by Umberto Eco
But I think there’s one effective way of exploiting the defects of the Internet for educational purposes. For a class exercise, homework, or university essay, give the following subject: “Find a series of unreliable arguments available on the Internet, and explain why they are unreliable.” Here is research that demands critical skill and an ability to compare different sources, and that enables students to practice the art of discrimination.
2006
What’s the point of having a teacher?
Among the wealth of articles about the bullying of teachers, I read one account that I wouldn’t describe as bullying but at most as impertinence, though a singular impertinence. A pupil, in order to annoy a teacher, had asked, “Excuse me, but in the age of the Internet, what’s the point of having you?”
What the pupil was saying had a grain of truth in it, and it’s a question that has worried teachers for at least twenty years now. At one time the school certainly had to educate, but above all it had to transmit basic facts, from multiplication tables at primary school, to information about the capital of Madagascar in junior high school, to the date of the Thirty Years’ War in high school. With the advent not only of the Internet, but of television before it, and also radio, and perhaps even with the arrival of cinema, children learned many of these basic facts outside the school curriculum.
My father didn’t know that Hiroshima was in Japan, or that there was an island called Guadalcanal; he had a vague idea about Dresden, and knew about India only through the stories of Emilio Salgari. Back in the 1940s, I could pick these things up from the radio and from the maps in newspapers, whereas my children could watch television and see pictures of the Norwegian fjords or the Gobi Desert, how bees pollinated flowers, what a Tyrannosaurus rex looked like; and they know everything about the ozone layer, koala bears, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Perhaps they don’t know exactly what stem cells are, but they’ve heard of them, though in my time it meant nothing even to the science teacher. So what’s the point of having teachers?
I said that the question posed by the student had a grain of truth, because the teacher’s task, above all, is formation as well as information. What transforms a class into a good class is not the facts and figures it has absorbed, but the continual dialogue, the exchange of opinions, the discussion about what is being taught in school and what is happening outside it. Television, of course, tells us what is going on in Iraq, but only the school can explain why something has been going on there since way back to the Mesopotamian civilization, and not, for example, in Greenland. It might be argued that there are experts who tell us this on current affairs programs, in which case the school must discuss what has been said on those programs.
The mass media tell us many things, and even transmit values, but schools should know how to talk about the way these values are transmitted, and to assess the tone and strength of the arguments put forward in print and on television. And then there is the investigation of information relayed by the media; for example, who but the teacher can correct the errors in English pronunciation people pick up from television?
But our pupil wasn’t suggesting that he didn’t need the teacher because he now had radio and television to tell him where Timbuktu is, or what has been said about cold fusion. In other words, he wasn’t telling the teacher that his role had been taken over by the disjointed discussions that circulate daily in a casual and disorderly fashion in the media. The student was saying that the Internet, the Great Mother of all Encyclopedias, is where we can find Syria, cold fusion, the Thirty Years’ War, and endless discussion on the largest odd number. He was telling him that the information available online is far larger and deeper than a teacher’s knowledge. Yet he was ignoring one fundamental point: the Internet tells us almost everything apart from how to search, filter, select, accept, or reject that information.
Everyone is capable of storing new information, so long as they have a good memory. But deciding what is worth remembering, and what is not, is a subtle art. This marks the difference between those who have passed through formal education, however poorly, and those who are self-taught, however brilliantly.
The crucial problem is that not even teachers themselves know how to teach the art of being selective, certainly not in every branch of knowledge. But at least they know they ought to know, and if they can’t give exact instructions on how to be selective, they can be the model of someone who tries to compare and judge, case by case, what the Internet has to offer. And lastly, they can strive daily to put into a proper context what the Internet transmits merely in alphabetical order when it tells us, for instance, that Tamerlane and monocotyledons exist but doesn’t explain the relationship between these two notions.
Only schools can bring sense to these relationships, and if the school doesn’t know how, then it must equip itself to do so. Otherwise, the teaching of the Internet at school is as pointless as the braying of a donkey that never reaches the ears of heaven.
2007
The fifth estate
At one time we were accustomed to two principles. One was encapsulated in a savory Sicilian saying, Megghiu cumannari c’a fottiri, which might prudishly be translated as “It’s better to exercise power than to fornicate.” The other was that men of power, if they wished to indulge in sexual relations, aimed for the likes of the Countess of Castiglione, Mata Hari, Sarah Bernhardt, or Marilyn Monroe.
It’s surprising that many politicians and businessmen now let themselves be corrupted not so much by joint interests in the Panama Canal as by the services of professional women who are highly capable but charge no more than 1,000 euros a session, a lot for a casual worker but a great deal less than she would have charged at the time of Madame de Pompadour. If they have other tastes, they aim not for the refined Alcibiades but for a transsexual scarred by misfortunes in the narrow streets of Piraeus.
But that’s not all. Many men are looking for positions of command not because they consider them to be better than sexual positions, but for the prime purpose of trying out sexual positions they’ve never tested before. Let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean the governors of bygone times were insensitive to the pleasures of the flesh. Italian postwar leaders such as Alcide De Gasperi and Enrico Berlinguer had accustomed us to another kind of austerity; the most that Palmiro Togliatti had dared was to get divorced. But Julius Caesar had it off indiscriminately with Roman centurions, noblewomen, and queens of Egypt; the Roi Soleil had a string of favorites; King Victor Emmanuel II had the beautiful Rosina; and best not mention President Kennedy. Nevertheless, these great men seemed to consider the woman, or the youth, as providing a warrior’s repose. In other words, he had first to conquer Bactria, crush Vercingetorix, win victory from the Alps to the pyramids, and bring unity to Italy. Sex was a bonus, like a martini straight up at the end of a tiring day.
The powerful men of today, however, seem to aspire in the first instance to an evening of showgirls, and to hell with great enterprises—or with the Great Enterprise.
The heroes of the past obtained their excitement from reading Plutarch, whereas those of today zap around the soft-porn TV channels after midnight or get their thrills surfing online. I went on the Internet and did a search for “Padre Pio”: 1,400,000 sites. Not bad. I did a search for “Jesus”: 4,830,000 sites. The Nazarene is still way ahead. Then I did a search for “porn” and came up with 130,000,000—yes, one hundred and thirty million—websites. Thinking that “porn” was too generic in comparison to “Jesus,” I decided to make a comparison between “porn” and “religion.” “Religion” gives just over 9,000,000 sites, more than twice that of “Jesus,” which seems politically correct, but minuscule compared with “porn.”
What do 130,000,000 porn sites contain? Among our options, we find: Anal, Asiatic, Latino, Fetish, Orgy, Bisexual, Cunnilingus, German (sic), Lesbian, Masturbation, Voyeur (we spy on someone who is spying on a carnal congress), and then the various forms of incest—father and daughter, brother and sister, mother an
d son, father, mother, son, and daughter together, godmother and godson, but also grandson and granny, and MILF, which means Mother I’d Like to Fuck (see Wikipedia), generally containing attractive women between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Just think: Balzac gave the title A Woman of Thirty to a story about female decline.
Now, pornography can provide an outlet for someone who for whatever reason can’t have live sex, or it can help a rather jaded couple to revive their own relationship, and in that respect it has a positive purpose. But it can stir the imagination of those who are repressed, leading them to give vent to their instincts through rape, sexual attack, and assault. Moreover, pornography persuades you that a 1,000-euro escort can do things that not even Phryne, the ancient Greek courtesan, would have imagined.
But let’s not limit ourselves to the thirty percent of Italians who use the Internet; the remaining seventy percent can see pictures every day on their television screens that are ten times more enticing than those sights that only Milanese grandees could get in the 1940s, when they would pay dearly to see the saucy performances of Wanda Osiris. Normal people today are far more conscious of sex than their grandparents. Think of poor parish priests: at one time all they saw was their housekeeper, and all they read was L’Osservatore Romano, whereas now they see skimpily clad girls swaying their hips every evening.
Is it inconceivable that this relentless solicitation of desire is also having an effect on those in public office, causing a mutation of their kind, and changing the very purposes of their social behavior?
2010
A further note
It has been said that a sociologist is someone who, in a striptease club, studies the audience and not the stage. I have no means of studying those who look at porn sites, let alone studying the whole stage. The number of porn sites, according to Internet surveys, seems impossible to gauge. According to a 2003 Web survey, the number of such sites was said to be 260,000,000, but that seems an exaggeration—perhaps they’ve counted sites where Carroll Baker appears en déshabillé as being pornography. Choosing just one of them, perhaps the most visited, I saw 71 categories, each containing on average thousands of videos. Considering that the site is updated daily, though it’s possible to view previous material, we can reckon it contains 170,000 videos. From here we can gain access to another 21 sites, so I arrived at a figure of 3,570,000, taking into account repetitions, and that some sites are not large. This doesn’t get me to 260,000,000, and perhaps 3,000,000 is on the low side, but this is presumably the extent of the phenomenon.
Not having had the opportunity to visit 3,000,000 sites—ars longa, vita brevis—I went by an almost random sample and have made an observation that I cannot claim has scientific validity but which I myself find persuasive. Making it clear that I lingered only on the female faces—those of the men are irrelevant, since with men the camera tends to dwell on their reproductive equipment—I noted that most of the girls involved in these erotic games display a poor set of teeth when they open their mouth, which they do often, and not just to smile or groan with satisfaction. Generally the incisors are all right, but the canines are crooked and small, not to mention the irregular molars and the unsightly fillings on display.
The first thing Hollywood does when it launches a new actress is to get her teeth fixed. But the work costs a lot of money, as anyone going to a dentist in Bucharest is also aware. So a large proportion of the girls taking part in porn videos, who are often beautiful or at least attractive, come from a poor social background and don’t have the money for a dentist. I think they have little hope of making much from their services, since the statistics tell us that supply is high, so the money they earn cannot be astronomical: the Web tells me once again that the more popular girls can make up to $10,000 a month, though the season isn’t long and the real stars can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Perhaps they hope that by appearing on the computer screen some Hollywood magnate will notice them and take the trouble to fix their teeth. Or do they perhaps realize they won’t get to Hollywood with bad teeth and are resigned to playing erotic games in the minor leagues.
This tells us that the immense army of full-time fornicators comes from the sexual proletariat, and therefore the business of porn production is nothing other than a form of white slavery and an exploitation of casual labor without hope.
It’s important that this be said, since visitors to porn sites often get aroused at the thought that the girls taking part do what they do out of brazenness, impudence, enjoyment, or shamelessness, making them seem more desirable. Instead, they do it out of desperation, knowing that with those teeth there is no future, only an underpaid now.
2015
Dogmatism and fallibilism
In an article that appeared in last Sunday’s Corriere della Sera, Angelo Panebianco wrote about possible examples of dogmatism in science. I basically agree with him and would like to highlight just one aspect of the question.
In short, Panebianco says that science is by definition antidogmatic because it consciously proceeds by trial and error, and because (in agreement, I would add, with Charles Sanders Peirce, who inspired Karl Popper) its implied principle is that of “fallibilism,” which means science is always ready to correct its own errors. It becomes dogmatic in its disastrous journalistic simplifications, which transform what had been a cautious research hypothesis into a miraculous discovery and firm truth. But it also risks becoming dogma when it accepts one inevitable criterion: that the culture of an age is dominated by a “paradigm,” such as that not only of Darwin or Einstein, but also of Copernicus, to which every scientist adheres so as to eradicate the follies that move outside it, including those of madmen who still claim the Sun revolves around the Earth. How do we reconcile this with the fact that innovation occurs at the precise moment when some doubt is cast on the dominant paradigm? Isn’t science acting dogmatically when it holds rigidly to a certain paradigm, perhaps to defend acquired positions of power, dismissing those who doubt the paradigm as madmen or heretics?
The question is crucial. Should paradigms always be defended or always contested? A culture, by which I mean a system of knowledge, opinions, beliefs, customs, and the historical legacy shared by a particular human group, is not just an accumulation of facts but also the result of their filtration. Culture can also throw away what is not useful or necessary. The story of culture and civilization consists of tons of information that has become buried. What is true of culture is also true of our individual lives. Borges, in his story “Funes the Memorious,” describes a character who remembers everything—every leaf he has seen on every tree, every word he has heard throughout his life, every gust of wind he has felt, every flavor he has tasted, every phrase he has read. And yet, because of this, Funes is a complete idiot, a man blocked by his inability to select and discard. Our unconscious works because it eliminates. Then, if some snag arises, we go to the psychoanalyst to recover the little that was useful to us and which we have mistakenly discarded. But all the rest has fortunately been eliminated, and our mind is the precise product of the continuity of this selective memory. If we had the mind of Funes, we would be people with no mind.
What culture and its body of paradigms does is therefore the result of a shared encyclopedia, comprising not only what has been conserved but also, so to speak, the taboo on that which is eliminated. On the basis of this shared encyclopedia there is then discussion. But for a discussion to be comprehensible to everyone, it needs to start from existing paradigms, if only to demonstrate that these paradigms no longer hold. Copernicus’s discourse would have remained incomprehensible without his negation of Ptolemy’s paradigm, which formed the background.
The Internet is like Funes. As a totality of content available in a disordered, unfiltered, unorganized manner, it enables anyone to construct their own encyclopedia, or rather their own free system of beliefs, ideas, and values, which may contain, as happens inside the heads of many human beings, the idea that water is H2O at the sa
me time as the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth. In theory, we could therefore arrive at the existence of seven billion encyclopedias, and human society would be reduced to a fractured dialogue among seven billion people who each speak a different language that only the person speaking can understand.
Fortunately this supposition is only theoretical, but that’s because the scientific community ensures that shared languages circulate, knowing that to overturn a paradigm there has to be a paradigm to overturn. Defending paradigms certainly produces the risk of dogmatism, but it is on this contradiction that the development of knowledge is based. In order to avoid rash conclusions, I agree with what was said by the scientist quoted at the end of Panebianco’s article: “I don’t know, it’s a complex phenomenon, I need to think about it.”
2010
Marina, Marina, Marina
I received the following email: “You are the one I want to know well. Ciao. My nominative is Marina, 30 years me. I saw you profile and decided to produce to you. How you are doing? I have a marvelous state of mind. I am looking for an individual for serious relation, what type of link that you are searching? I am very interested to know you, but believe it be better if you and me corrispond by email. If you are stimulated to do the comprehension with me, here my email address: [email protected]. Or me email your email address I will write you circular. One cannot start I hope without the attention and the epistle you write me. I would be very please to collect your opinion. I wait the hour your missive in the mail. Your Marina.”
The photo attached shows a creature worthy of Miss Universe, ready to be invited to an elegant dinner by a prime minister, so the question is why a young girl as attractive as Marina is reduced to looking for a “serious” relationship on the Internet. Maybe the photo has been taken from some online site and hidden behind Marina is a character who might interest Roberto Saviano, though who knows? Yet since there are plenty of gullible people around, I’m leaving her address in the message so that anyone who wishes can hasten into an affectionate correspondence with her. Needless to say, I accept no responsibility for the consequences. Judging by the number of people watching teleshopping or horoscope channels and the many voters in the previous elections, Marina can hope for a great many virtual followers.