnetization or

emission of wavelengths. The wavelengths determine the conven-

tional affinities and discard all other possible combinations. This is

how Eco represents the process of codification, insisting that the mag-

netization is not inherent in the marbles as a property, but transitory

and historical (ibidem, p. 126). There cannot be one code or the

code, but only a complex network of subcodes or a hypercode(ibid., p. 125) which is something quite similar to a hypertext.

The next major step in the development of the model of Encyclo-

pedia is made inLector in Fabula (1979). Here Eco uses the model to

deconstruct the rigid structuralist approach to text analysis. In re-

turn, he develops a theory of textual pragmatics which formalizes the

complex and open process of textual cooperation between the author

and the reader in the act of interpretation. In both the Italian and the

English editions of the book, though they differ, Eco employs a heavy

exploration of Peircean semiotic heritage, as a dwarf on the shoulders

of a giant, to build his theory, (1979, p. 49). As a result he obtains a

very rich definition of the notion of encyclopedic competence

which, in my view, is the key notion of the whole theory. Encyclope-

dic competence is the ground for the interplay between author and

reader. It is the condition of possibility for interpretation, since the

text is a lazy machine and needs a lot of contribution on the side of the

reader to reveal its meaning. It is also a narrative resource for the au-

thor, on the management of which depends the successful involvement

of the reader. The author inscribes a readermodel inside the text, a

virtual entity made of presupposed encyclopedic competence, the

similarity of which with the empirical reader determines the degree of

success of the communicative act.

1 Thanks to Shareen Abramson we have a graphic animation of this metaphor of the mo-

tion of the cultural units. (http://coinquiry.org/vol1num4/theoryoflang.html).


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Ecos textual pragmatics is based on permanent hypothetical condi-tions, a kind of constant bet between the parts in the communication.

This is due to the fact that every single person possesses a different

portion of encyclopedic competence (ibid., p. 53). There are more andless codified (or conventionalized) contents of the encyclopedia which

corresponds to a bigger or smaller probability that they are of some-

ones personal encyclopedic competence. The big step for our inquiry

inLector in Fabula is the explanation of the principle which changesthe encyclopedia according to the living processes in a given cultural

community. Ecos first attempt was the marbles metaphor inA Theory

of Semiotics, and it was implicit in his statement that usually in our

culture we are doing this or that But here we finally find the ex-pression we need: I insist on usually: an encyclopedic competence

is based on socially accepted cultural data because of their statistical

constancy. (ibid., p. 18). It might not seem so important, but actu-

ally the emphasis on the importance for the statistical constancy forthe establishment of the cultural conventions brings us to the core of

Google architecture. But I shall come to this in a while.

In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (published 1984, butwritten between 1976 and 1980, p. IX) Eco gives the clearest defini-

tions of the model of Encyclopedia. Actually, the article is an entry for

the Einaudi encyclopedia. Here he uses the model to deconstruct the

whole tradition in the Western thought of Treelike representations of

the knowledge of the world, the icon of which is Porphyrys tree.

What is necessary to emphasize for our inquiry is that there Eco

makes a description of encyclopedia which is closest to what the

Internet is today. The genuineness of Ecos intuition is quite eloquent

in the first example he gives, commenting the structure of encyclope-

dia: A net is an unlimited territory. A net is not a Tree. The territory

of the United States does not oblige anybody to reach Dallas from

New York by passing through St. Louis, Missouri; one can also pass

through New Orleans. (Eco 1985, p. 81) Very similar ideas inspired

the American military engineers in the sixties, who were architects ofthe future Internet. They wanted to build a communication system

among computers on the territory of the whole country, which was

weblike and decentralized, in order to prevent a communicative

blackout in case of a nuclear war with Soviet Russia.


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109

Following this line of thought, Eco reaches the model of the rhi-zome by Deleuze and Guattari. These two French philosophers are the

real visionary thinkers, but their model is completely abstract. Ecos

great merit is to transfer those visionary insights into the concrete do-

main of the encyclopedic competences, thus obtaining a description of

culture and its structure which is very similar to what the internet

turned out to be 30 years later. Given the importance of this point, Eco

resorts to an extended quotation, which I reproduce:

The characteristics of a rhizomatic structure are the following:

(a) Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other

point. (b) There are no points or positions in a rhizome; there are only lines(this feature is doubtful: intersecting lines make points). (c) A rhizome maybe broken off at any point and reconnected following one of its own lines. (d)The rhizome is antigenealogical. (e) The rhizome has its own outside with

which it makes another rhizome; therefore, a rhizomatic whole has neitheroutside, nor inside. (f) A rhizome is not a calque but an open chart which can

be connected with something else in all of its dimensions; it is dismountable,reversible, and susceptible to continuous modifications. (g) A network oftrees which open in every direction can create a rhizome (which seems to usequivalent to saying that a network of partial trees can be cut out artificiallyin every rhizome). (h) No one can provide a global description of the wholerhizome; not only because the rhizome is multidimensionally complicated,

but also because its structure changes through the time; moreover, in a struc-

ture in which every node can be connected with every other node, there isalso the possibility of contradictory inferences [] (i) A structure that cannotbe described globally can only be described as a potential sum of local de-scriptions. (j) In a structure without outside the describers can look at it onlyfrom the inside.

(Eco 1985, pp. 812)

After 1984, Ecos contributions to the development of the model of

encyclopedia are minor, though important. In The Limits of Interpreta-tion (1994) Eco uses the model for deconstructing another classical

rigid postulate in semiotics: Morris division of semiotics into syntac-tics, semantics, and pragmatics. The Encyclopedia is a model of lib-

eral semantics and pragmatics, which includes all the elements in an

interconnected way, elements which are artificially divided by Morris

(cfr Ch. 13).


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InKant and the Platypus (2000), Eco extends the principles of themodel of encyclopedia to the field of cognitive science. This time the

rigid system to deconstruct is Kants transcendental schematism and

the major focus is on the primary iconism and the processes which

precede and enact the chain of semiosis. Nevertheless, there are a lot

of new points in this book which enrich the model of encyclopedia.

First of all there is an extended and illustrated presentation of

Quines argument in Two dogmas of empiricism (1951), the most

important philosophical source of the model of Encyclopedia, pre-

sent without exception in all Ecos theoretical works from A Theory

of Semiotics on (cfr Eco 2000, 4.6.4). This is about how the social

life of cultural units gradually transforms their meaning, even that ofthose which are deeply rooted in our understanding and form its

logical ground. For this reason, Eco introduces the notions of nego-

tiation and contract, maybe the most significant ones in the entire

work. Thus he perfects the model of encyclopedia on a collective

level, as a regulative principle. On an individual level, that of the en-

cyclopedic competence, Eco gives a new shape to an old idea, pre-

sent also in his other works. It concerns the local dictionaries or the

utility of the dictionary as a tool (1984, 5.5., 1985, 2.3.6.). The point

is that independently from the fact that the dictionary cannot repre-

sent an acceptable general semantic model, it is a way in which local

portions of encyclopedia are organized within our encyclopedic

competence. Actually those portions of the individual competence

are very important because they provide the general coherence of our

world views (Eco 2000, p. 251). In most examples of local dictionar-

ies, Eco uses existing categorizations of the natural world and the

fundamental properties of human beings. Cultures can also establish

dictionarylike structured areas in their content without necessarily

relying on scientific dichotomies. Eco calls this wild categoriza-

tion (ibid., p. 232), and it is a result of accumulated affirmed collec-

tive experiences. In both cases, though, we are dealing with portions

of culture with a higher internal coherence than the rest of the rhi-zomatic multiplicity. Thus on the level of individual encyclopedic

competence, Eco reconciles the two opposed ways of existence of

knowledge in a dialectical relation:


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111

And this is why the categorial moment and the observational moment do notoppose each other as irreconcilable ways of understanding, nor are they jux-taposed through syncretism: they are two complementary ways of consider-

ing our competence, precisely because, at least at the auroral moment ofunderstanding [], they imply each other reciprocally.[] The unstable equilibrium of this coexistence is not (theoretically) syn-cretistic, because it is on the basis of this happily unstable equilibrium thatour understanding precedes. (p. 252)

4. The search2

The idea to include an overview of internet search engines is moti-vated by a striking analogy between their evolution and Ecos hy-

pothesis about the passage from dictionary to encyclopedia. If the first

phase of the invasion, the internet was dominated by Yahoo!, a very

Porphyrianlike web portal, whereas the second phase is dominated

by Google, the rhizomatic core of todays Internet. But let us examine

some more details.

Although conceived in the late sixties, the internet became a mass

phenomenon only in the nineties. The advent of search engines is par-

allel to the growth of the web, from its very beginning. They appeared

even before the first internet browser Mosaic (1993). Archi, Gopher

and Wanderer are the first search engines, followed by Lycos, Exciteand finally Yahoo! (see Battelle 2005: 3948). There was already a

competition of ingenuity in inventing successful algorithms for the

search: the selection of necessary web pages, requested by the user.

The usual approach was based on indexing all available web pages,

using the words in their title. Then Jerry Yang and David Filo, the

founders of Yahoo!, gradually guessed the winning approach, appro-

priate for the public attitude towards the emerging informational web.

They adopted a structured, hierarchical approach for their portal. As

Jerry Yang of Yahoo tells me, back when he started the service as a

directory, no one knew what was out there, and a directory listing cool

new sites was a revelation. (ibid., p. 31). Similarly to the dawn of

2 The title of the chapter comes from the most quoted book here, The Search. How Googleand Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Battelle 2005).


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Western civilization, the times of Aristotle and company, the dawn ofthe internet was driven by a great deal of curiosity, an emerging world

interesting in itself and not yet saturated by business and pragmatic in-

terests, at least from the point of view of the general public. So, simi-

larly to Aristotle, the Yahoo! founders offered a directorylike de-

scription of this world. Their categories and subcategories looked like

this:

Arts: Humanities, Photography, Architecture, ;

Business and Economy: Directory, Investments, Classifieds, ;

Computers and Internet: Internet, WWW, Software, Multimedia,

;Education: Universities, K12, Courses, ;

Entertainment: TV, Movies, Music, Magazines, ;

Government: Politics, Agencies, Law, Military, ;

Health: Medicine, Drugs, Diseases, Fitness, ;

News: World, Daily, Current Events, ;

Recreation and Sports: Sports, Games, Travel, Autos, Outdoors,

;

Reference: Libraries, Dictionaries, Phone Numbers, ;

Regional: Countries, Regions, U.S. States, ;

Science: CS, Biology, Astronomy, Engineering,

As they say, ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phy-

logenesis. With the exponential growth of the Internet, the hierarchical

model of navigation had a crisis. Jerry Young summarizes this shift:

our need to comprehend what was out there receded as we began to

know our way around now we assume that everything is connected

(ibid., p. 32).

Google arrived on the search engine scene towards the end of the

nineties and its algorithm was completely innovative. It is based on

the patented PageRank technology.3 The guiding principle of this ap-

proach is relevance. Now that we know that everything is on the3 After its glorious decade the PageRank technology was substituted at the end of 2009 by

a new algorithm, more resistant to abuses by numerous companies have carried out to artifi-cially increase the ranking of their customers. Thanks to Dimiter Radkovsky for this sugges-

tion.


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113

internet, we do not need a directory or treelike guidance, because thismethod cannot encompass the huge variety of information. We expect

a search engine to provide relevant answers to our queries, answers as

close as possible to our search intention.

It is interesting that the prototype of the two Googlefounders

Larry Page and Sergey Brin for their relevancebased approach is bib-

liometrics (ibid., p. 70), the system mainly used for measuring the

relevance of scientific publications, based on references. If a scientific

paper is quoted by many scholars, and if those scholars are highly

ranked themselves, then the paper is relevant. The system is quite reli-

able, given that you know all references made to your paper. Now,

imagine the same task, applied to websites rather than to scientific pa-pers. The search engine analyses the content of the pages and espe-

cially the hyperlinks. By going through the whole internet you finally

get the whole database of references and you can trace all links to your

website from other websites. This procedure measures one part of the

entity of the rhizomatic node (its relevance), if we return to Ecos

model of culture. The other part is calculated through the statistics of

the so called clickstreams, the statistical record of the real number of

visits to your website. But this is not enough. Google learns from its

users which of the listed answers after the query really work and

which do not. If, for example, you Google semiotics, you will get

1,360,000 results in English, ordered according to their relevance.

Obviously most people will pick the first ones on the list, because they

know those results are the closest to their search intention. But web-

sites change, cultural trends change, i.e. the encyclopedia changes.

Users may no longer be satisfied with the bestranked websites and

search for new emergent ideas or notions. Google astute PageRank

will then take into consideration how many of the users, after having

checked the first answers in the list, return to the query to pick other

results, because they are not satisfied with the firstranked. If this

process starts to repeat constantly, and lets say, most of the users fin-

ish their query only after visiting the fifth result, then Google will rerank this website, raising its position towards the top. Thus formally

the rhizomatic node will grow and in the future more likely users will

be addressed there, which will further affirm it. And so on ad infini-tum, as Peirce would say.


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Search algorithms are far more complex than that, but those are theprinciples, roughly speaking. The same principles, the rhizomatic in-

terconnectedness of cultural units and the affirmation of meaningful

nodes after the statistical constancy of their use, determine the life of

culture according to the semiotic model. What the internet does, by

means of the search engines, is to exponentially accelerate those proc-

esses. John Battelle remarks that [I]ncreasingly, search is our mecha-

nism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place

within it. Its how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives

human culture: knowledge (ibid., p. 280). According to my hypothe-sis, this occurs because the homogeneity of our natural predisposition

to absorb culture (encyclopedic competence) on one side and thestructural organization of the information on the internet, on the other,

results in an increasingly complete merging of the two in the newer

generations. Actually the great challenge for the future of the search is

how it can be made more intelligent and more able to transform que-

ries written in everyday language into relevant answers (cfr ibid., ch.

11). And the more the engines will succeed in this challenge, the more

we will witness the externalization of the intelligence, its outsourcingin the computers of Google, Yahoo!, IBM and many others. I return to

this point in the last paragraph of the study.

5. Some hints on the identity of the new generations from post-

modern critical sociology

Intelligence, when referred to human cognitive faculties, is a

highly compromised notion, implying racial, sexist, ethnocentric, and

any other possible politically incorrect connotations. For this state-

ment I rely entirely on the seminal work of Stephen Jay Gould, The

Mismeasure of Man (1981). In the course of a huge debate during the

whole 20th century, it turns out that man is a far more complicated en-

tity than the one whose intellectual performance can be reduced to asimple number, the IQ quotient. Nevertheless, the criticism of intellec-

tual performance on a collective level still exists. Today it is unac-

ceptable to criticize entire social groups on the ground of characteris-

tics in which individuals had no choice (race, sex, ethnicity, etc.), but


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115

it is quite usual to criticize on the grounds of free choice. For instance,consumerism, the incarnation of free choice, is accused of making

people dull. But if this critique is expressed by means of academic

discourse, it will not sound like consumerism reduces IQ. Most

probably it will be formulated as analysis of identity, its structure and

the derived reduction of critical awareness, self reflection, and open-

ness to otherness. Therefore, for the requirements of the present study,

I shall not follow the simple transposition that the intelligence of

search engines is reversely proportional to the IQ of their users, but

will examine which transformations of the identity of the internet gen-

erations is formed by the habit of using more and more intelligent

search engines, in particular on the level of encyclopedic competence.For this purpose, I shall briefly outline the diagnosis of contemporary

identity by four of the most influential voices in critical sociology.

The objective is not to offer a complete overview of the problem, but

to demonstrate that there is something like a converging trend.

Chronologically, the first of the chosen authors is Frederic

Jameson. In his essay The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, written

in 1984, he criticizes some consequences of the legitimation of post-

modernism by its exponents in arts and theory. His point about iden-

tity changes in the new generation of artists, but of course this goes for

the whole zeitgeist. To explain identity changes, he uses Lacans

model of schizophrenia, a breakdown of the signifying chain (Jameson

1991, p. 26). In the case of nonpathological subjects that means a de-

liberate choice of attitude towards the world, deprived of historicity,

i.e., deprived of a coherent extension of subjectivity over past, present,

and future. Postmodernism legitimizes a breakdown of this fundamen-

tal human temporality and affirms an ethics of pure and unrelated

presents in time (ibidem, p. 27). This fragmentation of identity has its

concrete application: it is far easier for a disengaged subject to leap

into states of euphoria with intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity

(ibid.). Postmodern lifestyles go exactly in the opposite direction of

constructive praxis, long term solidarity, and profound, suffered ex-periences behind artistic creativity. The cultural logic of late capital-

ism affirms life consumption rather than life construction. This iswhere Baumans ideas come in. It is impossible to summarize his im-

mense contribution to the topic of postmodern identity, but the notions


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of liquid identity (2000) and subjectivity fetishism (2007) seemthe most appropriate.

Bauman constructs his precious insights on the same considerations

about broken temporality in the interest of an exaltation of the present

(Bauman 1999, p. 36). The major consequence of that genetic dis-

ease of postmodernity is the deterioration of social bonds. In Liquid

modernity (Bauman 2000), he examines the weakening of personal

identity, caused by its exaggerated adaptiveness to present circum-

stances. The metaphor is all encompassing:

fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone)

to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than thespace they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but for a mo-ment.

(ibid., p. 2)

The lack of longterm engagement with reality (or, as other think-

ers call it, ontological commitment) derives from the overabundance

of options to be involved in, similar to the trajectory options in a rhi-

zomatic structure. The increased standards of intensity of the present

experience generate uncertainty about choice and missed opportuni-

ties. For this ethics, it is far more convenient to consider others as

commodities, interchangeable and easily quittable, than subjects oflonglasting relations and responsibilities. In Consuming Life (2007)Bauman examines how, after commodifying anything around us, we

also commodify our identity. Here he examines social networking

phenomena, in order to underline how subjectivity goes public, on the

market, after all, and how its commodification impedes the awareness

that its conditions of possibility are human relations. Subjectivity fet-

ishism (ibid., p. 14) is the ultimate expression of the deterioration ofsocial bonds.

Jeremy Rifkin, in his landmarking study The Age of Access: the

New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a PaidFor Ex-

perience (2000) proclaims the advent of a new type of human beingand actually traces the objective of the present study:

Just as the printing press altered human consciousness over the past severalhundred years, the computer will likely have a similar effect on conscious-


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117

ness over the next two centuries. Psychologists and sociologists are alreadybeginning to note a change taking place in cognitive development amongyoungsters in the socalled dotcom generation. A small but increasing

number of young people who are growing up in front of computer screensand spending much of their time in chat rooms and simulated environmentsappear to be developing what psychologists call multiple personas shortlived fragmented frames of consciousness, each used to negotiate whatevervirtual world or network they happen to be in at any particular moment oftime.

Some observers worry that dotcommers may begin to experience reality aslittle more than shifting story lines and entertainments and that they mightlack both the deeply anchored socializing experience and extended attentionspan necessary to form a coherent frame of reference for understanding and

adapting to the world around them. Others see the development in a morepositive light as a freeingup of the human consciousness to be more playful,more flexible and transient in order to accommodate the fastmoving andeverchanging realities that people experience.

(Rifkin 2000, p. 13)

DanyRobert Dufour also proclaims the birth of a new man, al-

though his critical vehemence exceeds that of previous authors (Du-

four 2007, p. 167). The French philosopher also accuses neoliberalism

of causing considerable damage to subjectivity and to an individuals

capacity to cope with reality. But what goes beyond the contribution

of the other authors is the profound analysis which Dufour makes of

the development of the human being in the present conditions. His

main point is that the logic of neoliberalism imposes the abolition of

the Kantian critical subject and the Freudian neurotic subject, the

pilasters of modern subjectivity. In other terms, the conditions of the

formation of the new generations prevent them from becoming critical

and developing a superego, i.e. the instance of the sense of guilt. The

crucial notion of Dufours analysis is desymbolization.

Dufour also refers to Lacans terminology for his diagnostics. If the

normal development of the child passes through three phases the

real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, todays children are stopped at

the second phase the market provides so many tools for childrensentertainment that most parents prefer to rely on them. Obviously,

those are cartoons on TV, videogames, and hundreds of other tools

dominated by visual interaction. They work fine and actually capture

the childs attention more easily than a parents communicative ef-


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forts. But those efforts are not that insistent since the new generationof parents is also dominated by consumerism. What happens is that

kids are faced with such an abundance of visual (imagery) information

about the world, that they never develop the need of verbal narratives

about it. According to Lacan, the superego is formed in the symbolic

phase, in which it is normal for parents to be the main source of in-

formation about the world, a genuine authority to be interiorized later

on. But nowadays this phase never takes place. The substitution of the

narratives symbolic constitution of the world view through the par-

ents intermediation with the selfconstructed worldview by cartoons,

videogames, and intelligent toys has brought this about. If, from the

point of view of pure information, this does not seem particularly wor-rying (a kids interactive encyclopedias know more than the average

parent), from the point of view of psychological development, it de-

prives the nascent subject of fundamental elements. Dufour goes thus

far to show the semiotic mechanism of this process (referring to Ben-

veniste, ibid., p. 99). Verbal interaction between humans establishes

habits of exchange of the roles of listener and speaker. Multimedia

visual flows do not. The linguistic phenomenon of deixis, typical for

the verbal utterances, establishes the connection between conversers

and the situation, or reality. This principle of reality is entirely absent

in the anonymous visual narration of media.

Thus when those kids (homo zappiens, ibid. pp. 92119) go toschool, they are no longer pupils; they are unable to be subjected to

the authority of the teacher and they are technically unable to get into

the particular communicative form of a lesson. And the process does

not stop at school: The mission of educational institutions (including

the universities) is now to absorb floating populations whose relation-

ship with knowledge is no more than a secondary and sporadic issue.

(ibid., p. 117).

6. Knowledge, identity, internet, and the semiotic search

With the last quotation of Dufours book, the circle is closed and

we are back where we started this theoretical exploration, following

the empirical observations of students cognitive habits. Even if we


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119

are not as pessimistic as Dufour, it is undeniable that something doesnot work in the didactic communication at the universities after the

advent of Internet. So, the point here is to see how Ecos model of en-

cyclopedia helps us to understand and analyze this phenomenon. Ac-

tually the first hint comes from Eco himself, in an interview in Spiegel

about the exhibition of lists in the Louvre, which he curated. When the

conversation comes to the lists Google offers, Eco answers:

Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Googlegenerated list, it hasalready changed. These lists can be dangerous not for old people like me,who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, forwhom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to bediscriminating.

(Eco 2009, online text)

Discriminating, decimazione in the original Italian expression,

is the process of reducing the huge amount of information available

for the exact one needed by the reader, and it is the common denomi-

nator of all documented considerations on the internet made by Eco

from 1995 until now.4 Unfortunately, Ecos interest was never di-

rected toward the fact that the evolution of the search, the billion dol-

lars business, was dedicated to the art of discriminating the lists for

achieving higher levels of relevance of the results and that the princi-

ples of rhizome and the statistical constancy are at the core of that

process. Nevertheless, the second part of Ecos words coincides with

both the critical sociologists and my (but I guess everyones) empiri-

cal observation of the students cognitive behavior.

Thus the key point seems to be not the resulting amount of knowl-

edge, but the process regulating its social life. According to Eco,

Google is a tragedy for those who acquired their knowledge not in the

old peoples way, but following the present circumstances. For old

people like us, whose encyclopedic competence is achieved through

books and teachers, internet is a very comfortable extension or a tool,

whereas for young people, whose encyclopedic competence is formedthrough the internet, it is a substitute. In the first case the internet has a

utilitarian function, in the second an existential function. My starting

4 I refer to the following documents: Eco 1995, 1996, 2006, 2006b, 2009.


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concern was why are students so reluctant to write? Dufour wouldreply that this is due to the fact that their development has been ar-

rested to the imaginary phase, so they are unprepared for such a sym-

bolic exercise as writing. Eco would say that their thinking is no

longer based on local dictionaries, i.e. interiorized structured portions

of encyclopedic competence, but on an entirely rhizomatic and exter-

nalized encyclopedia. As I mentioned before, according to Eco, our

understanding proceeds thanks to the happily unstable equilibrium be-

tween the categorial and the observational moment (Eco 2000: p.

252). This balance seems not to exist in the newer generations, al-

though they are quantitatively much more informed than previous

generations. Here the balance seems to lack due to everything on theside of the observational, on the statistically constant nodes, provided

by the search engine. Contrary to this, developing your thoughts in a

written form is something which has to do with the dialectics between

the categorial and the observational, something which requires many

inferences and a coherent link between what you know (the past) and

what you want to express (the future).

Among the last questions of my interviews with the students I

asked them about the platypus. All of them knew the word; they knew

that it is an animal and almost nothing more. In Ecos numerous ex-

amples using the platypus as a cognitive challenge his mind model

is inferring the missing information from existent dichotomies, by

analogy between the observable and the known for other species. In

the case of the students no one enacted a chain of inferences or abduc-

tions. All of them were immediately thinking that they would find

everything about the platypus on the net (4 of them referred more pre-

cisely to Wikipedia). Thus I would suggest that the great convenience

and omnipresent availability of the net5 dispenses young people from

cognitive initiatives which produce interpretants and enrich the indi-

vidual encyclopedic competence from the inside. Or, more likely,

what I call here culture of navigation is a new attitude towards

knowledge in which the inferential and abductive skills are mostly ap-

5 Most of the questions of the interviews from my field work were dedicated to habits of

using the internet. Afterwards I found very similar results in the study Novite mladi I novitemedii (New Youth and New Media, Dichev, Spasov 2009); the penetration of the internet

among young people here is almost 100%.


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plied to the process of acquiring information/knowledge but not somuch to reflection and the construction of internal coherence within

the acquired and strictly encyclopedic knowledge. In other words the

symbolic phase is not organized in Grand individual narratives (one

of which, for instance, is the dictionarylike classification of living

species) and, although quantitatively present, it is fragmented by a rhi-

zomatic structure, typical for the imaginary phase. It has precisely the

format of individual encyclopedic competence, encouraged by the in-

dustry of quiz shows and other forms of shortterm conspicuous intel-

lectual performance, necessary for the various social exploits of liquid

identity.

Conclusion

To conclude, I spend some words on the possibility of the perfect

search and its cultural consequences. In the eyes of the expert, the

perfect search looks like this:

Imagine the ability to ask any question and get not just an accurate answer,

but your perfect answer an answer that suits the context and intent of yourquestion, an answer that with eerie precision is informed by who you are and

why youre asking. This answer is capable of incorporating all the worldssearchable knowledge into the task at hand be it captured in text, video, oraudio formats. Its capable of distinguishing between straightforward requests(Who was the third president of the United States?) and more nuanced ones

(Under what circumstances did the third president of the United States for-swear his views on slavery?).

(Battelle 2005: p. 252)

As we can see, a big part of the problem is strikingly semiotic. One

of the lines of inquiry followed by the search engineers is the construc-

tion of the model of the semantic web (ibidem, p. 263), but not the

semiotic web. Apart from the fact that semiotics can get rich if it

helps in some way to improve the search we may try to imagine the cul-tural implication of its success. Now it is commonly accepted that the

search has developed about 5% of its potential. And what a huge impact

on the cognitive habits of an entire generation! Imagine what will hap-

pen when it approaches 100%. Above, I used the expression outsourc-


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ing intelligence. Actually, the big challenge is to invent the perfectsimulation of the process of recall within the individuals mind. The

combination of the efficiency of data processing in the individual mind

with the infinite database of the internet would mean a perfect search,

i.e. posing the questions in everyday language and getting the exact an-

swers according to our intention. Considering the internal mechanisms

of the encyclopedic competence, I would suggest that its efficiency is

due to the fact that all knowledge is hosted by the same intentionality.

Erudition means operating within the whole of our encyclopedic data

with efficient categorization, independently whether it is scientific or

wild (Eco 2000, p. 232). Now, merely at first sight, the semantic web

project follows that line: the reconstruction of a reliable system ofmetadata which can guarantee at least some general orientation on the

semantic relevance of the web pages. Since the other component of the

perfect search the clickstreams statistics has been considerably

perfected, it is up to the semiotic one to hand the torch of truth. It seems

that now the research is going in a reverse direction, from the encyclo-

pedia to the dictionary, structuring portions of the global encyclopedia

through metadata, not by means of transcendental categories, but using

ad hoc solutions for an increasingly immediate interaction between the

searcher and his second brain, the web.

To conclude the conclusion, we may say that the internet and its

access through the intermediation of those quasiminds which are the

search engines is among the most important factors for the expansion

of the postmodern fragmented identity, i.e. the culture of navigation.

References

Battelle J. (2005) The Search. How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules ofBusiness and Transformed Our Culture, Brealey, London.

Bauman Z. (1999) La societ dellincertezza, il Mulino, Bologna [original Englishversion?].

. (2000)Liquid Modernity, Polity, Cambridge (UK).. (2007) Consuming Life, Polity, Cambridge (UK).Dichev I. and O. Spasov (eds) (2009)Novite mladi I novite medii (New Youth and

New Media), Otvoreno obshtestvo, Sofia.

Dufour D.R. (2007) The Art of Shrinking Heads. The New Servitude of the Liber-ated in the Era of Total Capitalism, Blackwell, London.


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Eco U. (1968)La struttura assente, Bompiani, Milan.. (1971)Le forme del contenuto, Bompiani, Milan.. (1975) Trattato di semiotica generale, Bompiani, Milan.

. (1976)A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana UP, Bloomington (IN).. (1979)Lector in fabula, Bompiani, Milan.. (1994) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts Ad-

vances in Semiotics, Indiana UP, Bloomington (IN).. (1984) Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, Einaudi, Torino.. (1985) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Macmillan, London.

. (1994) The Limits of Interpretation, Indiana UP, Bloomington (IN).. (1995) Eco discusses the Internet. A conversation with Patrick Coppock for

Multimedia World, www.carbon.ucdenver.edu Access date: 12.02.2010.. (1996) From Internet to Gutenberg. A lecture presented by Umberto Eco at

The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, November 12, 1996.www.hf.ntnu.no Access date: 12.02.2010.

. (2000)Kant and the Platypus, Vintage, London.. (2006) A passo di gambero. Guerre calde e populismo mediatico, Bompiani,

Milan.. (2006b) Semiotica: origini, definizione, sguardo sul presente, July 2006,

Realisation: Leonardo Romei www.archivesaudiovisuelles.fr Access date:12.02.2010.

. (2009) We Like Lists Because We Dont Want to Die:DerSpiegelInterviewwith Umberto Eco, by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, Spiegel

www.spiegel.de Access date: 11.11.2009.Gould S.J.. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton & Co., New York.Jameson F. (1991)Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke

UP, Durham, NC.Quine W. (1951) Two Dogmas of Empiricism, in Philosophical Review, January

1951, 60 (1): 2043.

Rifkin J. (2000) The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where allof Life is a PaidFor Experience, Penguin/Putnam, New York.

Documents

Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition