Audio Over IP

Preface

In 1984, the writer Italo Calvino began composing a series of lectures he never delivered. They were entitled “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” although he only completed five of them before his sudden death in 1985. The lectures were later published in a book of the same name.¹

His lectures—or “memos,” as he preferred—were critiques of literature, considering a myriad of works ranging from Lucretius and Ovid to Joyce and Dostoevsky. Yet a quick look at the lectures’ titles shows how they serve as apt metaphors to technology, as well. Their subjects are paragons we associate closely with the digital age that now flourishes in the new era that Calvino addressed from some temporal distance. He named his memos simply:

1. Lightness