Ricominciare dall'enciclopedia = Starting over from the encyclopaedia

Abstract

In order to manage the unprecedented epistemological and cultural changes resulting from the ever-growing expansion of World Wide Web's global knowledge repository, an overall theoretical framework is needed. This contribution aims to interpret the digital cultural ecosystem in terms of an encyclopaedic project, with the belief that the exploitation of the great hermeneutic power of this image can provide an analysis of knowledge representation, classification and selection in the personalized Web. The idea behind this work is that we have to start from the social images that we create to represent reality and rationalise it. Among these, faced with the theme of a web that can no longer be traversed due to an excess of information, we would like here to take up the image of the encyclopaedia-memory - at once an instrument of registration, interpretation and filtering - developed by Umberto Eco in both semantic and metaphorical terms. In so doing, we can redefine an idea of normative freedom, i.e. one that is not limited to the level of choices, but also concerns ways of removing the obstacles that separate us from the realisation of motives.