The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 35

The need to achieve high levels of efficiency corresponding to the current human scale is probably the aspect most ignored.

Efficiency, pre-programmed through design, confirms that human involvement is expensive (do-it-yourself dominates at all levels of design), and service more profitable than manufacturing in developed countries. None of these solutions can be taken lightheartedly. After all, design bridges to the future, and to bridge to a world of depleted resources, destroyed ecology, and a mediocre human condition is not necessarily a good reason for optimism. The goal of reducing human involvement, especially when the human is forced into exhausting and dangerous experiences, is very attractive, but also misleading. To reduce human involvement, energies different from those of an individual involved in experiences of self-const.i.tution as a user need to be provided. Faced with the challenge posed by the dualistic choice expectations vs. resources, designers often fail to free themselves from the literate ideology of dominating nature. Fortunately, design based on co-evolution with nature is gaining momentum. So is the design of materials endowed with characteristics usually a.s.sociated with human intelligence.

The inherent opposition between means and goals explains the dynamics of design in our time. Extremely efficient methods of communication lead to information saturation. New methods for designing result in an apparent overabundance of artifacts and other products of design. It seems that the driving force is the possibility to practically meet individual expectations at levels of productivity higher than those of literacy-based ma.s.s production, and at costs well below those of ma.s.s production. The challenge-how to maintain quality and integrity-is real and involves more than professional standards. Market-specific processes, probably well reflected in the notion of profit, affect design decisions to the extent that often human practical experiences in the market result in under-designing or over-designing negotiated items. Changing expectations, as a consequence of rapidly changing contexts of human experiences, affect the design cycle even more than the production cycle. The ability to meet such changes by a built-in design variability is, however, not only a test of design, but also of its implicit economic equation.

Enormous segments of the world population are addressed by design. This fact gives the design experience, taken in its entirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of the opportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without the need to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of such an activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers are aware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such an experience, is a different question.

The new designer

Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and plans for change; and they need to interface between the given and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an implicit set of antic.i.p.ations and a projected endurance.

Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit set of antic.i.p.ations. It translates from the many languages of human practical experiences to the language of design, and from here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product, event, message, material, or interaction.

It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules, such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the design experience within a context of a.s.suming ident.i.ty between the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from any other pragmatic context but the one on which the civilization of illiteracy is established.

Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind, applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of self-const.i.tution, makes something out of them.

In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a challenging sense of quality against the background of our obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much the activity as the people who are the activity that make either the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings up the ident.i.ty of the designer in the civilization of illiteracy.

Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual.

Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers, graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional s.p.a.ce either as product designers, architects, or engineers.

Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer; gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima).

The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design, and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way, from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible.

People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes, furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape) in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models, just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism, communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries, promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient, but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the challenges people face and through which human personality emerges.

The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average, generating expectations affordable to everyone. The s.p.a.ce of choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event.

n.o.body ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers, earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans, dresses, gla.s.ses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games.

No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips.

Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for gla.s.ses, sells under different identifiers.

This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are who namelessly partic.i.p.ate in expected abundance or in ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means through which new practical experiences take place make each of us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of information through which our profile of commercial democracy is drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search for information on the Internet-we become more and more transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But transparency, sometimes savage in compet.i.tive life (economy, politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is lost in the process.

Designing the virtual

The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real, without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire.

One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual s.p.a.ce is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical experience, the design of virtual s.p.a.ce is one level beyond, i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a realm where the person frees himself from the structures characteristic of literacy.

In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context.

Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear because their descriptions are no longer based on the reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual s.p.a.ce, self-const.i.tution, hence identification, no longer regards cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human practical experiences.

Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design practical experience. From among the very many designs in a state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework.

Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly computational and disseminates computational means.

Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means of expression and communication, in respect to the role of representation, and to our position in regard to values. The electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data processing. When, at the social level, representation is replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by interest groups a.s.sembled around causes of short-term impact that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.

The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials, messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations a.s.sociated with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems, articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline and self-control in our interaction with artifacts.

Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality, stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and by representations of representations, and so on until the reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of literacy are reconst.i.tuted as a frame of relativist interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing the image in full control of all its components. A sound level can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process, adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to those that design affords, results in the infinity of books, printed for the potential individual reader (or the very limited readership that a t.i.tle or journal tends to have) who might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical description given above might still be far away from today's reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.

On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is integrated in the networked world in a number of ways: communication protocols, hypertext, doc.u.ment and image layout, structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no one company (not even the inst.i.tution of defense, which supports networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disa.s.sembled, turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a portion of a letter), and given indications where they should arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are rea.s.sembled, after each package travels its own path. But in order to become a word again, they are further processed according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global.

Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning.

Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes, highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph, television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind, connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can partic.i.p.ate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network.

Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages, electricity, gas, or railway pa.s.sengers is far from being used in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a consequence of our self-identification in practical activities based on a qualitatively new understanding of design.

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning

Hlderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So viel Anfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It applies to many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, of technological directions, of art and literature. It is probably most applicable to the beginnings in political life. The political map of the world has changed more rapidly than we can remember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerous to generalize from events not really settled. But it is impossible to ignore them, especially when they appear to confirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to the civilization of illiteracy.

People who deal with the development and behavior of the human species believe that cooperative effort explains the development of language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is also the root of human self-const.i.tution as political animals. The social dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followed by commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, the driving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, the qualifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal (zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship does not fully address the nature of political human experiences.

Different types of animals also develop patterns of interaction that could be qualified as social, without reaching the cognitive sophistication of the species h.o.m.o Habilis. They also exchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, and biochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, and entrance into cooperative effort are doc.u.mented aspects of animal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals; neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, in its incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations, is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary by the conscious need to optimize practical experiences of human self-const.i.tution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation of a pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to the complex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is not reducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter how sophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, and probably other animals.

The underlying structure of the activities through which humans identify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of the nature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, and establishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritual nature. Changes in the circ.u.mstances of practical experiences effect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That the scale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practical experience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of the species' const.i.tution. Incipient agricultural activity and the formation of the many families of languages correspond to a time when a critical ma.s.s was reached. At this threshold, syncretic human interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns of practical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped the incipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it.

Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactions increased. Political practical experiences are related to work, to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even to geography, to the extent to which the environment makes some forms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historic perspective, politics is never disa.s.sociated from economic life, religion, racial or ethnic ident.i.ty, geography, art, or science.

The underlying structure of human praxis that determined the need for literacy also determined the need for appropriate means of expression, communication, and signification. This becomes even more obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-based pragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmatic circ.u.mstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals of politics should change as well.

The commercial democracy of permissiveness

The condition of politics in a pragmatic framework of non-sequentiality, non- linear functional dependencies, non-determinism, decentralized, non-hierarchic modes of interaction or accelerated dynamics, extreme compet.i.tive pressure-that is, in the framework of the civilization of illiteracy-currently escapes definition. State of flux appropriately describes what such a political experience can be.

What we have today, however, is a conflict between politics anch.o.r.ed in the pragmatics that is still based on literacy and politics shaped by forces representing the pragmatic need to transcend literacy. The conflict affects the condition of politics and the nature of contemporary political action. It affects everything related to the social contract and its implementation: education, exercise of democracy, practice of law, defense, social policies, and international affairs.

Changes affecting current political experiences are part of a sweeping dynamics. These changes range from the acknowledged transition from an industrially based national economy to an information processing global economy focused on service. Part of the change is reflected in the transition from national economies of scarcity (usually complemented by patterns of preserving and saving) to large, integrated commercial economies of access, even right, to consumption and affluence.

Established in the context of political movements that focused on individuality, these integrated economies affect, in turn, the condition of the individual, who no longer sees the need for self-restraint or self-denial, and indulges in the commercial democracy of permissiveness. Consequently, political trials are met, or avoided, with an Epicurean response: withdrawal from public life for the pleasures of buying, entertainment, travel, and sport, which in a not-so-distant past only the rich and powerful could enjoy. Politics itself, as Huxley prophesied in his description of the brave, new world, becomes a form of entertainment, or yet another compet.i.tive instant, not far from the spirit and letter of the stock market, of the auction house, or the gambling casino.

Political involvement in a democracy of permissiveness is channeled into various forms of activism, all expressions of the shift from the politics of authority to that of expanding freedom of choice. The new experience of increasingly interactive electronic media is probably correlated to the shift from the positivist test of facts, as it originated in science and expanded into social and political life, to the rather relativist expectation of successful representations, in public opinion polls, in staged political ceremonies, in the image we have of ourselves and others. Albeit, the power of the media has already surpa.s.sed that of politics.

All these considerations do not exhaust the process under discussion. They explain how particular types of activism-from emanc.i.p.atory movements (feminist, racial, s.e.xual) to the new action of groups identified through ethnic origin, lifestyle, concern for nature-use politics in its newer and older forms to further their own programs. Openness, tolerance, the right to experiment, individualism, relativism, as well as att.i.tudinally motivated movements are all illiterate in nature in the sense that they defy the structural characteristics of literacy and became possible only in post- literate contexts. Some of these movements are still vaguely defined, but have become part of the political agenda of this period of fervor and upheaval. Literacy, in search of arguments for its own survival, frequently embraces causes stemming from experiences that negate it.

The impact of new self-const.i.tutive practical experiences and definition on digital networks already qualifies these experiences as alternatives, regardless of how limited an individual's involvement with them is. Within the realm of human interaction in the only uncensored medium known, a different political experience is taking shape. What counts in this new experience are not anonymous voters lumped into ineffective majorities, but individuals willing to partake in concrete decisions that affect their lives in the virtual communities of choice that they establish. While the ma.s.s media, still connected to the literate nest in which they were hatched, partake in the functioning of political machines that produce the next meaningless president, a different political dynamics, focused on the individual, is leading to more efficient forms of political practical experiences. There is nothing miraculous to report in this respect. Notwithstanding, the Internet can be credited for the defeat of the attempt in 1991 to turn back the political clock in Russia, as well as for the way it is influencing events in China, East Europe, and South America.

How did we get here?

Human relations can be characterized, in retrospect, by recurrences. Distinctions within self-const.i.tutive experiences occur under the pressure of the realized need to achieve higher levels of efficiency. Relations, which include a political component pertinent to cooperative efforts and the need to share the outcome, have been evinced since the syncretic phase of human activity. There is no distinct political dimension in the syncretic pragmatics of immediacy. Incipient political ident.i.ty, as any other kind of human self-identification, is foremostly natural: the strongest, the swiftest, those with the most acute senses are acknowledged as leaders. The most powerful are successful on their own account. And this success translates into survival: more food, more offspring, resilience, ability to escape danger. Once the natural is humanized, the qualities that make some individuals better than others were acknowledged in the realms of nature and human nature. Whether as tribal leaders, spiritual animators, or priests, they all accomplished political functions and continuously reaffirmed the reasons for their perceived authority. Over time, natural qualities lost their determinant role. Characteristics based on human nature, in particular intellectual qualities such as communication skills and management and planning abilities, progressively tipped the balance. Current textbooks defining politics do not even mention natural abilities, focusing instead on the art or science of governing, shrewdness in promoting a policy, and contrivance.

From partic.i.p.atory forms of political life, in which solidarity is more important than differences among people, to the forms characteristic of our time of personal and political shift away from each other, changes have taken place because human practice made them necessary. Politics was not and is not a pa.s.sive result of these changes, some of which it stimulated, others of which it opposed. The survival drive behind partic.i.p.atory forms was continuously redefined and became a different kind of a.s.sertion: not just better than other species, but better than those before us, better than others. Compet.i.tion shifted from the realm of nature-man against nature-to the realm of humanity. Once the element of comparison to the other, or judgment by others, was introduced, hierarchy was established. Hierarchy put on record became, with the advent of notation, and more so with the advent of writing, a component of experience, one of its structuring elements. It is no longer a here-and-now defined action of immediacy, but action expanded as progression over generations and societies, and among various societies. Accordingly, while solidarity, though permanently subject to redefinition, was still in the background, the driving forces were quite different.

They resulted from the need to establish a political practice of efficiency pertinent to the pragmatic framework, henceforth to the needs of the community.

For as long as human activity was relatively h.o.m.ogeneous, there was no need for political delegation or for reifying political goals into rules or organizations. Once diversification became possible, the task of integration, to which rituals, myths, religion, a.s.signment distribution, and leadership contributed, changed. Not only did people involve more of their past in new practical experiences, but they also started to keep records and to measure the adequacy of effort, and thus the appropriateness of their own policies. Attention to their past, present, and future also allowed them to become aware of the means that distinguished political practical experiences from all other experiences (magic, myth, religion). It was a difficult undertaking, especially under the provisions of centralized, syncretic authority. The natural, the magical, the religious, the logical, the economical, and the political mingled. The critical element proved to be represented by practical expectations. To implore unknown forces for rain, a successful hunt, or fertility was very different from articulating expectations related to what needs to be done to maintain the integrity of work and life.

Initially, these expectations were mixed. They progressively became more focused, and a sense of accountability, based on tangible results, embodied in comparisons, was introduced.

While self-const.i.tution is the projection of individual characteristics (biological, cultural) in a given practical experience, political practice is to a great extent a projection of expectations. At each juncture in humankind's practical experience, the previous expectation is carried over as new expectations appear. Accordingly, it is expected that a political leader will embody, in fact or through the symbolism of authority, natural qualities, cognitive abilities, and communication skills (rhetoric included), among other attributes. When these expectations are embodied in specific functions (tribal chief, judge, army commander, elected legislator, or selected member of the executive body) and in political inst.i.tutions, the projection is no longer that of individuals, but of the society committed to the goals and means expressed, to its acknowledged values. Whether indeed each tribal leader was the fastest, or each judge the most impartial in ascertaining the damage done by a person who defied rules of life and work, whether the military leader was the bravest, or the legislator the wisest, became almost irrelevant after their political recognition. Expectation overcame reality. This aspect becomes very significant in the context of literacy. Moreover, it becomes critical in the transition from the pragmatics on which literacy is based to a pragmatic framework in respect to which literacy requirements only hinder.

Political inst.i.tutions firmly grounded in the a.s.sumptions of literacy still debate whether tele-communting is acceptable, tele-commerce secure, or tele-banking in the national interest.