I.1. Between “attention war” and “attention whore”

Nowadays, we are observing rather a shift from the search for information to the search for attention in documentary practices, a consequence of the progressive expansion of the so-called Web 2.0 or social web, which allows everyone to disseminate documents from the personal sphere. From now on, objectives differ: the web has ended up privileging influence over relevance, producing and generating the metadata of quantifiable popularity, whereas the information systems created by information professionals prioritized the relevance of the answers provided and of the documents proposed in relation to a more or less defined information need. The documentary prism is therefore no longer the same. It has sometimes been difficult to understand and accept for information professionals and libraries who have often reduced the space of the web to a space for information research. Certainly, the initial goal of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau was to promote a new space with flexible and open protocols for sharing “data, news and documentation¹”. However, what was initially a space for scientific and technical information has become a popular space with obvious commercial interests. But let’s not be too quick to judge this phenomenon negatively. The success of the Internet and the Web rests above all on freedom of use, not to say a certain liberality. The fact that commercial exchanges are very present is not problematic. One could rather deplore the fact that exchanges are not based on a balanced technical, social and economic infrastructure. There are unquestionable centralities, obvious imbalances, and therefore accumulations and collections.

However, the documentary question has not disappeared – quite the contrary. A too quick reading of the evolution of the Web and interfaces could make us think that the commercial web has become so dominant and that it is no longer a tool for classifying, sorting, filing and organizing information. Nothing could be further from the truth, on the one hand because marketing operates through sorting and filing strategies, and on the other hand because users’ documentary practices are constantly growing in new forms, based on logics that may differ from the practices derived from knowledge organization and organizational practices. Hierarchical and treebased logics have gradually given way to new forms whose graphic representations are those of networks of graphs and links. More difficult to apprehend at times, they are richer in links, but are not egalitarian because they contain nodes that are more important than others.

Hyperdocumentation draws on the roots of hypertext, whose history largely precedes that of computer environments and its configuration within the Web. Also deceptive are the new forms of documentation that may lead us to believe that the democratization of possibilities and the apparent personalization of interactions on the new interfaces make it possible to do without logics organized in a controlled way by larger authorities. However, although the driving force behind the actions undertaken on the Web is based on the illusion of ease and freedom of action, the phenomena of governmentality are still very present, even if they are not necessarily the work of traditional institutions, but of the new actors of the Web and the Internet. The documentary growth has thus continued even as the initial informational and documentary spirit of the web project has changed. The new documentary productions that can be examined are based on the growing phenomena of self-documentation (Gorichanaz 2018) and hyper-documentation (Le Deuff 2019a, Le Deuff and Perret 2019a, Le Deuff and Perret 2019b). Hyperdocumentation therefore feeds on hyperconnection, which refers both to the fact that the individual is almost permanently connected to his or her digital devices, but also to the fact that it is difficult to be disconnected due to an increase in the number of capture instruments.

The self-documentary practices that take place on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc.) in various forms (photographs, videos, messages, tags, likes, etc.) are in fact proof of the formation of a new documentary regime, that of a hyperdocumentation whose content exploits to the maximum the potentialities of the indexing of knowledge and especially those of the indexing of existences.

This documentary regime is based on the evolution of the role of institutions whose search for truth required knowledge of individuals and groups of individuals in order to allow for optimized action (systemic and logistical logic notably since Vauban’s work (Chevalier and Le Deuff 2010)) as well as the exercise of increasingly tight control over individuals as demonstrated by Michel Foucault in order to have better control. If Michel Foucault showed that the best way to control individuals was the progressive and voluntary integration of social norms, the current evolution tends to reinforce these mechanisms by voluntarily making our actions more visible. Indeed, it is not only a question of demonstrating one’s personal presence, but also of assuming forms of communication that are placed within the logic of conformity, notably social, cultural, community or generational.

Hyperconnection and hyperdocumentation are then propelled by editorial logic: for a person to exist in the digital space, he or she must have a profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or another platform that can identify him or her and make him or her visible:

Editorialization thus becomes a condition of existence. Now, on the basis of this idea, editorializing does not only mean producing content, but also producing reality itself. According to this very broad definition, editorialization designates all the collective forms of negotiation of reality. In other words, editorialization is the set of our social practices that allows us to understand, organize and interpret the world. The fact that we live in an increasingly digital space suggests that all these practices also take place in the digital space – which means, in short, that any practice aiming to understand, organize or interpret the world is an act of editorialization. (Vitali-Rosati 2016, p. 8, author’s translation)

This editorialization was built on the evolution of indexing. While it was based on information search mechanisms based on the need to find the right document according to a query, automatic indexing mechanisms in particular sought to identify information segments or groups of words or expressions within documents to produce new documentary units. Subsequently, the evolution of websites and the possibilities of accessing dynamic sites made it possible to create documentary forms generated according to queries, which Bruno Bachimont described:

The goal is no longer to retrieve documents, but to produce new ones using the resources found. We are thus moving from indexing for research to indexing for publication. Since the latter is carried out according to rules and standards, we will speak of editorialization, to emphasize the fact that the indexed segments are enrolled in editorial processes for new publications. (Bachimont 07, p. 17, author’s translation)

The documentary extension then resides in the query mechanism, which is more and more closely associated with the fact that the logic of organized data makes it possible to generate documents on demand. The documentary logic then rests at the same time on mechanisms of direct solicitation, but also on potentialities to which it is necessary to try to answer or even to anticipate. There must always be somewhere a documentary answer to a question, even if it is not always clearly expressed, because one tries above all to anticipate it.

I.2. Editorialization and referencing

The editorial issue of the Web is strongly correlated to the issues of indexing, which enable the visibility of content. While the initial spirit was based more on sharing and favoring forms of facilitated accessibility, the success of the Web has led to a mass of available content that requires new tools. These new tools are, in the end, as much new tools as they are new media and new powers.

Editorial logics are now coupled with indexing logics and algorithmic strategies. The data generated and its processing eventually produces a new augmented reality. Via the documentary forms that add, complete or describe what seems to correspond to reality, a hyper-reality is then constituted, of which the hyperville (Lussault 2017) is one of the most current forms.

Can we speak of hyper-reality to describe this new way of seeing and perceiving the world through not only our senses and our experience, but through the means, the mediums that allow us to see more and to know more?

In just a few years, the Internet and its web offshoots have by no means made space and geography disappear, contrary to what Paul Virilio (Virilio 1997) thought, incapable of thinking about the world without conceiving of technology as a potential catastrophe. On the contrary, a cybergeography (Dodge 2001) or connected social geography (Beaude 2012) has developed to produce new measures and metrics that constitute challenges for the sciences, especially the humanities and social sciences.

If space is increased, what about time? Can hyper-geography be associated with hyper-history?

The Italian philosopher Floridi thus considers that it is possible to qualify our present era as hyper-historical, because nowadays a large part of the population and its societies live in a pervasive technological environment, and this environment is changing the perception of our present world, but also the conditions for preserving and writing history:

The greatest majority of people today still live historically, in societies that rely on ICTs to record and transmit data of all kinds. In such historical societies, ICTs have not yet overtaken other technologies, especially energy-related ones, in terms of their vital importance. Then, there are some people around the world who are already living hyperhistorically, in societies or environments where ICTs and their data processing capabilities are the necessary condition for the maintenance and any further development of societal welfare, personal well-being, as well as intellectual flourishing. The nature of conflicts provides a sad test for the reliability of this tripartite interpretation of human evolution. Only a society that lives hyperhistorically can be vitally threatened informationally, by a cyber attack. Only those who live by the digit may die by the digit. (Floridi 2012, p. 129–130)

Floridi’s somewhat dystopian vision insists on threats. But it seems to me that it is a bit quick to overlook realities other than data theft or cyber security threats. Firstly, the documentary and material reality of these devices and especially the voluntary exercise of making visible masses of documentation that did not need to be extorted, because they were provided voluntarily, deserve to be recalled. In some ways, if the risks are present and sometimes conscious, it seems that the risk might be worth it.

The search for attention is then exercised as much by its members as by the mechanisms of the platforms. Hyperdocumentation becomes total, mixing personal documentary practices with a short range, with the logic of documentation of all individual practices (the famous personal data) whose interest lies in the fact of being able to relate them to collective data. The process relies on comparison to try to extract, if not new major laws, at least new strategies for organizing and optimizing content.

The hyperdocumentation we examine in this book is based on processes that govern our lives. It appears as exciting as it is disturbing, as its possibilities appear almost unlimited, especially when one studies the context in which Otlet defines and conceives it. So now we have to take full measure of it.

The time of hyperdocumentation has begun, and it is not about to be over. Paul Otlet had described and “predicted” it, but it was very difficult to fully grasp what he was announcing and describing at the time the concept was created. However, I am tempted to follow the advice of Valère Darchambau, who tried to answer a colleague who had difficulty understanding what Paul Otlet was trying to achieve in his desire to make the Universal Decimal Classification evolve. Darchambau placed Otlet’s work in a long perspective a few months before the death of the creator of the Mundaneum:

Mr. Otlet’s mental audacities, his ‘utopias’, some would say, take on their full value when they are considered in relation to the ultra-fast mechanical brain that these machines represent. This multiple and differentiated characterization that Mr. Otlet would like to achieve, practically unusable within a valid period of time by our slow and quickly rejected human brains, will probably be the ‘code’ through which statistical machines will soon (in 5, 20, 50 or x years) reveal unsuspected relationships between things.² (author’s translation)

Nearly 80 years have passed since the death of Paul Otlet, and this book aims to understand his mental audacity in order to better grasp the whole range of dimensions of hyperdocumentation, particularly in the present day.

I.3. Chapter structure

In Chapter 1, we present the main concept of this book by explaining its conception by the Belgian lawyer and pioneer of documentation, Paul Otlet. We show here the evolution of documentary forms and practices and the different stages that Otlet describes and that should lead us to hyperdocumentation, a kind of ultimate goal of documentation where everything is potentially recorded. In Chapter 2, we articulate this concept with that of documentality developed by the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, notably to underline the importance of documentation in human societies, but also to demonstrate that the documentary question remains essential in today’s environments. The third chapter deals with the question of machines and their typology in hyper-documentary regimes, which allows us to study (in Chapter 4) the power issues related to documentary enterprises. Within this framework, we present the concept of the “documentary regime”, an expression used in particular by Bertrand Müller (Müller 2012), whose relevance we try to show in periods marked by the progressive advent of hyperdocumentation. Chapter 5 allows us to place, in a historical way, the tensions between the different forms of information gathering and documentary processing within the tensions between the indexing and organization of knowledge and the element that sometimes uses similar techniques to index existences and finally organize our lives. Chapter 6 is based on the study of personal or individual documentation, showing the growth of these documentary practices, even if they are not necessarily part of a logic of accumulating knowledge and skills, and, on the contrary, they favor forms of self-documentation or even self-promotion. Chapter 7 examines what the hyperdocumentalists of our lives are today and addresses the question of the mediations to be developed to respond to new needs both in terms of managing one’s data (especially personal data) on a daily basis, but also in terms of temporalities that presuppose the inheritance and transmission of what has been collected, accumulated and produced by the individual in favor of his or her descendants, but also for the common good. Chapter 8 raises the question of the limits of a hyperdocumentation that could succeed in indexing all human sensations in order to get closer to recordings of the real. We also approach in a historical way the attempts to imagine and understand what is out of the ordinary and could correspond to the sixth sense and to what Otlet calls the irrational which hyperdocumentation seeks to document. Finally, this chapter also poses the question of the indexing of spiritual life and the question of desires.

Chapter 9 describes the avenues and obstacles to the development of hyperdocumentation for the benefit of the greatest number of people, easily accessible, both technically and intellectually.

We conclude with an ethical as well as philosophical questioning on what we want to achieve in the regimes of hyperdocumentation, which necessarily raises the question of the goals of human societies and the place of the individual in this history. It also interrogates the temporalities that we are living and the tracks that could allow us somewhere to “replay our lives”.