The cloud.
We all talk about the cloud.
That cloud where we upload a part of the digital world
under construction.
We will see
how we can get to that digital cloud from the process of written culture.
We are living through a time of accelerated changes.
We might be the first generation
throughout history, if not the only,
which feels the world moving under our feet.
And that gives us some vertigo,
a kind of disorientation.
To combat that vertigo, to have something to take refuge in,
a good resource is usually to fix the eyes
on a point, if it is possible, on a forward point,
on a point in the future, at the port of destination.
But the problem is that vertigo is caused
by a quick movement that we don't know where it goes to.
A good trick to try to orient ourselves,
to try to ease that sense of vertigo,
might be turning around and looking into the past,
towards a point in the past.
That is what we will try to do
as we look towards the written culture.
We will try to understand
the changes brought about by the world of digital culture
asking some questions towards the past,
towards the written culture.
At the beginning was the word, the orality.
In the orality, in the word,
the orator and the receiver, who listens to,
share the space, share the time,
share the communication.
But when changing from orality,
the spoken word, to the written culture,
we see two processes starting, which reach the present day.
One of those processes
is division, alienation.
The dissociation between the word, the one who emit the word,
and the resulting text.
We will see the way this division is being produced.
And the other process we will see is persistence.
Man always tries to remember.
He has to persist to remember, he has to resist in many ways.
Culture demands permanence, it demands preservation.
We carry out this preservation through replications.
There are many ways how we can replicate
the memory we build. In the spoken word,
we build that memory with insistence,
insisting so that we can memorise it,
in order to turn it into a mnemonic technique.
In the written word we have a repetition,
which turns into a replication when printing appears
and we can replicate it.
So insistence, persistence,
is one of the essential features to generate memory.
That memory generation also needs artifacts,
which we will see very briefly.
It needs artifacts.
Written culture, culture in general,
needs artifacts to support that memory.
And that memory and its artifacts produce practices,
different reading and writing habits, for example.
We said: 'at the beginning was the word.'
Montaigne wrote:
'We are only men, and we only hold one to the other
by our word.'
The word is what makes us human.
The spoken word, the orality.
The orality is the starting point, as I said.
But there is a moment when the development
of social forms, the complexity of humanity,
requires other ways to generate memory
that go beyond oral transmission.
Thus the writing we are seeing was born.
A division of the word is produced, with regard to the one who emits it.
We write the word and it starts having a life of its own.
And writing has some...
fascinating characteristics
to understand that world of written culture.
The first one is that writing is a technology.
No matter how natural it seems,
we all write as if it was a natural process.
Writing is a technology.
It is the most complex of all the technologies
that have to do with the written culture,
because, for example, we don't need to learn to speak.
However, with reading and writing we do.
In addition to being a technology, writing breaks time.
It is one of the miracles of writing.
It breaks time.
It can always be present, beyond time.
Quevedo expressed it perfectly in one of his famous sonnets:
'Retreated in the peace of these deserts,
with few but learned books together,
I live with the deceased in conversation,
and with my eyes I listen to the dead.'
That 'listen to' while reading the dead with the eyes
means to give life to writing at any time.
Therefore, it breaks time.
Writing also brings certainty, it brings authority.
What we call 'the principle of authority.'
It sounds quite rigorous. The principle was born with writing.
Relying on what is written
is important to make knowledge and science progress.
We can build upon the reliable step of the authority of what is written,
instead of being always repeating and learning.
That even happens to us in our everyday life.
We can say:
'I read that somewhere', like a principle of authority.
We teachers even hear that from students,
after a bad exam: 'It was in my class notes.'
As if the fact of being in black and white in the notes
filled them with authority.
Authority also means respect towards what is written,
towards the blank sheet of paper.
Martín Gaite said in a note,
in a notebook where he wrote everything down:
'I have great respect for written words,
it must come from my years as a student,
from that mania about blank notebooks I was instiled.
How often I have taken the pen in front of a blank notebook,
like this one, and I haven't dared to start it.'
I haven't dared to start writing. Respect.
A good question is if we feel the same respect
towards a blank screen than a blank sheet of paper.
Do the written and the digital world bring us the same impression?
We could think more things about writing.
Writing as a 'structurer' of thought.
We could say: 'in a society where we have been for generations
a literate society, used to reading and writing,
isn't it possible that things have turned around,
that we came to think, in a sense,
how we read, how we write,
that we came to think about paragraphs
with bold types, titles, underlining and even footnotes?'
It is a good reflection in this changing world
because other forms might organise our thinking,
as written culture did.
And, finally, writing can't be understood
without the other side.
We can't understand writing without reading.
But reading isn't simply deciphering these written signs,
turning again written signs into sound.
That would be very boring.
Readers are passionate,
and they are passionate because reading is creative,
because reading is specially interpreting.
It is creative, we become authors,
writing is all that
we are able to read on it.
We can read infinite things
and each one of us something different.
That is why we are so passionate about reading.
But that technology of writing, creator of an external memory,
needs an artifact,
needs some artifacts in order to work.
The artifact par excellence of the written culture
is, naturally, the book.
When I say the word 'book' I am sure you think about our book,
the book which has dominated our culture for centuries.
However, this is a book.
It is a clay tablet.
However, this is a book.
It is a papyrus roll.
What happens? What is a book?
A book is a machine. We usually forget that,
as we forget that writing is a technology.
A book is a machine. Well, two machines,
a double machine. It is a memory machine,
because it is used to contain information,
to confine information.
This is a bad memory machine,
because it is difficult to confine much information there,
but it is also a reading machine.
If books were only memory machines,
those books we are used to no serían como son.
The letter would be smaller, no margins...
What really matters is that they contain
as much content as possible.
But they are made to be read. They are reading machines.
The great change of books happens when the codex appears.
The codex. Another word that sounds to us
like old, medieval, dusty and leather-bound books.
But 'codex' is a format, it simply means 'booklets',
which may be of parchment, paper,
sewn among themselves, with some covers.
It isn't less 'codex' one of those old codex
we are seeing there,
made of parchment, handwritten and bound,
than what we have in our shelves, in the bookshops.
That book we have imagined when I said the word 'book'
is, in fact, a codex printed on paper.
We should call our book 'a codex printed on paper.'
That codex printed on paper
radically changes when printing appears,
when typography appears.
When typography appears,
as we are seeing here on the stage,
things change again.
Typography, printing, is another revolution
that we have found, that we are facing.
We are progressing again in the processes I said:
the one of repetition and the one of persistence.
Here we see that clear. What makes printing possible?
The replication of the object, the artifact,
the books.
That guarantees its survival, its persistence.
We keep on progressing
in the other process, that of dissociation,
alienation, shift away.
The final product, the books, move away increasingly
from that composition made by the author.
They move away from that word printed on the books.
The print world is, for sure, very interesting.
But from that printed text, with whom we still live,
we will move on to another world: the case of the digital culture,
where we are getting in.
What we see there is, again, a progress
in these two issues we were talking about.
In the digital culture we can see the persistence
in a different way:
the persistence recovering a part of the orality,
which was to insist as we were doing in the orality.
And that insistence, as we see in the social networks,
which is what we do, insisting in the social networks,
generates sediments.
Interestingly, those sediments don't fall,
but they climb to the cloud we started talking about.
They climb to the cloud.
From the printed text to the digital one
we have also finished the process of alienation
I was talking about.
This one, in the digital world where we live,
is even more obvious,
because we have the artifact
but the text is elsewhere. The text is not in the artifact:
the text is in the cloud.
Throughout this talk,
you have seen a sentence being composed.
We have watched a video of a calligrapher
who was composing a sentence.
We have also seen Eva
writing another part of the sentence with typographic typefaces.
Hi, Eva.
We will finish that sentence with a tweet.
I will finish writing a tweet that I will send
to complete that sentence.
The three parts that we have seen in this talk.
I will put...
I am preparing this.
Let's remember...
I will prepare this so that we can see it well.
Let's first remember
the sentence the calligrapher had been writing.
We had seen it in the video.
'Reading makes a man full,
conversation makes a man alert
and writing makes a man upright.'
There it is.
'Therefore, if a man writes little,
he must have a good memory; if he speaks little,
he must have an alert memory.'
Let's see.
'And if he reads little, he must be clever
to pretend to know what he doesn't know.'
'Francis Bacon.'
We tweet it and we send it to that cloud
we started talking about.
Goodnight.
(Applause)
European Night of Researchers
Communication and Culture Vice-Chancellor
Institutional Communication Service Scientific Information Office