Chronicles of a Liquid Society

by Umberto Eco

  2010

  I tweet, therefore I am

  I’m not on Twitter, not on Facebook—the Italian Constitution allows me not to be. But there is evidently a false Twitter account in my name, as there seems to be for other well-known people. I once met a woman whose eyes brimmed with gratitude as she explained how she read me all the time on Twitter and sometimes corresponded with me, reaping much intellectual benefit. I tried telling her that it was a false me, but she gazed back as though I were telling her I wasn’t really who I am. If I was on Twitter, then I existed. Twittero ergo sum.

  I wasn’t too worried about trying to convince her, whatever she might have thought of me, since she was evidently pleased with what the false Eco was telling her, and this whole business was hardly going to change the history of Italy, nor that of the world—nor my own, for that matter. At one time I regularly received large dossiers from someone who stated she also sent them to the Italian president and other illustrious figures in protest against a person who was persecuting her. She was sending them to me, she said, because each week in my L’Espresso column, I came out in her defense. She therefore interpreted everything I wrote as relating to her personal problem. I never tried to contradict her, as it would have been pointless, and her own grave paranoia would have done nothing to solve the Middle East crisis. Eventually, because I didn’t reply, she turned her attention on someone else, I’ve no idea who.

  The opinions expressed on Twitter have no relevance, since everyone is talking—those who believe in the appearances of Our Lady of Medjugorje, those who go to fortunetellers, those who claim that September 11 was planned by the Jews, and those who believe in Dan Brown. I’m always fascinated by the Twitter messages that appear at the bottom of the screen during television shows. They say anything and everything.

  Twitter is like a village or suburban bar. You hear the village idiot, the small landowner who reckons he’s being persecuted by the tax authority, the local doctor who resents not getting the post of professor of comparative anatomy at a big university, the passerby who has already had too much grappa, the truck driver who talks about the beautiful women he has picked up on the highway, and occasionally there is someone with a few sensible ideas. But it all ends there. Barroom gossip has never changed international politics, and it was only the Fascists who worried about it and banned the discussion of high politics in bars. On the whole, though, what the majority of people think is reflected in the statistic that emerges at the moment when, after due reflection, they vote, at which point they ignore what’s been said at the bar and vote for the views expressed by someone else.

  And so the ether of the Internet is crossed by irrelevant opinions, not least because, even though great ideas can be expressed in fewer than 140 characters, such as “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” rather more are needed to describe Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and still more to explain the meaning of E=mc2.

  Then why is Twitter being used by leading politicians, who could simply send out a press release and be quoted in newspapers and on television, reaching also the multitude who aren’t connected to the Internet? And why does the pope get a few seminarians employed by the Vatican as temps to write short summaries of what he has already said Urbi et Orbi in front of millions of television viewers? Frankly, I don’t know. Someone must have persuaded them that it all helps to stir faith among a large number of Web users. But then, apart from politicians and the pope, why does anyone else use Twitter?

  Perhaps to feel important.

  2013

  The loss of privacy

  Privacy is one of the problems of our time—it concerns more or less everyone. Privacy means, roughly, very roughly, that we are all entitled to go about our business without the rest of the world—and, in particular, agencies linked to the organs of power—knowing what we’re doing. There are of course institutions that try to protect privacy. And so it’s all the more worrying that it’s possible out there to discover through our credit cards what we’ve been buying, which hotel we’ve stayed at, and where we’ve dined. The same is true with telephone tapping, except in cases where it’s essential for identifying criminals; indeed, Vodafone has recently warned that agents from every country can find out more or less secretly whom we are telephoning and what we are saying.

  Privacy therefore seems a right that each of us should want to defend at all costs, to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in a world of Big Brother, the real Big Brother, where the universal eye can monitor all that we do or even think.

  But the question is whether people are really concerned about privacy. At one time the threat to privacy came from gossip. The fear of gossip, or the washing of dirty linen in public, came from the impact it had on our public reputation. But perhaps in the so-called liquid society, where people suffer from lack of identity and values, and have no points of reference, the only means for obtaining social recognition is through “being seen” at all costs.

  And so a woman today who goes out and sells herself, who at one time would have tried to keep her vocation hidden from her family and neighbors perhaps by describing herself as an “escort,” happily performs her role in public and even appears on television; the couples who once jealously guarded their differences now take part in trash broadcasts, telling everyone about their adultery and unfaithfulness, to public applause; on the train, our neighbor yells into his cell phone about what he thinks of his sister-in-law and what his tax consultant ought to be doing; those under criminal investigation, instead of withdrawing to the countryside until the wave of scandal has died down, now generally prefer to appear in public with a smile on their face, since it’s better to be a dishonest celebrity than an honest nonentity.

  A recent article by Zygmunt Bauman in La Repubblica reported that the social networks (especially Facebook), instruments for keeping an eye on other people’s thoughts and emotions, are being used by the organs of power, but with the enthusiastic endorsement of those taking part. Bauman also talks about a “confessional society, promoting public self-exposure to the rank of the prime and easiest available, as well as arguably the most potent and only truly proficient proof of social existence.” In other words, for the first time in the history of mankind, those who are being spied upon are helping the spies to make their work easier, and gain satisfaction from being observed as they live, even if at times they are behaving like criminals or idiots.

  It is also true that, as soon as everyone is capable of knowing everything about everyone, and everyone identifies with the sum of the inhabitants of the planet, the excess of information can produce only confusion, noise, and silence. But this ought to worry the spies, whereas those being spied upon think it’s a good thing that their friends, their neighbors, and perhaps their enemies know their most intimate secrets, as this is the only way they feel themselves to be a living and active part of the social body.

  2014

  The Old and the Young

  The average lifespan

  I wonder whether many Italians remember this poem by Edmondo De Amicis:

  Beauty is not always canceled out by time

  Or marred by toil and fever;

  My mother is sixty and past her prime,

  Yet more beautiful I think than ever.

  It’s a hymn not to female beauty but to filial devotion. A devotion that ought now to be shifted toward the bounds of ninety years, since a woman of sixty, provided she’s in good health, is still lively and active—and, with a little plastic surgery, can look twenty years younger. Yet I remember asking myself as a child whether it was right to go on living beyond sixty, since it would be terrible to end up weak, dribbling, and senile in an old people’s home. And thinking about the year 2000, I imagined, with Dante in mind, that I might live to seventy, and therefore till 2002, but it seemed such a remote conjecture, since rarely at that time did people reach so venerable an age.

  I was reminded of this a few years ago when I met Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was then one hundred. He
had traveled a long way for a conference, and was tucking into his meal with gusto. I asked him how he was, and he replied with an almost mournful smile that his legs were getting creaky. I felt like thumping him for his cheerful impudence. Indeed, he remained in excellent health for another two years.

  We continue to think we are living in an age when technology is making great strides forward each day; we wonder where globalization will eventually lead us; but less often do we consider that the greatest advance achieved by humanity is in prolonging the average lifespan. After all, the idea that mankind could control nature was once vaguely understood by the troglodyte who managed to make a fire, not to mention our more advanced ancestor who had invented the wheel. Ideas about the future construction of a flying machine were put forward by Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, and Cyrano de Bergerac; the prospect of increasing the speed of travel was apparent from the invention of steam power; the advent of electricity could be foreseen back in the days of Alessandro Volta. But people for centuries had been dreaming in vain about the elixir of long life and the fount of eternal youth. In the Middle Ages there were excellent windmills, still good today for producing alternative energy, but a church was the place for pilgrims looking for the miracle of reaching the age of forty.

  We landed on the Moon more than thirty years ago and cannot yet get to Mars, but at the time of the lunar landing many people of seventy had reached the end of life, whereas today, heart attack and cancer aside, it’s not unreasonable to hope to reach ninety. In short, the great progress—if we want to call it progress—has been in the field of life expectancy more than in the field of the computer. Computers had been heralded by Pascal’s calculating machine, and Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, which was then a good age. There again, Alexander the Great and Catullus died at thirty-three, Mozart at thirty-six, Chopin at thirty-nine, Spinoza at forty-five, Saint Thomas Aquinas at forty-nine, Shakespeare and Fichte at fifty-two, Descartes at fifty-four, and Hegel at the ripe old age of sixty-one.

  Many of the problems we face today result from the extension of the average lifespan. I’m not talking about pensions. The enormous migration from the third world to Western countries is surely due to millions of people hoping to find food, work, and all that cinema and television promise, but they are also hoping to reach a world in which people live longer—and in any event to escape from one where they die too young. And yet, though I don’t have the figures at hand, I believe the amount we spend on geriatric research and preventive medicine is infinitely lower than what we spend on military technology and information. Yet we know more than enough about how to destroy a city and how to move information around cheaply, whereas we still have no exact idea about how to reconcile collective well-being, the future of young people, global overpopulation, and the prolongation of life.

  Young people might think that progress is what allows them to send text messages from their phone or fly at low cost to New York. But the amazing fact, and the unresolved problem, is that they plan, if all goes well, to reach adulthood at forty, whereas their ancestors became adults at sixteen.

  Certainly we have to thank the Lord, or our lucky stars, that we are living longer, but we have to regard this not just as a self-evident fact, but as one of the most dramatic problems of our time.

  2003

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair?

  Hegel observed that only with Christianity did the artistic portrayal of pain and horror make its first appearance. “Forms of Greek beauty,” he said, “cannot be used to portray Christ flagellated, crowned with thorns . . . crucified, dying.” He was wrong, because the Greek world wasn’t just white marble Venuses, but also the punishment of Marsyas, the anguish of Oedipus, and the murderous passion of Medea. All the same, in Christian painting and sculpture there is no shortage of faces disfigured with pain, notwithstanding the sadism of Mel Gibson. In any event, Hegel reminds us, thinking in particular of early German and Flemish painting, that deformity triumphs when Jesus’s persecutors appear.

  Someone recently pointed out that in a famous painting of the Passion, by Hieronymus Bosch in Ghent, two of the hideous torturers would send many of today’s rock singers and their young imitators mad with envy: one with a double piercing on his chin and the other with his face pierced all over with metal gewgaws. Except that Bosch wanted in this way to produce a sort of manifestation of evil, anticipating the belief of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso that those who tattooed and interfered with their bodies were innate delinquents, whereas today one might have feelings of distaste for youngsters with beads on their tongues, but it would be, if nothing else, statistically wrong to consider them genetically defective.

  If we then think that many of these same young people swoon over the “classic” beauty of George Clooney or Nicole Kidman, it becomes clear that they follow their parents, who, on the one hand, buy cars and televisions designed according to the Renaissance canons of the golden ratio or crowd the Uffizi Gallery to experience Stendhal syndrome, while, on the other hand, they get their entertainment from splatter movies where walls are covered with brain matter, buy dinosaurs or other toy monsters for their children, and go to happenings where artists pierce their hands, torture their limbs, and mutilate their genitals.

  Not that parents or children are rejecting all things to do with beauty in preference for what in previous centuries was considered hideous. That was perhaps what the futurists were doing when they sought to shock the bourgeoisie by proclaiming, “Let us boldly create ugliness in literature,” and what Aldo Palazzeschi was doing in Il controdolore (1913) when he suggested giving children a healthy education in ugliness by letting them have, as toys, “puppets that are hunchbacked, blind, gangrenous, crippled, consumptive, syphilitic, that mechanically cry, shout, complain, that have attacks of epilepsy, plague, cholera, hemorrhages, hemorrhoids, discharges, madness, that faint, gasp, die.” Quite simply, people today still enjoy certain kinds of classic beauty, and appreciate a good-looking child, or a fine landscape, or a Greek statue; and then, at other times, they gain pleasure from what had once been seen as intolerably ugly.

  Ugliness is indeed sometimes chosen as the new model for beauty, as happens in cyborg “philosophy.” In William Gibson’s early novels, a human being in whom various organs had been replaced by mechanical or electrical equipment could still be seen as representing a disturbing vision of the future. Today, however, certain radical feminists propose that sexual distinctions can be overcome through the creation of neutral, postorganic, or transhuman bodies, and Donna Haraway has launched the slogan “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

  According to some, this means that the postmodern world has removed all contradiction between beauty and ugliness. It’s not even a matter of repeating with the witches in Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The two values, they argue, have simply merged, losing their distinctive characteristics.

  But is it true? And are certain forms of behavior among young people and artists just phenomena of marginal significance, celebrated by a minority of the world’s population? On television we see children dying of hunger and reduced to skeletons with distended stomachs, we learn of women raped by intruders, we hear about human bodies tortured, while, on the other hand, constantly returning before us are the not-too-distant images of other living skeletons destined for the gas chamber. Only yesterday we saw limbs torn apart by the explosion of a skyscraper or an aircraft in flight, and we live in terror that this might also happen to us tomorrow. Each of us knows that these things are gruesome, and no awareness of the relativity of aesthetic values can persuade us to experience them as an object of pleasure.

  Perhaps, then, cyborg, splatter, The Thing from Another World, and disaster movies are all superficial manifestations, hyped by the mass media, through which we exorcise a far deeper horror that besieges us, terrifies us, and which we desperately want to ignore, pretending that everything is a sham.

  2006

  Thirteen years misspe
nt

  The other day an interviewer asked me, as many do, which book has had the greatest influence on my life. If, over the course of my entire life, just one book had influenced me more than any other, I’d be an idiot. There are books that were crucial in my twenties and others that defined my thirties, and I impatiently await the book that will sweep me away when I reach a hundred. Another impossible question is, Who has really taught you something in your life? I never know how to answer, unless I were to say my mother and father, since at every juncture of my life someone has taught me something. They might have been those close to me or some dear departed friend, like Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, or Charles Sanders Peirce.

  In any event, I can say that, apart from books, there have been lessons that have certainly changed my life. The first came from Signorina Bellini, my wonderful junior high school teacher who, as homework for the following day, used to give us a word, such as “hen” or “steamship,” that we had to use as the starting point for a thought or a story. One day, in the enthusiasm of the moment, I said I would talk there and then on any subject she chose. She looked at her desk and said “notebook.” In retrospect, I could have spoken about a journalist’s notebook or an explorer’s travel diary, but instead I leapt boldly onto the teacher’s platform and froze. Signorina Bellini taught me on that occasion never to be too sure of my own strengths.