Nothing makes noise

The End Of Digital Age

TAG: technology internet Umberto Eco

Strange times we are living in, this "Information Age" I mean. Not so long ago, only in last two decades, we observed an extreme leap in our civilization. Our lives are digitilized so to speak. It's quite interesting to see how smoothly we adapted ourselves to this technological development. Computers started to play a very important role in our lives and the discovery of Internet changed quite drastically the perception of "getting information" (I'd written somethings about this while ago; you can check them here and here if you want). Of course, we humans become a technological animal since we learnt to use "tools'. And now, at this step of our evolution, we are entering in a new era. Our technology served everything to us -and still serving-, we become almost superhuman so to speak. Highly sophisticated, developed, powerful but also extremely vulnerable, alienated and lonely we become (But I don't want to discuss about modern-man's problems right now, maybe later)

But there was a splinter thought which scratched my brain that I read sometime ago on journalist Ali Işıngör's website. He made some comparison's with library's and search engine's but mentioned more things, I'll try to translate and sum it up a bit. Internet effects the way we communicate but it also changes our way of collecting and learning information. Search engines and -google of course- are an indispensable medium to gather knowledge (it's open to discussion of course). Personally I don't believe either that search engines -or internet- could provide a sophisticated knowledge. I prefer to visit libraries or special old, antic book stores to search "real" information which you can't find in any search engine! But I don't want to compare the search engines with libraries, it's ridicilous to make that comparison. Our "Digital Information Age Revolution" may have changed many things and made easy for us to get information but we don't get more than short, filtered, encyclopedical pieces of knowledge. It is absurd to believe that last 15 years developments will provide suddenly the 5000 years of human knowledge to everyone.

But it is also true that we depend more and more on Internet. Even the small kids do their home work via internet, univercity students prepare their thesis with copy paste, information gets compact, short and becomes an easily consumable package. To be honest, our civilization and human knowledge slowly shift in to the cyberspace, day by day. We are aware of it but as a natural human behaviour we adapt ourselves to these changes. And here is the thought he mentioned that scratched my brain (ironically I read it on the net):

It was a remark made by Umberto Eco. He is a wellknown professor of semiotics and philosophy of literature but also an expert on middle ages. He shows as one of the main reasons for the middle age, the dark era in human history, a kind of book worm (Stegobium Paniceum I guess). This tiny insect is highly populated in 7th and 8th ages by eating old hand written parchments. And these ages are the time that most of the handwritten, valuable books (jewels of the human knowledge of the time let's say) are disappeared forever from human history, also because of wars, exiles etc. It's indeed the Dark Age of humanity.

And this is the interesting point that Umberto Eco asks us: "If we consider the computer viruses as the worms and insects of the 20th century, can't we say that our knowledge and civilization which shifts more and more in to the digital space is under a risk?"

This is really an interesting point which we should think about. Besides the human knowledge is shifting in to the cyberspace, all our financial, genetical, personal data are moving onto the digital space as well. It's a fact that our lives become digital, we are entering to a new era. Can a powerful computer virus (a worm!), much stronger and destructive than we have ever seen, bring us to a digital "dark" age one day?

What if?

Noise made by . nothing .