Course:MDIA300/UmbertoEco

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Background

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an Italian novelist, philosopher, medievalist, and one of the most influential figures in contemporary media theory. Born in Alessandria in northern Italy, Eco grew up during the final years of fascism, which shaped his lifelong interest in ideology, language, and power. He came from a modest working-class family: his father was a railway employee and his grandfather a typographer, a background that exposed him early to books and the world of reading.

After completing his classical studies in Alessandria, Eco enrolled at the University of Turin where he studied literature and philosophy and graduated in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, which he later revised into his first published book. Eco’s academic and intellectual path eventually led him to the University of Bologna, where he became Professor of Semiotics in 1975 and played a central role in establishing Communication Science as an academic field in Italian universities.

Eco also became a major figure in media studies, examining how mass communication, television, advertising, and popular culture shape public perception. He famously criticized how social media gives “legions of idiots the right to speak,” a remark that many interpret as reflecting his concern with the credibility and noise of digital communication.

Eco in A Library of The World

His deep connection to knowledge is explored in the documentary Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2023), directed by Davide Ferrario. The film offers an intimate look inside Eco’s private library, which contains over 30,000 books and more than 1,500 rare and ancient volumes. It presents Eco not only as a major public intellectual but also as someone whose library functioned, as the documentary suggests, like a living intellectual ecosystem where texts, ideas, and histories coexist and continually inform one another.

Through archival footage and interviews, the documentary highlights Eco’s curiosity, humour, and scholarship, showing how closely his intellectual life was intertwined with his habits of reading, collecting, and cataloguing. It also portrays his library as an active space, what he himself described as a kind of “memory of the world,” where research, reflection, and discovery unfolded side by side.

Contributions and Works in Media Studies

Umberto Eco wrote various texts throughout his career, including fiction novels, academic texts, children’s books and articles for magazines, with his most famous work being the 1980 murder mystery novel titled “The Name of The Rose”. Many of his academic texts have had a significant influence within the field of media studies, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and Travels of Hyperreality.

A Theory of Semiotics

Eco’s book A Theory of Semiotics, written in 1976, contributed to a comprehensive, interdisciplinary understanding of semiotics, establishing it as a significant field of study. Instead of viewing signs as isolated entities, he argued that “the whole of culture should be studied as a communicative phenomenon based on signification systems”.

Eco posits semiotics to be a dynamic process of creating meaning through semiosis. A sign refers to another, and is then interpreted, forming an unending chain of meanings. Through this view, Eco differentiates his approach from older theorists. While he acknowledges the importance of Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, he argues that these terms were not clearly defined and challenges Saussure’s idea that signs are merely static connections between these two entities. Eco also cites Pierce’s theory of semiotics, arguing it be more comprehensive due to its model that consists of three abstract semiotic entities: sign, model and interpretant.

Eco distinguishes signification, which involves coding, from communication, which involves sign production. He explains that the former always precedes the latter, where every act of communication between human beings requires the necessary condition of a signification system. Hence, he argues that semiotics must be studied through its underlying structure, or signification system.

Travels in Hyperreality

Umberto Eco’s book Travels in Hyperreality published in 1986, and translated to English by William Weaver, is a collection of essays pertaining to viewing the world through the eyes of a semiologist. It is influenced by the documentation of Eco’s travels and stay in America. Initially produced as essays that were printed in newspapers, this book maintains a tone that can be understood by a general audience outside academia.

The word hyperreality is Eco’s way of describing a feature that he classifies as distinct to American culture, of “fabricating the absolute fake,” or imitations of reality that are at the same time superficial but also convey imagination and our attraction to grandeur. He uses examples of places that carry these elevated, fantastical states of reality, such as Disneyland, Wall Street, exhibits in New York by the School of Holography, etc. To articulate the comparison between fabricated environments and reality, he uses examples like Ripley’s Museum and questions the authenticity and historical accuracy of the exhibits, and labels it as an “uncritical accumulation of every curious find.”