Hyperdocumentation

10Conclusion: Is it Necessary to Go to San Junipero?

Hyperdocumentation is largely related to the ultimate goals of documentation, but also those of science and society according to Otlet. Strongly anchored in a vision of a humanity inscribed in constant progress, its realization seems to be placed in a future that seems unstoppable. If Otlet’s anguish was rooted in the 19th century’s fear that progress might stop, the protagonists of the present era are rather wondering whether progress should not “be stopped”, since it may ultimately constitute a form of threat to the human species. This is a transformation that Michel Foucault already described:

The great haunting that obsessed the 19th century was, as we know, history – themes of development and halt, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of the accumulation of the past, the great overload of the dead, the threatening cooling of the world. It is in the second principle of thermodynamics that the 19th century found most of its mythological resources. The present era would perhaps rather be the era of space. We are in the age of simultaneity, we are in the age of juxtaposition, in the age of near and far, of side by side, of dispersed. We are at a time when the world experiences itself, I believe, less as a great life that develops through time than as a network that connects points and intertwines its web. Perhaps one could say that some of the ideological conflicts that animate today’s polemics are between the pious descendants ...