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ISSN 1720-5298
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3459 copertinaNew:A 170 mastro copertine 9-09-2010 17:17 Pagina 1

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RlVlSTA Dl SENlOTlA
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RlVlSTA Dl SENlOTlA nuova sere
Direzione / Direction
Ugo Volli
Comitato di consulenza
scientica / Scientic committee
Kristian Bankov
PierreMarie Beaude
Denis Bertrand
Omar Calabrese
Donatella Di Cesare
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Ruggero Eugeni
Guido Ferraro
Bernard Jackson
Eric Landowski
Giovanni Manetti
Diego Marconi
Gianfranco Marrone
Jos Augusto Mouro
Jos Maria Paz Gago
Isabella Pezzini
Marina Sbis
Frederik Stjernfelt
Peeter Torop
Eero Tarasti
Patrizia Violi
Redazione / Editor
Massimo Leone
Editori associati di questo numero /
Associated editors of this issue
Kristian Bankov, Carla Bazzanella, Pierre-Marie Beaude,
Elena Codeluppi, Cristina De Maria, Guido Ferraro,
Claudio Guerri, Stefano Jacoviello, Tarcisio Lancioni,
Roberto Mastroianni, Andrea Pascali, Maria Pia Pozzato,
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Lucio Spaziante, Andrea Tramontana, Federica Turco,
Andrea Valle, Ugo Volli, Zdzik Wasik
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Info: massimo.leone@unito.it
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Torino n. 4 del 26/02/2009
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La rivista pu essere acquistata nella sezione
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I edizione: settembre 2010
ISBN 978-88-548-3459-0
ISSN 1720-5298
Stampato per conto della casa editrice Aracne
nel mese di settembre 2010 presso la tipograa
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anonimo
Lexia is a double-blind peerreviewed journal
ANAlYSlS Ol UlTURES
UlTURES Ol ANAlYSlS
(wth the contrbuton o the Southeast European enter
or Semotc Studes New Bugaran Unversty and o
the Human Resources Deveopment entre Bugara)
edted by Nassmo leone
7
Sommario/Table of Contents



PREFAZIONE
MASSIMO LEONE ........................................................................... 11



PARTE I
I confini semiotici della cultura: tensioni ..................................... 25
PART I
The Semiotic Boundaries of Culture: Tensions......................................... 25


Al di l delle culture, le strategie della memoria
UGO VOLLI ................................................................................... 27

Machines of Culture Culture of Machines?
WINFRIED NTH ........................................................................... 41

Il punto di vista semioculturale
ANNA MARIA LORUSSO ................................................................ 59

Il controllo e la mediazione Cultura e immanenza nellOrga-
non semiotico
EDOARDO LUCATTI........................................................................ 81



PARTE II
La costruzione semiolinguistica della cultura ............................ 101
PART II
The SemioLinguistic Construction of Culture......................................... 101


Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition
KRISTIAN BANKOV ........................................................................ 103
Sommario / Table of Contents 8
Exploring Intercultural Relations from the Intersubjective
Perspectives Offered through Creative Art in Multimodal
Formats (SIIM Research Program)
ASUNCIN LPEZVARELA ........................................................... 125

Shifters in Reporting and Recollecting Analyzing Aspects of
Culture
ANITA KASABOVA ......................................................................... 147



PARTE III
Tentativi metaculturali: letteratura, arti, religioni, costume .......... 179
PART III
Metacultural Attempts: Literature, Arts, Religion, Custom ......................... 179


Laristotelismo radicale di Guido Cavalcanti come agente di
conflitto ideologico nel Duecento europeo (omaggio a Maria
Corti)
ANDREA PASCALI .......................................................................... 181

Traduzioni e interpretazioni di un testo di mistica medievale
ALESSANDRA LUCIANO.................................................................. 205

Estetica dellerrore ed autenticit nella musica elettronica
Riflessioni, e il caso dei finlandesi Nu Science
DARIO MARTINELLI ....................................................................... 217

Danze simboliche dal folclore allavaguardia: Le Sacre du
Printemps e il Petroushka da Stravinsky a Tero Saarinen
VESA MATTEO PILUDU .................................................................. 255

Alla ricerca di una metasemiotica delle culture: analisi di segni
e metasegni nella cultura e nello stile interpretativo fondamen-
talisti
JENNY PONZO ................................................................................ 275
Sommario / Table of Contents
Lexia, 56/2010
9
Analyzing Early Christianity: Structures and Functions of
Interpretation in the Canonical Gospels
LORENZO L.D. INCARDONA .......................................................... 293

Cultureobjet et Culturesujet De lanalyse de la culture la
culture de lanalyse
HAMID REZA SHAIRI ..................................................................... 307

Sotto il velo dei media. Semiotica dellhijab tra Oriente e
Occidente
SIMONA STANO ............................................................................. 327

Pragmatics of Obituary Posters in Bulgaria
BORISLAV GUEORGUIEV................................................................ 349



PARTE IV
Semiotica e politiche della cultura................................................ 367
PART IV
Semiotics and Politics of Culture........................................................... 367


What is Culturalism? The Anatomy of a Contemporary
Disease in Academia and Politics
FREDERIK STJERNFELT .................................................................. 369

Notes pour une smiotique de la culture marocaine
MOHAMED BERNOUSSI ................................................................. 401

On my Accent Signs of Belonging in Multicultural Societies
MASSIMO LEONE ........................................................................... 415



RECENSIONI / REVIEWS .......................................................... 451

Sommario / Table of Contents 10
Paul Cobley (a cura di), The Routledge Companion to Semiotics. 453
Luigi Berzano e Carlo Genova, I lifestyles nella partecipazione
religiosa ........................................................................................ 463



Note biografiche degli autori ....................................................... 469


Call for Papers:
LImmaginario............................................................................... 477

Call for papers:
The Imaginaire .............................................................................. 481


103


Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition

KRISTIAN BANKOV

Italian title: Culture della navigazione versus culture dellerudizione.

Abstract: The idea of writing this paper comes after years of observation of the cog-
nitive attitudes of our students, in particular their approach to knowledge and informa-
tion and their tactics in demonstrating their acquisition of it during various types of
exams. The backbone of the study is Ecos model of culture as encyclopedia. Even
before my interest in this concrete problem, I was struck by how Ecos notion of En-
cyclopedia, conceived in the early 1970s, predicted the structure of the information
on the Internet. My main hypothesis concerns the formation of the individual portions
of encyclopedic competence, where the advent of the internet has apparently wrought
radical transformations, evident in the students. I also use another perspective on the
same phenomenon, derived from critical sociology, about the transformation of per-
sonal identity in the younger generations. Another theoretical input comes from a
short study on the way in which search engines have evolved and on the reasons for
which Google now dominates this fundamental component of the internet the
global encyclopedia. As a conclusion I would say that the internet and its access
through the intermediation of those quasiminds which are the search engines, is
among the most important factors for the expansion of the postmodern fragmented
identity, i.e. the culture of navigation.

Keywords: semiotics; internet; encyclopaedia; Google; identity.


The idea of writing this paper comes after years of observation of
the cognitive attitudes of our students, in particular their approach to
knowledge and information and their tactics in demonstrating their
acquisition of it during various types of exams. The advent of mass
use of the internet among students in Bulgaria (about 20002002) be-
gan to change their performance in a complex way, which I shall de-
scribe later. During all that time, as a semiotician, consciously or not, I
was trying to formulate an explanation or at least a model of descrip-
tion. Now I think I have reached a sufficient level of awareness of the

New Bulgarian University.

PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 104
phenomenon in order to put it in a theoretical frame, especially after
having done some fieldwork with that purpose.
Eight or seven years ago, after some changes of the standards for
examinations at my university (New Bulgarian University Sofia,
NBU) I started to assign to hundreds of students a year the obligatory
task of writing an essay on various current topics. Very soon I realized
that students were very reluctant to write any text whatsoever them-
selves and most of the times I would receive a bricolage of texts from
the net, which topics more or less coincided with the assignment. On
one hand this was an exciting experience because I found out a lot of
interesting publications in my field of study, but on the other, this
transformed my work from a qualitative evaluation of the essays into a
mechanical plagiarism control. Already at that time the emerging
search engine Google was the best tool for my new job. Last but not
least, in November 2007 I was a visiting professor at Helsinki Univer-
sity where I taught an intensive course on Semiotics of Consumption.
There were mostly Erasmus exchange students from Italy, France,
Spain, and other countries, as well as Finns. The examination con-
sisted in a written essay and again more than half of the students sent
me papers with texts from the internet.


1. The field work

Scientific interest for that phenomenon had not yet occurred. Ac-
tually, with every new edition of the course I used increasingly con-
vincing methods of persuasion to change this students practice. And I
found out that I was opposing something far deeper than a superficial
laziness and lack of motivation. Many students started to write their
essays themselves (with modest results), but others became increas-
ingly sophisticated in inventing methods for the use of internet re-
sources, in some cases even translating articles from various lan-
guages or changing the word order of entire texts in Bulgarian. Con-
sidering the difficulty of the original task, the latter elaborations were
much more time and effort consuming than that. Yet this was what I
was thinking, with my oldfashioned academic training. It was obvi-
ous that those students were not stupid. I found myself in a state of
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
105
Peircean doubt about this issue and the fist preliminary hypotheses oc-
curred to me. Then I started to approach the phenomenon in a reflex-
ive way. My field work began two years ago when I first included
The contemporary education between the encyclopedia and the
search engine in the suggested 6 essay topics. This was a big success
because more than half of the essays were on that topic and, in addi-
tion, the plagiarized ones were below average. At the end of the spring
semester 2008/2009, I also conducted 5 long interviews with students
about their habits of using the internet. In August 2009, during my in-
tensive course on Technology of Imagination at the Fulbright sum-
mer school in Tryavna, Bulgaria, I organized a discussion with a fully
international audience of 12 students on the same topic.


2. The theoretical framework

The backbone of this study is Ecos model of culture as Encyclope-
dia. Even before my interest in this concrete problem, I was struck by
how Ecos notion of Encyclopedia, conceived in the early 1970s,
predicted the structure of the information on the Internet. My main hy-
pothesis concerns the formation of the individual portions of encyclo-
pedic competence, where the advent of the internet has apparently
wrought radical transformations, evident in the students. I shall also
use another perspective on the same phenomenon, derived from criti-
cal sociology. There are a number of authors who, independently from
each other, made converging diagnoses of the transformation of per-
sonal identity in the younger generations. Frederic Jameson uses no-
tions such as the schizophrenic subject, the breakdown of tempo-
rality or unable to form a coherent ego (1991). Zygmunt Bauman
uses the notion of the liquid subject and wearing identities as
cloths (1998, 2000); Jeremy Rifkin the routine formation of multiple
identities (2000); DanyRobert Dufour the desymbolized subject
(2003). The third theoretical input comes from a short study of the
way in which search engines have evolved and why Google now
dominates this fundamental component of the internet the global en-
cyclopedia. This will be a further argument in favor of the soundness
of Ecos insights.
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 106
3. Umberto Ecos model of culture as Encyclopedia

[The encyclopaedia] is the recorded sum of all interpretations, objectively
conceivable as the library of libraries, where library is also the archive of all
non verbal information, registered in some way, from paintings to cinema.
[] The encyclopaedia, as the totality of interpretations, also accommodates
contradictory interpretations; textual activity based on the encyclopaedia, and
operating on the contradictions of the latter, continuously introduces a new
resegmentation of the continuum; this happens also as the effect of progres-
sive experiences and, in time, transforms the encyclopaedia; so [the encyclo-
paedias] global representation is impossible, because it would already be
false at the moment in which it is terminated; also, the encyclopaedia, as an
objective system of interpretations, is possessed in different ways by different
users.
(my translation, Eco 1984, pp. 10910)

Eco obtains this essential description of the model after passing
through various phases. The first appearance of the notion is in Theory
of Semiotics (1976), where it is opposed to a series of important closed
semantic models, especially to the very influential one by Katz and
Fodor. This work on the encyclopedia model develops into a battle
horse against ontological structuralism and similar approaches, begun
already in La struttura assente (1968). Although in Theory of Semiot-
ics this model is concretely associated with the name of Quillian
(modello Q, cfr Eco 1976, 2.12.2., but already discussed in 1971), it is
Ecos means for introducing a major ally in his doctrine Charles S.
Peirce. The Encyclopedia is a regulative hypothesis about the global
semantic structure which is dynamically derivative from living proc-
esses in every cultural community an infinite semiosis, regulated
by pragmatically and temporarily established semantic conventions.
Thus encyclopedia is coextensive with culture, opening the universe
of meaning to an infinite variety of contents, far beyond linguistic cen-
trism.
In A Theory of Semiotics Eco still pays tribute to the notion of
code, which he then abandons, and this somehow prevents him from
developing the full extent of his hypothesis. I am mostly interested in
the development of the description of the encyclopedias internal
structure, since this is the link with the analysis of the internet and the
search engines. In A Theory of Semiotics Eco explains the functioning
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
107
of the cultural units within the encyclopedia with the metaphor of an
enormous number of marbles contained in a box
1
(1976, p. 124). The
social life of the cultural community provokes a permanent motion of
those marbles, i.e., associations between cultural units. What guaran-
tees rules in the movement of the marbles/cultural units, thus prevent-
ing entropy and enabling communication is a certain magnetization or
emission of wavelengths. The wavelengths determine the conven-
tional affinities and discard all other possible combinations. This is
how Eco represents the process of codification, insisting that the mag-
netization is not inherent in the marbles as a property, but transitory
and historical (ibidem, p. 126). There cannot be one code or the
code, but only a complex network of subcodes or a hypercode
(ibid., p. 125) which is something quite similar to a hypertext.
The next major step in the development of the model of Encyclo-
pedia is made in Lector in Fabula (1979). Here Eco uses the model to
deconstruct the rigid structuralist approach to text analysis. In re-
turn, he develops a theory of textual pragmatics which formalizes the
complex and open process of textual cooperation between the author
and the reader in the act of interpretation. In both the Italian and the
English editions of the book, though they differ, Eco employs a heavy
exploration of Peircean semiotic heritage, as a dwarf on the shoulders
of a giant, to build his theory, (1979, p. 49). As a result he obtains a
very rich definition of the notion of encyclopedic competence
which, in my view, is the key notion of the whole theory. Encyclope-
dic competence is the ground for the interplay between author and
reader. It is the condition of possibility for interpretation, since the
text is a lazy machine and needs a lot of contribution on the side of the
reader to reveal its meaning. It is also a narrative resource for the au-
thor, on the management of which depends the successful involvement
of the reader. The author inscribes a readermodel inside the text, a
virtual entity made of presupposed encyclopedic competence, the
similarity of which with the empirical reader determines the degree of
success of the communicative act.

1
Thanks to Shareen Abramson we have a graphic animation of this metaphor of the mo-
tion of the cultural units. (http://coinquiry.org/vol1num4/theoryoflang.html).
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 108
Ecos textual pragmatics is based on permanent hypothetical condi-
tions, a kind of constant bet between the parts in the communication.
This is due to the fact that every single person possesses a different
portion of encyclopedic competence (ibid., p. 53). There are more and
less codified (or conventionalized) contents of the encyclopedia which
corresponds to a bigger or smaller probability that they are of some-
ones personal encyclopedic competence. The big step for our inquiry
in Lector in Fabula is the explanation of the principle which changes
the encyclopedia according to the living processes in a given cultural
community. Ecos first attempt was the marbles metaphor in A Theory
of Semiotics, and it was implicit in his statement that usually in our
culture we are doing this or that But here we finally find the ex-
pression we need: I insist on usually: an encyclopedic competence
is based on socially accepted cultural data because of their statistical
constancy. (ibid., p. 18). It might not seem so important, but actu-
ally the emphasis on the importance for the statistical constancy for
the establishment of the cultural conventions brings us to the core of
Google architecture. But I shall come to this in a while.
In Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (published 1984, but
written between 1976 and 1980, p. IX) Eco gives the clearest defini-
tions of the model of Encyclopedia. Actually, the article is an entry for
the Einaudi encyclopedia. Here he uses the model to deconstruct the
whole tradition in the Western thought of Treelike representations of
the knowledge of the world, the icon of which is Porphyrys tree.
What is necessary to emphasize for our inquiry is that there Eco
makes a description of encyclopedia which is closest to what the
Internet is today. The genuineness of Ecos intuition is quite eloquent
in the first example he gives, commenting the structure of encyclope-
dia: A net is an unlimited territory. A net is not a Tree. The territory
of the United States does not oblige anybody to reach Dallas from
New York by passing through St. Louis, Missouri; one can also pass
through New Orleans. (Eco 1985, p. 81) Very similar ideas inspired
the American military engineers in the sixties, who were architects of
the future Internet. They wanted to build a communication system
among computers on the territory of the whole country, which was
weblike and decentralized, in order to prevent a communicative
blackout in case of a nuclear war with Soviet Russia.
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
109
Following this line of thought, Eco reaches the model of the rhi-
zome by Deleuze and Guattari. These two French philosophers are the
real visionary thinkers, but their model is completely abstract. Ecos
great merit is to transfer those visionary insights into the concrete do-
main of the encyclopedic competences, thus obtaining a description of
culture and its structure which is very similar to what the internet
turned out to be 30 years later. Given the importance of this point, Eco
resorts to an extended quotation, which I reproduce:
The characteristics of a rhizomatic structure are the following:

(a) Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other
point. (b) There are no points or positions in a rhizome; there are only lines
(this feature is doubtful: intersecting lines make points). (c) A rhizome may
be broken off at any point and reconnected following one of its own lines. (d)
The rhizome is antigenealogical. (e) The rhizome has its own outside with
which it makes another rhizome; therefore, a rhizomatic whole has neither
outside, nor inside. (f) A rhizome is not a calque but an open chart which can
be connected with something else in all of its dimensions; it is dismountable,
reversible, and susceptible to continuous modifications. (g) A network of
trees which open in every direction can create a rhizome (which seems to us
equivalent to saying that a network of partial trees can be cut out artificially
in every rhizome). (h) No one can provide a global description of the whole
rhizome; not only because the rhizome is multidimensionally complicated,
but also because its structure changes through the time; moreover, in a struc-
ture in which every node can be connected with every other node, there is
also the possibility of contradictory inferences [] (i) A structure that cannot
be described globally can only be described as a potential sum of local de-
scriptions. (j) In a structure without outside the describers can look at it only
from the inside.

(Eco 1985, pp. 812)

After 1984, Ecos contributions to the development of the model of
encyclopedia are minor, though important. In The Limits of Interpreta-
tion (1994) Eco uses the model for deconstructing another classical
rigid postulate in semiotics: Morris division of semiotics into syntac-
tics, semantics, and pragmatics. The Encyclopedia is a model of lib-
eral semantics and pragmatics, which includes all the elements in an
interconnected way, elements which are artificially divided by Morris
(cfr Ch. 13).
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 110
In Kant and the Platypus (2000), Eco extends the principles of the
model of encyclopedia to the field of cognitive science. This time the
rigid system to deconstruct is Kants transcendental schematism and
the major focus is on the primary iconism and the processes which
precede and enact the chain of semiosis. Nevertheless, there are a lot
of new points in this book which enrich the model of encyclopedia.
First of all there is an extended and illustrated presentation of
Quines argument in Two dogmas of empiricism (1951), the most
important philosophical source of the model of Encyclopedia, pre-
sent without exception in all Ecos theoretical works from A Theory
of Semiotics on (cfr Eco 2000, 4.6.4). This is about how the social
life of cultural units gradually transforms their meaning, even that of
those which are deeply rooted in our understanding and form its
logical ground. For this reason, Eco introduces the notions of nego-
tiation and contract, maybe the most significant ones in the entire
work. Thus he perfects the model of encyclopedia on a collective
level, as a regulative principle. On an individual level, that of the en-
cyclopedic competence, Eco gives a new shape to an old idea, pre-
sent also in his other works. It concerns the local dictionaries or the
utility of the dictionary as a tool (1984, 5.5., 1985, 2.3.6.). The point
is that independently from the fact that the dictionary cannot repre-
sent an acceptable general semantic model, it is a way in which local
portions of encyclopedia are organized within our encyclopedic
competence. Actually those portions of the individual competence
are very important because they provide the general coherence of our
world views (Eco 2000, p. 251). In most examples of local dictionar-
ies, Eco uses existing categorizations of the natural world and the
fundamental properties of human beings. Cultures can also establish
dictionarylike structured areas in their content without necessarily
relying on scientific dichotomies. Eco calls this wild categoriza-
tion (ibid., p. 232), and it is a result of accumulated affirmed collec-
tive experiences. In both cases, though, we are dealing with portions
of culture with a higher internal coherence than the rest of the rhi-
zomatic multiplicity. Thus on the level of individual encyclopedic
competence, Eco reconciles the two opposed ways of existence of
knowledge in a dialectical relation:

Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
111
And this is why the categorial moment and the observational moment do not
oppose each other as irreconcilable ways of understanding, nor are they jux-
taposed through syncretism: they are two complementary ways of consider-
ing our competence, precisely because, at least at the auroral moment of
understanding [], they imply each other reciprocally.
[] The unstable equilibrium of this coexistence is not (theoretically) syn-
cretistic, because it is on the basis of this happily unstable equilibrium that
our understanding precedes. (p. 252)


4. The search
2


The idea to include an overview of internet search engines is moti-
vated by a striking analogy between their evolution and Ecos hy-
pothesis about the passage from dictionary to encyclopedia. If the first
phase of the invasion, the internet was dominated by Yahoo!, a very
Porphyrianlike web portal, whereas the second phase is dominated
by Google, the rhizomatic core of todays Internet. But let us examine
some more details.
Although conceived in the late sixties, the internet became a mass
phenomenon only in the nineties. The advent of search engines is par-
allel to the growth of the web, from its very beginning. They appeared
even before the first internet browser Mosaic (1993). Archi, Gopher
and Wanderer are the first search engines, followed by Lycos, Excite
and finally Yahoo! (see Battelle 2005: 3948). There was already a
competition of ingenuity in inventing successful algorithms for the
search: the selection of necessary web pages, requested by the user.
The usual approach was based on indexing all available web pages,
using the words in their title. Then Jerry Yang and David Filo, the
founders of Yahoo!, gradually guessed the winning approach, appro-
priate for the public attitude towards the emerging informational web.
They adopted a structured, hierarchical approach for their portal. As
Jerry Yang of Yahoo tells me, back when he started the service as a
directory, no one knew what was out there, and a directory listing cool
new sites was a revelation. (ibid., p. 31). Similarly to the dawn of

2
The title of the chapter comes from the most quoted book here, The Search. How Google
and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Battelle 2005).
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 112
Western civilization, the times of Aristotle and company, the dawn of
the internet was driven by a great deal of curiosity, an emerging world
interesting in itself and not yet saturated by business and pragmatic in-
terests, at least from the point of view of the general public. So, simi-
larly to Aristotle, the Yahoo! founders offered a directorylike de-
scription of this world. Their categories and subcategories looked like
this:

Arts: Humanities, Photography, Architecture, ;
Business and Economy: Directory, Investments, Classifieds, ;
Computers and Internet: Internet, WWW, Software, Multimedia,
;
Education: Universities, K12, Courses, ;
Entertainment: TV, Movies, Music, Magazines, ;
Government: Politics, Agencies, Law, Military, ;
Health: Medicine, Drugs, Diseases, Fitness, ;
News: World, Daily, Current Events, ;
Recreation and Sports: Sports, Games, Travel, Autos, Outdoors,
;
Reference: Libraries, Dictionaries, Phone Numbers, ;
Regional: Countries, Regions, U.S. States, ;
Science: CS, Biology, Astronomy, Engineering,

As they say, ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phy-
logenesis. With the exponential growth of the Internet, the hierarchical
model of navigation had a crisis. Jerry Young summarizes this shift:
our need to comprehend what was out there receded as we began to
know our way around now we assume that everything is connected
(ibid., p. 32).
Google arrived on the search engine scene towards the end of the
nineties and its algorithm was completely innovative. It is based on
the patented PageRank technology.
3
The guiding principle of this ap-
proach is relevance. Now that we know that everything is on the

3
After its glorious decade the PageRank technology was substituted at the end of 2009 by
a new algorithm, more resistant to abuses by numerous companies have carried out to artifi-
cially increase the ranking of their customers. Thanks to Dimiter Radkovsky for this sugges-
tion.
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
113
internet, we do not need a directory or treelike guidance, because this
method cannot encompass the huge variety of information. We expect
a search engine to provide relevant answers to our queries, answers as
close as possible to our search intention.
It is interesting that the prototype of the two Googlefounders
Larry Page and Sergey Brin for their relevancebased approach is bib-
liometrics (ibid., p. 70), the system mainly used for measuring the
relevance of scientific publications, based on references. If a scientific
paper is quoted by many scholars, and if those scholars are highly
ranked themselves, then the paper is relevant. The system is quite reli-
able, given that you know all references made to your paper. Now,
imagine the same task, applied to websites rather than to scientific pa-
pers. The search engine analyses the content of the pages and espe-
cially the hyperlinks. By going through the whole internet you finally
get the whole database of references and you can trace all links to your
website from other websites. This procedure measures one part of the
entity of the rhizomatic node (its relevance), if we return to Ecos
model of culture. The other part is calculated through the statistics of
the so called clickstreams, the statistical record of the real number of
visits to your website. But this is not enough. Google learns from its
users which of the listed answers after the query really work and
which do not. If, for example, you Google semiotics, you will get
1,360,000 results in English, ordered according to their relevance.
Obviously most people will pick the first ones on the list, because they
know those results are the closest to their search intention. But web-
sites change, cultural trends change, i.e. the encyclopedia changes.
Users may no longer be satisfied with the bestranked websites and
search for new emergent ideas or notions. Google astute PageRank
will then take into consideration how many of the users, after having
checked the first answers in the list, return to the query to pick other
results, because they are not satisfied with the firstranked. If this
process starts to repeat constantly, and lets say, most of the users fin-
ish their query only after visiting the fifth result, then Google will re
rank this website, raising its position towards the top. Thus formally
the rhizomatic node will grow and in the future more likely users will
be addressed there, which will further affirm it. And so on ad infini-
tum, as Peirce would say.
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 114
Search algorithms are far more complex than that, but those are the
principles, roughly speaking. The same principles, the rhizomatic in-
terconnectedness of cultural units and the affirmation of meaningful
nodes after the statistical constancy of their use, determine the life of
culture according to the semiotic model. What the internet does, by
means of the search engines, is to exponentially accelerate those proc-
esses. John Battelle remarks that [I]ncreasingly, search is our mecha-
nism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place
within it. Its how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives
human culture: knowledge (ibid., p. 280). According to my hypothe-
sis, this occurs because the homogeneity of our natural predisposition
to absorb culture (encyclopedic competence) on one side and the
structural organization of the information on the internet, on the other,
results in an increasingly complete merging of the two in the newer
generations. Actually the great challenge for the future of the search is
how it can be made more intelligent and more able to transform que-
ries written in everyday language into relevant answers (cfr ibid., ch.
11). And the more the engines will succeed in this challenge, the more
we will witness the externalization of the intelligence, its outsourcing
in the computers of Google, Yahoo!, IBM and many others. I return to
this point in the last paragraph of the study.


5. Some hints on the identity of the new generations from post-
modern critical sociology

Intelligence, when referred to human cognitive faculties, is a
highly compromised notion, implying racial, sexist, ethnocentric, and
any other possible politically incorrect connotations. For this state-
ment I rely entirely on the seminal work of Stephen Jay Gould, The
Mismeasure of Man (1981). In the course of a huge debate during the
whole 20
th
century, it turns out that man is a far more complicated en-
tity than the one whose intellectual performance can be reduced to a
simple number, the IQ quotient. Nevertheless, the criticism of intellec-
tual performance on a collective level still exists. Today it is unac-
ceptable to criticize entire social groups on the ground of characteris-
tics in which individuals had no choice (race, sex, ethnicity, etc.), but
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
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115
it is quite usual to criticize on the grounds of free choice. For instance,
consumerism, the incarnation of free choice, is accused of making
people dull. But if this critique is expressed by means of academic
discourse, it will not sound like consumerism reduces IQ. Most
probably it will be formulated as analysis of identity, its structure and
the derived reduction of critical awareness, self reflection, and open-
ness to otherness. Therefore, for the requirements of the present study,
I shall not follow the simple transposition that the intelligence of
search engines is reversely proportional to the IQ of their users, but
will examine which transformations of the identity of the internet gen-
erations is formed by the habit of using more and more intelligent
search engines, in particular on the level of encyclopedic competence.
For this purpose, I shall briefly outline the diagnosis of contemporary
identity by four of the most influential voices in critical sociology.
The objective is not to offer a complete overview of the problem, but
to demonstrate that there is something like a converging trend.
Chronologically, the first of the chosen authors is Frederic
Jameson. In his essay The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, written
in 1984, he criticizes some consequences of the legitimation of post-
modernism by its exponents in arts and theory. His point about iden-
tity changes in the new generation of artists, but of course this goes for
the whole zeitgeist. To explain identity changes, he uses Lacans
model of schizophrenia, a breakdown of the signifying chain (Jameson
1991, p. 26). In the case of nonpathological subjects that means a de-
liberate choice of attitude towards the world, deprived of historicity,
i.e., deprived of a coherent extension of subjectivity over past, present,
and future. Postmodernism legitimizes a breakdown of this fundamen-
tal human temporality and affirms an ethics of pure and unrelated
presents in time (ibidem, p. 27). This fragmentation of identity has its
concrete application: it is far easier for a disengaged subject to leap
into states of euphoria with intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity
(ibid.). Postmodern lifestyles go exactly in the opposite direction of
constructive praxis, long term solidarity, and profound, suffered ex-
periences behind artistic creativity. The cultural logic of late capital-
ism affirms life consumption rather than life construction. This is
where Baumans ideas come in. It is impossible to summarize his im-
mense contribution to the topic of postmodern identity, but the notions
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 116
of liquid identity (2000) and subjectivity fetishism (2007) seem
the most appropriate.
Bauman constructs his precious insights on the same considerations
about broken temporality in the interest of an exaltation of the present
(Bauman 1999, p. 36). The major consequence of that genetic dis-
ease of postmodernity is the deterioration of social bonds. In Liquid
modernity (Bauman 2000), he examines the weakening of personal
identity, caused by its exaggerated adaptiveness to present circum-
stances. The metaphor is all encompassing:

fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone)
to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the
space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but for a mo-
ment.
(ibid., p. 2)

The lack of longterm engagement with reality (or, as other think-
ers call it, ontological commitment) derives from the overabundance
of options to be involved in, similar to the trajectory options in a rhi-
zomatic structure. The increased standards of intensity of the present
experience generate uncertainty about choice and missed opportuni-
ties. For this ethics, it is far more convenient to consider others as
commodities, interchangeable and easily quittable, than subjects of
longlasting relations and responsibilities. In Consuming Life (2007)
Bauman examines how, after commodifying anything around us, we
also commodify our identity. Here he examines social networking
phenomena, in order to underline how subjectivity goes public, on the
market, after all, and how its commodification impedes the awareness
that its conditions of possibility are human relations. Subjectivity fet-
ishism (ibid., p. 14) is the ultimate expression of the deterioration of
social bonds.
Jeremy Rifkin, in his landmarking study The Age of Access: the
New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a PaidFor Ex-
perience (2000) proclaims the advent of a new type of human being
and actually traces the objective of the present study:

Just as the printing press altered human consciousness over the past several
hundred years, the computer will likely have a similar effect on conscious-
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
Lexia, 56/2010
117
ness over the next two centuries. Psychologists and sociologists are already
beginning to note a change taking place in cognitive development among
youngsters in the socalled dotcom generation. A small but increasing
number of young people who are growing up in front of computer screens
and spending much of their time in chat rooms and simulated environments
appear to be developing what psychologists call multiple personas short
lived fragmented frames of consciousness, each used to negotiate whatever
virtual world or network they happen to be in at any particular moment of
time.
Some observers worry that dotcommers may begin to experience reality as
little more than shifting story lines and entertainments and that they might
lack both the deeply anchored socializing experience and extended attention
span necessary to form a coherent frame of reference for understanding and
adapting to the world around them. Others see the development in a more
positive light as a freeingup of the human consciousness to be more playful,
more flexible and transient in order to accommodate the fastmoving and
everchanging realities that people experience.
(Rifkin 2000, p. 13)

DanyRobert Dufour also proclaims the birth of a new man, al-
though his critical vehemence exceeds that of previous authors (Du-
four 2007, p. 167). The French philosopher also accuses neoliberalism
of causing considerable damage to subjectivity and to an individuals
capacity to cope with reality. But what goes beyond the contribution
of the other authors is the profound analysis which Dufour makes of
the development of the human being in the present conditions. His
main point is that the logic of neoliberalism imposes the abolition of
the Kantian critical subject and the Freudian neurotic subject, the
pilasters of modern subjectivity. In other terms, the conditions of the
formation of the new generations prevent them from becoming critical
and developing a superego, i.e. the instance of the sense of guilt. The
crucial notion of Dufours analysis is desymbolization.
Dufour also refers to Lacans terminology for his diagnostics. If the
normal development of the child passes through three phases the
real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, todays children are stopped at
the second phase the market provides so many tools for childrens
entertainment that most parents prefer to rely on them. Obviously,
those are cartoons on TV, videogames, and hundreds of other tools
dominated by visual interaction. They work fine and actually capture
the childs attention more easily than a parents communicative ef-
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 118
forts. But those efforts are not that insistent since the new generation
of parents is also dominated by consumerism. What happens is that
kids are faced with such an abundance of visual (imagery) information
about the world, that they never develop the need of verbal narratives
about it. According to Lacan, the superego is formed in the symbolic
phase, in which it is normal for parents to be the main source of in-
formation about the world, a genuine authority to be interiorized later
on. But nowadays this phase never takes place. The substitution of the
narratives symbolic constitution of the world view through the par-
ents intermediation with the selfconstructed worldview by cartoons,
videogames, and intelligent toys has brought this about. If, from the
point of view of pure information, this does not seem particularly wor-
rying (a kids interactive encyclopedias know more than the average
parent), from the point of view of psychological development, it de-
prives the nascent subject of fundamental elements. Dufour goes thus
far to show the semiotic mechanism of this process (referring to Ben-
veniste, ibid., p. 99). Verbal interaction between humans establishes
habits of exchange of the roles of listener and speaker. Multimedia
visual flows do not. The linguistic phenomenon of deixis, typical for
the verbal utterances, establishes the connection between conversers
and the situation, or reality. This principle of reality is entirely absent
in the anonymous visual narration of media.
Thus when those kids (homo zappiens, ibid. pp. 92119) go to
school, they are no longer pupils; they are unable to be subjected to
the authority of the teacher and they are technically unable to get into
the particular communicative form of a lesson. And the process does
not stop at school: The mission of educational institutions (including
the universities) is now to absorb floating populations whose relation-
ship with knowledge is no more than a secondary and sporadic issue.
(ibid., p. 117).


6. Knowledge, identity, internet, and the semiotic search

With the last quotation of Dufours book, the circle is closed and
we are back where we started this theoretical exploration, following
the empirical observations of students cognitive habits. Even if we
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
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are not as pessimistic as Dufour, it is undeniable that something does
not work in the didactic communication at the universities after the
advent of Internet. So, the point here is to see how Ecos model of en-
cyclopedia helps us to understand and analyze this phenomenon. Ac-
tually the first hint comes from Eco himself, in an interview in Spiegel
about the exhibition of lists in the Louvre, which he curated. When the
conversation comes to the lists Google offers, Eco answers:

Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Googlegenerated list, it has
already changed. These lists can be dangerous not for old people like me,
who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for
whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be
discriminating.
(Eco 2009, online text)

Discriminating, decimazione in the original Italian expression,
is the process of reducing the huge amount of information available
for the exact one needed by the reader, and it is the common denomi-
nator of all documented considerations on the internet made by Eco
from 1995 until now.
4
Unfortunately, Ecos interest was never di-
rected toward the fact that the evolution of the search, the billion dol-
lars business, was dedicated to the art of discriminating the lists for
achieving higher levels of relevance of the results and that the princi-
ples of rhizome and the statistical constancy are at the core of that
process. Nevertheless, the second part of Ecos words coincides with
both the critical sociologists and my (but I guess everyones) empiri-
cal observation of the students cognitive behavior.
Thus the key point seems to be not the resulting amount of knowl-
edge, but the process regulating its social life. According to Eco,
Google is a tragedy for those who acquired their knowledge not in the
old peoples way, but following the present circumstances. For old
people like us, whose encyclopedic competence is achieved through
books and teachers, internet is a very comfortable extension or a tool,
whereas for young people, whose encyclopedic competence is formed
through the internet, it is a substitute. In the first case the internet has a
utilitarian function, in the second an existential function. My starting

4
I refer to the following documents: Eco 1995, 1996, 2006, 2006b, 2009.
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 120
concern was why are students so reluctant to write? Dufour would
reply that this is due to the fact that their development has been ar-
rested to the imaginary phase, so they are unprepared for such a sym-
bolic exercise as writing. Eco would say that their thinking is no
longer based on local dictionaries, i.e. interiorized structured portions
of encyclopedic competence, but on an entirely rhizomatic and exter-
nalized encyclopedia. As I mentioned before, according to Eco, our
understanding proceeds thanks to the happily unstable equilibrium be-
tween the categorial and the observational moment (Eco 2000: p.
252). This balance seems not to exist in the newer generations, al-
though they are quantitatively much more informed than previous
generations. Here the balance seems to lack due to everything on the
side of the observational, on the statistically constant nodes, provided
by the search engine. Contrary to this, developing your thoughts in a
written form is something which has to do with the dialectics between
the categorial and the observational, something which requires many
inferences and a coherent link between what you know (the past) and
what you want to express (the future).
Among the last questions of my interviews with the students I
asked them about the platypus. All of them knew the word; they knew
that it is an animal and almost nothing more. In Ecos numerous ex-
amples using the platypus as a cognitive challenge his mind model
is inferring the missing information from existent dichotomies, by
analogy between the observable and the known for other species. In
the case of the students no one enacted a chain of inferences or abduc-
tions. All of them were immediately thinking that they would find
everything about the platypus on the net (4 of them referred more pre-
cisely to Wikipedia). Thus I would suggest that the great convenience
and omnipresent availability of the net
5
dispenses young people from
cognitive initiatives which produce interpretants and enrich the indi-
vidual encyclopedic competence from the inside. Or, more likely,
what I call here culture of navigation is a new attitude towards
knowledge in which the inferential and abductive skills are mostly ap-

5
Most of the questions of the interviews from my field work were dedicated to habits of
using the internet. Afterwards I found very similar results in the study Novite mladi I novite
medii (New Youth and New Media, Dichev, Spasov 2009); the penetration of the internet
among young people here is almost 100%.
Cultures of Navigation versus Cultures of Erudition (Kristian Bankov)
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plied to the process of acquiring information/knowledge but not so
much to reflection and the construction of internal coherence within
the acquired and strictly encyclopedic knowledge. In other words the
symbolic phase is not organized in Grand individual narratives (one
of which, for instance, is the dictionarylike classification of living
species) and, although quantitatively present, it is fragmented by a rhi-
zomatic structure, typical for the imaginary phase. It has precisely the
format of individual encyclopedic competence, encouraged by the in-
dustry of quiz shows and other forms of shortterm conspicuous intel-
lectual performance, necessary for the various social exploits of liquid
identity.


Conclusion

To conclude, I spend some words on the possibility of the perfect
search and its cultural consequences. In the eyes of the expert, the
perfect search looks like this:

Imagine the ability to ask any question and get not just an accurate answer,
but your perfect answer an answer that suits the context and intent of your
question, an answer that with eerie precision is informed by who you are and
why youre asking. This answer is capable of incorporating all the worlds
searchable knowledge into the task at hand be it captured in text, video, or
audio formats. Its capable of distinguishing between straightforward requests
(Who was the third president of the United States?) and more nuanced ones
(Under what circumstances did the third president of the United States for-
swear his views on slavery?).
(Battelle 2005: p. 252)

As we can see, a big part of the problem is strikingly semiotic. One
of the lines of inquiry followed by the search engineers is the construc-
tion of the model of the semantic web (ibidem, p. 263), but not the
semiotic web. Apart from the fact that semiotics can get rich if it
helps in some way to improve the search we may try to imagine the cul-
tural implication of its success. Now it is commonly accepted that the
search has developed about 5% of its potential. And what a huge impact
on the cognitive habits of an entire generation! Imagine what will hap-
pen when it approaches 100%. Above, I used the expression outsourc-
PARTE II LA COSTRUZIONE SEMIOLINGUISTICA DELLA CULTURA 122
ing intelligence. Actually, the big challenge is to invent the perfect
simulation of the process of recall within the individuals mind. The
combination of the efficiency of data processing in the individual mind
with the infinite database of the internet would mean a perfect search,
i.e. posing the questions in everyday language and getting the exact an-
swers according to our intention. Considering the internal mechanisms
of the encyclopedic competence, I would suggest that its efficiency is
due to the fact that all knowledge is hosted by the same intentionality.
Erudition means operating within the whole of our encyclopedic data
with efficient categorization, independently whether it is scientific or
wild (Eco 2000, p. 232). Now, merely at first sight, the semantic web
project follows that line: the reconstruction of a reliable system of
metadata which can guarantee at least some general orientation on the
semantic relevance of the web pages. Since the other component of the
perfect search the clickstreams statistics has been considerably
perfected, it is up to the semiotic one to hand the torch of truth. It seems
that now the research is going in a reverse direction, from the encyclo-
pedia to the dictionary, structuring portions of the global encyclopedia
through metadata, not by means of transcendental categories, but using
ad hoc solutions for an increasingly immediate interaction between the
searcher and his second brain, the web.
To conclude the conclusion, we may say that the internet and its
access through the intermediation of those quasiminds which are the
search engines is among the most important factors for the expansion
of the postmodern fragmented identity, i.e. the culture of navigation.


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