Umberto Eco recently gave a lecture at the newly opened Biblioteca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt on the subject of memory, specifically written memory and the effect of online writing on books.

As could be expected from such a great scholar as Eco, he raises many interesting points. For example the contrast of the 'mineral memory' of the early Egyptian civilisation as preserved on obelisks, monuments and temples to the 'vegetal memory' of the nomadic civilisations of the Jewish/Islamic tradition which instead treated books and scrolls with reverence.

But the most interesting part of the article for me dealt with the philosphical difference between books and online texts, and to what extent online writing can provide an 'open' system as opposed to the inevitable 'closed' linear form of the book. His comparison principally related to fiction. For example, an online reader could in principle be able to experience alternative versions of the same story through hypertextual jumps in the same way as a jazz standard could be heard in an infinite number of ways as a musician improvises through a set of predefined scales.

Hypertextual fiction sounds a bit fanciful to me, but in non-fiction terms it strikes me that blogging is already providing an analogue.

An objective story is interpreted in a number of different ways by first-tier sources such as news agencies and newspapers. These are then commented on by a broad range of commentators across the blogosphere. A reader has the freedom to move through a choice of commentaries via hypertext links to generate a point of view on the original story. The reader's choice of links could influence the portrayal of the story from a political or cultural point of view, for example. Newspapers gave this option of open-ness to people in the past but only in a limited way. Convenience or lack of funds would prevent most people from having access to multiple written points of view in the past. Blogging gives people easy access to any number of immediately accessible opinions limited only by the amount of time the reader wishes to dedicate to them.

In spite of my left-leaning politics, the ease of access to well-argued right-wing points of view has been a revelation to me and has been a major factor in reawakening my interest in politics. In many ways I prefer to read the better written and argued of the right-wing blogs as they continually make me reassess my assumptions to ensure that I am not merely knee-jerking my way into a predictable line of thinking. If I was to buy one newspaper though, it would be a left-leaning one which would limit my exposure to other points of view.

In this way I think the weblog revolution offers a true step forward in political dialogue and argument, subverting the real-world partisan barriers to debate for the many with open minds, who are ready to leave no stones unturned in the search for battle-hardened convictions which have earned their stripes in the hack-and-slash of open debate.