Umberto Eco "An epidemic of electronic eye"

[TXForester]

Sure it is a rant, but it isn't a rant against technology. The rant is against separating yourself from the world by use of the technology.

I like to photograph airshows. I found I'm worrying about missing a good shot, and I'm missing the show. No big deal with the modern aircraft, but the shows I go to have a lot of historically important planes. When, if ever, will see them again? The camera doesn't record the sound of radial motors. The camera doesn't record the feel of the sun on my face as I look up at the planes. I miss the conversation with the guy standing next to me when the camera is at my eye.

 

[benlees]

I see no anti- tech rant here. Some forgettable generalizations regarding the behaviour of "educated" people and the young seems to be the bulk of the passage.

 

[f6andBthere]

Sure it is a rant, but it isn't a rant against technology. The rant is against separating yourself from the world by use of the technology.

I like to photograph airshows. I found I'm worrying about missing a good shot, and I'm missing the show. No big deal with the modern aircraft, but the shows I go to have a lot of historically important planes. When, if ever, will see them again? The camera doesn't record the sound of radial motors. The camera doesn't record the feel of the sun on my face as I look up at the planes. I miss the conversation with the guy standing next to me when the camera is at my eye.

This a sore point for me. I have a son (adult) who spends his time alternating between his X-Box (killing aliens, gangsters etc) internet, television, and android phone. Little does he suspect there's a real world out there somewhere!

Surely there has to be a point somewhere where a backlash against this lack of real communication/involvement will occur.

 

[Richard G]

A little florid but he makes a valid point.
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary place with a palpable effect on those who enter it. I have only exerienced the same collective hush when approaching the huge rock formation known as The Olgas in central Australia. In both places I saw people's shoulders relax, their cameras, most of them, held loosely in the hand, forgotten and irrelevant.

 

[Bobfrance]

I think those taking images of events they are attending with mobile phones are collecting social currency. They post the images onto other social networking websites with the intention of gaining peer recognition and increasing their social standing within their chosen group.

Surely as photographers we all do it to varying degrees...

 

[Pickett Wilson]

They are collecting moments. Ten thousand moments occupies so little space these days and costs nothing.

 

[Lss]

To walk and chew gum? Can't be done.

 

[Highway 61]

Lots of miscellaneous thoughts about this article. Many generalizations, some valid points, some stupid ones (Eco might have thrown his camera away rather after having realized that his own photos weren't good than just for looking at the real world differently and deeply).

Cell phones are today's common photo tools, but if you look at some photos of artistic or intellectual shows which happened during the 1950's and 1960's, you'll see a large crowd of TLR's and LF cameras with large flashguns heads over them - this wasn't less annoying than this armada of cellphones flashes.

People gathering around the main "big things" in museums to tremendously take photos or having themselves shot next to the masterpieces isn't a new phenomenon, it has nothing to do with cellphones or technology.

And I rather prefer to see people rushing into museums than not doing it.

There would be many things to write about this article, which mixes many concepts (education, photography, modernity, technology, how to perceive the world and the human beings), into a kind of strange and finally rather unpleasant soap, but what can be said is that this is quite expected to read this under Eco's signature. This is following his usual mental line of elites versus masses dichotomy.

Some other great arts and history specialists his age, like Paul Veyne, don't have the same problems with modernity and technology, and the use of modern communication tools.

And there is that very trendy thought about other people being unable to emphatize with others' suffering while he, Eco, can do it because he decided to stop taking pictures long ago. Stupid.

Robert Doisneau once related a similar accident episode and how he reacted to it as a confirmed and already famous photographer - this was much more sensitive and subtile than this cliché.

 

[Pickett Wilson]

The underlying enabler of all of this photo excess is social networking. Once that fades, so will the interest of the masses in cell phone photography. One thing I've learned in 62 years of living is that all human enterprise has a foundation of sand.

 

[Highway 61]

Absolutely.

I'll just add that, IMO, had Eco lived in the XVIIIth century, he would very likely have written the same kind of article in some printed elites-targeted gazette of that time, complaining about mass people attending his conferences while being drunk, speaking loud, stinking, being dirty, or even getting into the conference room with animals, prostitutes, and the like.

If you think of how people are said to have behaved while Mozart's operas were first being played in popular Czech and Austrian theaters... 😉

 

[DominikDUK]

Absolutely.

I'll just add that, IMO, had Eco lived in the XVIIIth century, he would very likely have written the same kind of article in some printed elites-targeted gazette of that time, complaining about mass people attending his conferences while being drunk, speaking loud, stinking, being dirty, or even getting into the conference room with animals, prostitutes, and the like.

If you think of how people are said to have behaved while Mozart's operas were first being played in popular Czech and Austrian theaters... 😉

Yeah well Mozart was more a pop/rock star and opera stages were pop/rock music stages and not the things we consider them to be today, the audience didn't really behave that much different than people of today behave at Rock concerts. Furthermore If people would have misbehaved at an academy/university in the 18th century they would have faced severe consequences being dismissed from the University would have been the least of their worries.

I don't read his rant as anti technological but more about the antisocial behavior or disconnection of people and not just of today. His thesis is supported by the fact that many photographers say that the viewfinder helps them disconnect from events and that it acts as a shield against the outside the viewfinder world.

 

[zauhar]

I was at the local punk flea market last weekend (fellow RFFer Jim Shulman also showed up). There is a class of young people who are less wrapped up in the virtualized world, who gravitate to the material world. They like books, bikes, vinyl and old electronics. They give me some hope for the future. I am sure they all have cell phones (why not, given that they are dirt cheap) but i saw them all busy talking to friends or browsing, I didn't see anyone glued to a screen.

They also like film, by the way, even if by the lomo route.

My generation should embrace these kids, but I sense that is not the case. They look like bums (and some live that way), many are not interested in college. In my view, they recognize the ugly trap that modern life has evolved into, and they are consciously or unconsciously seeking an alternative.

Randy

 

[zauhar]

Absolutely.

I'll just add that, IMO, had Eco lived in the XVIIIth century, he would very likely have written the same kind of article in some printed elites-targeted gazette of that time, complaining about mass people attending his conferences while being drunk, speaking loud, stinking, being dirty, or even getting into the conference room with animals, prostitutes, and the like.

If you think of how people are said to have behaved while Mozart's operas were first being played in popular Czech and Austrian theaters... 😉

Prostitutes and animals? How can I get invited to that party?!

 

[Highway 61]

I don't read his rant as anti technological but more about the antisocial behavior or disconnection of people and not just of today.

Yes.

But we can object to Eco that there were some times in the past during which people had a very social behaviour as well as a very strong connection to what they were living ; and this often leaded to actual cataclysms with a lot of violence and horror.

If one has received some solid educational basis and a good sense of the fundamental values in life, by no means can the use of the cell phone or the Internet just blow all of that away.

I now read that article as something disconnected as well. Eco knows for sure that he's famous enough through his books, radio broadcasts, universities conferences, all of them being events when he's not annoyed by masses flashing him.

So what's his point ? He's very famous, kind of a star of the intellectuals, so that people attending his vulgarization conferences want to share what they are doing through the Internet because they're proud to have been close to him once ? What a big deal, uh.

I regularly use to attend to conferences, concerts, movies, exhibitions, talk-shows, theatre plays : still no cell phones flashing there... people aren't as bad as what he writes they are. And the young aren't worse than the previous generation (at the very least they are the result of what the previous generation did...).

 

[newsgrunt]

One could speculate that the anger that Umberto Eco feels could also stem from the fact that he feels people are more interested in his picture as a celebrity writer and intellectual rather than what he has to say.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

 

[DominikDUK]

Yes.

But we can object to Eco that there were some times in the past during which people had a very social behaviour as well as a very strong connection to what they were living ; and this often leaded to actual cataclysms with a lot of violence and horror.

If one has received some solid educational basis and a good sense of the fundamental values in life, by no means can the use of the cell phone or the Internet just blow all of that away.

I now read that article as something disconnected as well. Eco knows for sure that he's famous enough through his books, radio broadcasts, universities conferences, all of them being events when he's not annoyed by masses flashing him.

So what's his point ? He's very famous, kind of a star of the intellectuals, so that people attending his vulgarization conferences want to share what they are doing through the Internet because they're proud to have been close to him once ? What a big deal, uh.

I regularly use to attend to conferences, concerts, movies, exhibitions, talk-shows, theatre plays : still no cell phones flashing there... people aren't as bad as what he writes they are. And the young aren't worse than the previous generation (at the very least they are the result of what the previous generation did...).

His point is that people use their cameras instead of their brains to record events.

 

[Highway 61]

His point is that people use their cameras instead of their brains to record events.

First thing to do would be to give out a good definition of what an event is.

People extensively using cameras aren't mandatory decerebrated frogs.

Even if there is an actual values scale of how to use a camera (and an actual values scale of what a camera is).

For discussing technologies, modernity, new technologies, communication through machines, new faces of the barbarism, there are better writeups than what Eco wrote in this text, which is very schematic and binary, and can be summed-up to a classical "Things were better before".

 

[Pickett Wilson]

"His point is that people use their cameras instead of their brains to record events."

Yes, and I think that distinction is important. I always use a recorder when I do an interview, but I also take notes and engage directly with what the person is saying. I have seen new reporters who think the recorder exempts them from having to pay attention during an event.

 

[semi-ambivalent]

The camera might do justice to laughter, but can only degrade sorrow.

- Auden

(From memory, perhaps incorrectly.)

 

[micromontenegro]

"His point is that people use their cameras instead of their brains to record events."

Yes again. And probably the pivotal point for us photogs (that him, as a non-photog fails to see), is that you can use both at the same time. Not only that, but using the camera can enhance the brain record, as Roger pointed out.

I often experience both sides of the coin: moments recorded both by my camera and my brain, that distinctly pop out of my memory, and moments obscured in my memory by the fact that I was just taking pictures and not experiencing them