ICS Magzine - n.2/3 - 2014 - English

I D E A S , P E O P L E , S T R AT E G I E S A N D S O L U T I O N S T H AT C O M M U N I C AT E

n. 2/3 2014

Hammersley vs Keen

Elisabetta Sgarbi

pag 20

Marco Belpoliti

pag 46

Digital culture: clash of opinions

pag 14

ISSN 2281-3365

A good publisher?

Is like a diviner

From Calvino to Twitter: a map of modernity

Umberto Eco

DIGITAL AMNESIA Under the Aegis of Confindustria Assafrica & Mediterraneo Department of Communications and social research of the “Sapienza� University in Rome Transparency International Italy Italian Association of Semiotic Studies

n. 2/3 2014 Digital amnesia Maybe you are apocalyptic!

Umberto Eco

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Say it with a kiss

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The age of perpetual reviewing

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The dark side of the Web

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New geography for print media

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The discreet charm of reading

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One thousand and one stories

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Festival Mania

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Carpe News

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Thanks to Vincenzo Boccia, Olimpia Fabbricatore, Fausto Lupetti, Anna Maria Lorusso, Scuola Superiore degli Studi Umanistici di Bologna, Michele Trimarchi, Leonardo Romei, Marco De Amicis, Autorità garante per l’Infanzia e l’Adolescenza, Antonia Magnacca

Oscar Blumm

Ben Hammersley

Andrew Keen

Vincenzo Boccia

Elisabetta Sgarbi

Ivan Cotroneo

Mauro Piccoli

International Journalism Festival

In vitro... veritas!

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The Oulipians of the Web

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Autopsy of culture

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Literature on the cover

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The archive in the digital age

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Under the aegis of DIPARTIMENTO DI COMUNICAZIONE E RICERCA SOCIALE

Umberto Eco

Ben Hammersley

Andrew Keen

Vincenzo Boccia

Elisabetta Sgarbi

Ivan Cotroneo

Gianfranco De Gregorio

Marco Belpoliti

Michele Trimarchi

Gianfranco De Gregorio

Marco Belpoliti

Michele Trimarchi

Giovanna Zaganelli

Leonardo Romei

Leonardo Romei

The cultural exception Editorial by Franco Pomilio

We are living in times in which everything is marketable. So culture as well - that strictly speaking represents the precondition for all communication acts, the humus feeding language - becomes subject of communication, of a service, a product to spread, to share, in most cases to sell.

Communicate culture thus means performing quite a feat. It means moving along a Moebius strip: talking about something else and end up talking about yourself.

This issue of ICS Magzine tries to run along the strip’s curves, from the book crisis to the cultural events boom, from the obsession for storytelling to the profound effects of digital culture. In order to understand how the specific nature of culture is refracted by the different ways of communicating it and, therefore, to give value to it. And ask oneself, for example, if the elegant French Minister of Culture Aurelie Filippetti wasn’t right when she managed to provoke a small dialectic earthquake in the European institutional field, some time ago, with her battle for the so called “cultural exception”.

The cultural product, Filippetti argued, cannot and should not be subject to the same rules and logics of the market that are valid for every other marketable commodity.

Metaphors aside, the point was to maintain culture and its industry outside the range of treaties pertaining to free trade between

Europe and the United States.

A new form of protectionism to contrast the U.S. domination of entertainment or a proud claim of a different view, distinctly European, about the role and social function of culture? For the record, the French Minister and other supporters of the cultural exception had it their way, but the answer to this question has been left hanging.

What is certain is that culture is now fully embedded within the most modern economic theories as a parameter of wealth to all extents. And therefore communication in this area can become a real factor of enhancement for products, services and consumption, which, as the cultural ones, bring progress and prosperity perhaps less visible but certainly more durable. Not only: it can help restore Europe’s vocation and ability to chart a new path of development, which in culture itself finds its mainstay, also in terms of pure political and social marketing.

Culture, in short, as a real development factor, provided of course that is readily made accessible to all. Because, as Umberto Eco reminds us in his interview, to produce consciousness and collective memory, making knowledge accessible is not enough; we rather need to address it and give shape to it: to select it for the good of everyone, avoiding the pitfalls of a new subjugation due to an excess, not a lack this time, of digital democracy.

Maybe you are apocalyptic!

by Daniela Panosetti

Absence of critical comparison, flattening of the present, lack of adequate filters to the excess of information. These are the critical points of the web according to Umberto Eco, who is indeed “apocalyptic”, but not completely. In fact, there is a “cure”: to pass from speaking out indiscriminately to a conscious awareness of memory

FIFTY YEARS OLD, BUT STILL GOING STRONG In the opening, particular of the first paperback edition’s cover of the famous book by Umberto Eco “Apocalittici e integrati”, which this year celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.

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A mere label, maybe a little clever, arisen from the need to find a striking synthesis for a handful of essays on a variety of topics – ranging from the Peanuts to commercial music, from kitsch to television language – yet all intended to maintain the unprecedented idea that the now established mass culture is worthy of study.

According to the author’s account, the genesis of the successful (and cordially hated) formula “Apocalittici e integrati”, whose story he has told more than once, occurred by pure chance.

And thanks to the infallible intuition of Valentino Bompiani. It was 1964 when the first university chairs devoted to mass communication began to appear. Eco’s book was just a collection of former studies specially gathered for one of the first competitions on the theme, but the title was missing: it was Bompiani who had the idea, artfully picking it up from the last chapter; compelling the young scholar to write forty pages more to justify it.

A fortuitous idea, then. Though this has not prevented the resulting model from acquiring an undeniable influence and above all the formula from becoming proverbial, as it regularly reappears at every new, more or less supposed, media revolution. This is what has happened to the web, and also to its latest “social” incarnation, that has made the usual multitudes of doomsters and enthusiasts rise.

Keeping himself warily at a distance from both, while their courses and recourses continue to take place, Umberto Eco still observes culture from the inner viewpoint of who knows, biased by semiotics, that everything has a meaning and when you try to seize it, you only see it slip and shift towards new shores. It follows that, for instance, if fifty years ago theorizing about mass communication theory was like “theorizing about next Thursday”, today theorizing about digital communication is like theorizing about the next two hours. Aware of such an impasse, though not reluctant to face it, Eco does not avoid the discussion and reflects upon the many articulations of the current relation between communication and culture: from the crisis of memory to the success of ebooks. And he does so with his usual irony, but also with the will – typical of a particular intellectual function in danger of extinction – to try in any case to suggest an interpretation, a more inclusive view; in a nutshell, to resist the “dictatorship of the present”, in order to take a step forward and show not so much the way to the future – let’s leave that to prophets – as the path already followed, as it is from there, he reminds us, that real culture is generated.

“Apocalittici e integrati” is fifty years old now.

Meanwhile, the web revolution has taken place, producing, needless to say, yet another articu-

Collective memory is in crisis because also the pleasure of individual memory is.

Those who don’t know when Mussolini died probably are not even interested in remembering what they did last summer

lation of such a dichotomy. The second phase of the digital era, anyway, with its intrinsic sociality, seems to encourage more “integrated” attitudes. There’s a whole pantheon of metaphors and keywords – opening, collaboration, sharing – meant as “good in themselves”, essentially salvific. I am thinking here about the metaphor of sharing, in particular, which is the most powerful one and has now reached even economy.

An interesting though dangerous phenomenon, as it looks like it might undermine the already poor critical capacity of media consumers.

What is your opinion about it?

The function of every culture is to produce a collective growth. Such growth, though, given that full freedom must be assured (otherwise we would be talking of dictatorship, not of real culture), is to be intended as a constant criticism of what is communicated when others speak out.

It is the ideal model of the Socratic dialogue: one rises and has his/her own say, then the other, either the master or the friend or whoever, raises in turn and declares his/her dissent, and so on.

This, of course, holds true both for society and individuals: even personal culture needs to be criticized. I advise young writers not to hope for their first publication to come out of nowhere: you first need to prove yourself, make yourself known, step into local discussion, listen to other opinions, gradually change your point of view, your way of thinking and writing, until one day the publisher himself will ask you to publish a book.

Culture, then, is a continuous alternation between people speaking out freely and the criticism of what is said. As for the web, what is happening is that people worship the ideal of the absolute freedom of having the floor and speaking one’s mind, without control by anyone. To be naughty – or apocalyptic – I would say it is the triumph of “the voice of the idiot!”.This is not culture, though. Or rather, the cretin might even

One of the strongest arguments by those who

poleon, but at least knew more or less where to place it between Garibaldi’s expedition and the beginning of World War II. Collective memory, however, is in crisis because also the pleasure of individual memory is. Those who don’t know when Mussolini died probably are not even interested in remembering what they did last summer. Nor do they care about what happened to their parents or grandparents.

When i was a child I learned many interesting things about World War I simply listening to my mother’s stories: my personal memory met shreds of someone else’s memory and enabled me to reconstruct a shared memory, made up of either the songs may mother sang to me or the

are apocalyptic about the web regards digital natives: the supposed anthropological mutation that the fact of having been born in this media context entails. What strikes me is not so much the precocious capacity of children to learn the grammar (even gestural) of digital media, as the cognitive consequences of such a massive and immediate availability of contents, and in particular how this affects individual memory: a topic you yourself have recently tackled with an “open letter” to your nephew.

date of the assassination Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo.

The teenager living in front of a computer display, who doesn’t listen to his mother singing anymore suffers a loss of both individual and collective memory. Hence the provocation of the letter to my nephew: learn by heart the nursery rhyme “La Vispa Teresa”, not because it is important to know its content, but because it helps you to exercise your memory and not to forget its importance.

The point is we are facing a severe crisis of collective memory. It suffices to recall those four young men in a quiz show some time ago that, when asked about an episode in the life of Mussolini, did not know how to place it into a time frame. Nobody remembered that he died in 1945 anymore! Now, previous generations might not have known the exact date of the death of Na-

How much is this related to the extreme simultaneity we are immersed in?

speak, even teach at a university, provided that the possibility for the others to counter, dispute, set up alternative models. Whereas, through these forms of pseudo-participation, people say whatever comes to their minds, sometimes yielding to offensive tones and offensive contents. Thus jeopardizing the most important, prerequisite of democracy: the assumption that not all that is said is good. Those who maintain the contrary, advocating that speaking out is the only form of expression have effectively renounced democracy – and therefore democratic culture – as criticism of opinions.

Probably a lot: the risk is the birth of a generation exclusively interested in knowing the present.

Some time ago a friend told me, a bit provocatively, that while re-reading my novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” he had been astonished by the de-

MEMORY AND OBLIVION Jim Carrey in a scene of the cult movie “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind”: the surreal and poetic story of a man who chooses to efface the memory of his lost love.

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THE DECEPTION OF HAPPINESS “Declaration of independence”, John Trumbull, 1819.

The Constitution of the United States of America is the first to have sanctioned the “pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right of the human being.

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scription of token-operated telephone. He had forgotten you needed a phone box once if you were out and wanted to make a call! Here, this is a good example of today’s cultural flattening.

It’s not that my friend had completely forgotten, though he had disabled that memory in particular, as it was incompatible with the present to which we tend to adhere too much.

And if for some this leads to the oblivion of the past, for others – the younger ones – it leads to the lack of interest for the past. I don’t know how many young people today would be able to say when mobile phones came on the market, but I would bet they could not even picture an age in which such gadgets didn’t exist.

There is no doubt, though, that for those who remain curious and prone to cultivate memory the web is a huge deposit of material. I am thinking, for instance, of the nostalgic obsession about vintage, of the quest for a “re-mediated” past, that is revised and catalysed, starting from the fruition of media products of the various ages: a sort of second-hand memory, made of things never actually experienced. A bit like when you hear and hear about a book and you end up knowing all of it though you haven’t actually read it.

The Internet can certainly be used for cultivating

Happiness is one of the vaguest ideas and thinking that power is supposed to ensure something so vague is terribly misleading, as it would be sufficient to multiply the offer, extend it to everything that can give satisfaction to someone collective memory in this sense, provided that there is interest to do so.

The point is – once again – that we should preserve our critical capacity, which is first of all being able to judge, to discriminate.

Let’s think of it: in every culture there has always been an elite having access to the “memory warehouses”, therefore to knowledge, and the masses, more or less wide, which were excluded. What is happening today is we have an elite again, which uses information technology tools critically and cultivates memory and knowledge consciously, and the masses which do not, not because they are prevented from accessing knowledge, but because they have been given too much of it in a disorganized way.

They will still be subject masses, but this time for an excess of democracy.

Speaking of democracy and culture: many new economic theories invite us to consider immaterial values like happiness and moral well-being as an indicator of richness in its fullest sense.

Don’t you think this might add new value to cultural products or at least provide one more topic to the debate on the economic exploitation of culture, still blocked between the mutual vetoes of those who think that “you can’t eat culture” and those who want it to remain an activity unrelated to anything else, as an end in itself?

No doubt incorporating cultural consumption, but also the citizens’ level of education, into GDP is a way to react to that lack of individual critical capacity the general crisis of society is ultimately based on. It is misleading, though, to speak of happiness, as it reinforces one of the assumptions at the root of the present decline, that is the idea that everything – from advertising to entertainment to politics – should propose itself as a sale or gift of happiness.

This major modern tragedy started with the American Declaration of Independence, which is the first to have included the “pursuit of happiness” in the fundamental human rights. A big naivety with a Masonic flavour. Happiness is one of the vaguest ideas – it means having a lot of money for some, whereas for others is finding

love, and so on – and thinking that power is supposed to ensure something so vague is terribly misleading, as it would be sufficient to multiply the offer, extend it to everything that can give satisfaction to someone: here is the cream that will make you more good-looking, the car that will make all envy you, the job that will make you richer.

The founding fathers of the America Constitution should have written, instead, that the duty of a government is to reduce unhappiness at the minimum. Because happiness is undeniable and is the same for all: a visceral pain, a friend’s betrayal, the death of a loved person. Is Medea’s insanity when killing her children to take revenge for her lover’s desertion. A government intending to prevent all that would know exactly what to do: guarantee medical assistance, avoid that problematic children feel isolated, make car accidents decrease and so on.

Well, we are all quite aware of the ways to reduce unhappiness, but we don’t know how to produce happiness. Basing everything on an happiness offer, therefore, is a big deception, because keeps us blocked in an eternal present, in the satisfaction of the moment, in the selfish warmth of Linus’s blanket, something that today, and probably only for today, is able to give me, only me, happiness.

The same thing also applies to communica-

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EPOCH-MAKING DUALISMS In 1964 Umberto Eco’s reflections on culture becoming more and more moulded on mass media supremacy were published by Bompiani. And an expression then become proverbial was coined.

Fifty years ago Umberto Eco wondered how to approach the rising, flourishing mass culture to which the semiologist himself gave academic dignity considering it for the first time a subject of study to investigate with all the expertise and subtlety of his analytical insight.

Taking the possible approaches to the extreme, to myths and phenomenons like Superman, the Peanuts and the kitsch, Eco identified a dualism of approaches which would become an analytic paradigm for the future: on the one hand, the apocalyptic ones, inclined to refuse drastically the culture expressed by mass media; on the other hand, the integrated ones, prepared to accept it and feeling comfortable in it without regrets.

Half a century after the publication of what would become a real cult book, that was initially conceived for a contest and then proved to be a success, positively reviewed by Montale, the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici (School for Advanced Studies in Humanities) of the University of Bologna celebrated the birthday of “Apocalittici e integrati” with a special event, held in the Emilia’s capital last 11 March before Eco himself and the semiologists Marco Belpoliti, Fausto Colombo, Giacomo Manzoli, Gianfranco Marrone, Marco Santoro, Anna Maria Lorusso.

A peculiar birthday to celebrate the up-to-dateness of this text and its potentiality in terms of interpretation of the present, but also future, reality. The world, today more than ever, seems to be still divided (with some forcing, though) into the two Eco’s timeless categories: but the dispute has now moved, according to Eco himself, to the digital level.

«If you think about it – Eco declared – today the apocalyptic ones are those who criticize the Internet and get answers like “Ah! You hate it”; on the other hand, the current integrated using it unconditionally are those who get the criticism of people disapproving them and saying “I still use a fountain pen”».

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tion: better showing unhappiness than promising happiness. Whoever were able to make me experience some kinds of unhappiness existing in the world would do a cultural work. On the contrary, those who promises me extemporary happiness for little money only keeps crushing me, entrapping me in the present moment. Like a toad squashed on the highway.

to take the floor and speak out which, as I said, ends up depriving of authority any cultural consistency.

The eternal promise of happiness is also the prelude to an eternal competition to reach it.

Maybe it is not by chance that among talent shows and self-publishing it seems now necessary to put any artistic or cultural talent to the test. What do you think of this mounting competitive interpretation of culture?

They do, absolutely. In this terrible situation the success of festivals, where people pays to attend conferences on Plato, is the sign that there is a part of the audience, if only a minimum percentage, which feels a deep unrest and reacts, looking for spaces where it is possible to satisfy the need for culture and debate. Television is no longer able to do it, nor is publishing, which mixes up on the shelf cookery books, humorous books and Iliad. That is why there is a search for substitutes.

I think there are different degrees. From the boasters parade, of those who are only interested in being recognized in the cafè close to home, to those who are instead motivated by a genuine wish to express themselves and therefore they save money, make sacrifices and self-publish their books. Of course, reading a couple of typed pages in front of a jury made up of three members saying respectively that they are amazing or indecent doesn’t mean to be judged, nor to invite others to pass judgment on them, but only to pass an absence of criticism off as competitive spirit, thus fuelling that perpetual tendency

Still, a demand for culture does exist, otherwise marketing wouldn’t even bother to create such formats. Cultural festivals seem to be meeting at least part of this demand.

To conclude, some time ago you maintained that e-publishing might have worked for reference books, not for books to read for mere pleasure.

Haven’t you changed your mind meanwhile?

No, I haven’t, but I think that if I have a leg cut off, it is right that I use a prosthesis. So, if I’m going on a journey and cannot tuck ten books in my suitcase I welcome the possibility to upload all of them, and even more, in my iPad. I would

I don’t know how many people today would actually be able to say when mobile phones came on the market, but I would bet they could not even picture an age in which such gadgets didn’t exist

A rose is a rose is a rose…

Write one of the most read and translated contemporary books in the world, masterfully weaving St. Thomas and Sherlock Holmes, the Canticle of Canticles and Borges’s fantastic: check.

Ferry unharmed the study of mass communication across a country with an old and skeptical humanistic tradition, working behind the scenes of the rising public television: check. Bring into universities, in the turbulent Seventies, an anomalous subject like semiotics and make it the basis of the first university courses in Communication Sciences in Italy: check. In the midst of all this - or rather in the historiated plot, between one identity and the other - the academic education with Luigi Pareyson and the experience as an editor at Bompiani, the Gruppo 63 postmodern avantgarde and the amazing university career, in Italy and abroad, from the Alma Mater of Bologna to the Columbia University up to the Collège de France.

And also the one thousand “Bustine di Minerva”, dripping irony, and the 39 honorary degree, from Argentina to Estonia. The love for Paris and its bouquinistes, for puzzles and the mists of Valois, Tex Willer comic strips and Proust’s Recherche.

Maybe this is the only way to pay homage to Umberto Eco’s chaotic curriculum: give oneself up to what he calls “the infinity of lists”, and be airily carried away by the passion for knowledge, in all its forms.

Born in Alessandria in 1932, Umberto Eco is today, in all probability, the most famous and appreciated Italian intellectual in the world. Member of the Lincean Academy and Knight Grand Cross, but also “grand transcendent satrap” of the Collège de Pataphysique, the author of “The Name of the Rose” is currently emeritus professor and president of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici (School for Advanced Studies in Humanities) of the University of Bologna and continues his activity as a writer. Besides his famous medieval mystery book with William of Baskerville, he has published five novels and an indeterminable number of academic essays, ranging from language philosophy to aesthetics to linguistics, linking his name to that obscure “science of signs” that for many people is ultimately nothing but “the subject studied by Umberto Eco”.

Because culture and language have so many forms and investigate all of them is the only way to account for their power, even if only approxi-