L’intellettuale come interprete: Umberto Eco e la teoria delle “caldaie” mediatiche

According to Umberto Eco, the spread of digital technologies and the Internet is an issue concerning the humanities because it involves the structure of our knowledge. The web is a medium where many writings proliferate chaotically, without a hierarchy. It is a rhizomatic space similar to a big library, as Eco puts it. Moreover, according to Eco, the web needs to be filtered because of its exorbitant amount of data which no one can order: it is like Funes el memorioso, the title character of Borges’s novel, who had a prodigious memory but was hopelessly stupid. In a society undermined by divisions and entropies, the intellectual can only accentuate his function as interpreter, translator or mediator. It is no coincidence that the latest Eco insists more and more often on the ability of culture to “hold together”, on the transmissibility value of our “encyclopedias”.