What exactly is this thing called Culture?


Culture is a word we all use and understand. At least it seems to be so? But when we use the word culture in the phrase "Digital re-Discovery of Culture", what is that we mean... exactly?

<quote>
Gloria Origgi: When asked, in varying contexts, about the possibilities and risks of Internet, you have often evoked the problem of filtering information.
Umberto Eco: It is the fundamental problem of the Web. The whole of the history of culture has consisted in the establishment of filters. Culture transmits memory, but not all memory: it filters. It filters well, or badly, but if anything what has allowed us to interact socially is the fact that we have had all of these filters. Then of course the scientist or scholar can put in question these filters, but that is another matter. With the Web, everyone is in the situation of having to filter information that is so vast, and so unsustainable, that if it isn't filtered it cannot be absorbed. It is filtered unsystematically, so what is the primary metaphysical risk of this business? That we'll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopaedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopaedias is a society in which there is no more communication. Moreover, the filters we resort to result from  our having trusted what we call "the community of learning" that, throughout the centuries, through debate and discussion, gives the guarantee, if anything else, that the filtering is reasonable; so imagine what would be an individual filtering performed by anyone, for example by a fourteen-year-old boy. We could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild.
</quote>
Authors and Authority
Umberto Eco
http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=11 {20051019}

This is interesting! Eco was not thinking well. The fourteen-year-old (boy) would quickly discover via-a-vis all other fourteen-year-olds just how sensible or not his filtering and judgment was. Hence, we may reason that the filters of the past are not at all appropriate for the filters of the now. The filters of the now are more democratic and inevitably authority (and better judgment) will emerge/arise.

Posted: Wed - October 19, 2005 at 11:11 a.m.          

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