The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 42

Natural language accomplished the function of interface long before the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be the permanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifying factor in the relation between the individual and society.

Ideally, interface should not affect the way people const.i.tute themselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to their ident.i.ty. This means that people can change and tasks can vary.

The interface would account for the change and would accommodate new goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists and researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, who work with intelligent interfaces, do not antic.i.p.ate such a living interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practical experiences in computing. As these become more complex, a breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead of supporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them and affect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quite well under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each new human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks because the people const.i.tuted in language adapt. In the intimate relation between humans and their language, language limits new experiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence.

Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches its climax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessary exhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language no longer enhances human abilities in practical experiences outside its pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scope of the experience to its own, and limits human growth.

Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of them, are testimony to the powerful interface that literate language is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony to what occurs when the interface const.i.tutes its own domain of motivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goals that result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacy had been a neutral mediating ent.i.ty, it would have scaled up to the new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiency expectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms of religious, scientific, ideological, political, and economic domination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. To understand this predicament, we can compare the sequence of interfaces connected to the experience of religion to the sequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between these two domains of practical experience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Both start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and expand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very rich multimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to the wide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve as double-headed ent.i.ties: the language of the initiated individuals interfaced with the language of the individuals progressively integrated in the experience. No one should misconstrue this comparison, meant only to ill.u.s.trate the const.i.tutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We could as well focus on the experiences of economics, politics, ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art.

The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but also in lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) that disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to resuscitate. The relation between the individual and community, once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacy took over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into a multiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques applied on literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require even further standardization in order to be efficient. As a result, the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes a locus for data management instead of a place for human interaction. The process exemplifies what happens when interface takes over and interacts with itself.

The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how important it is to understand the nature of interface processes. But experience gained in computational research of knowledge points to other aspects critical to the relation between the individual and society. Humans const.i.tute themselves in a variety of practical experiences that require alternatives to language.

Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualization techniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual s.p.a.ce are such alternative means. Non-linear a.s.sociation and cognitive paths, until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience on the World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processing language is not equivalent to integrating these alternative means.

Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiences grounded in means different from language, on account of the intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of memory requirements. The genetic endowment formed in language-based practical experiences of self-const.i.tution is not necessarily adapted to fundamentally different means of expression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which is established in an acculturation process that takes many generations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does not become more precise. Programs are conceived to enable the understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means on a routine basis, though the compa.s.s might be set on some elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have to articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating many operations that human beings still perform will increase output, and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the real challenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation between what is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that will a.s.sociate the output to the many criteria by which humans or the machine determine how meaningful that output is, are more important than raw technological performance. Until now, literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for this goal.

People and language change together. Individuals are formed in language; their practical experiences reshape language and lead to the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple language and the human being, especially in view of the parallel evolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we will continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and representation. The issue is not language per se, but the claim that representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive, paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy has produced an alternative to representation.

There is more to physical reality than what language can lay claim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of our existence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it while extending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in the physical world-skills which children and newborn animals display-are only partially represented in language. The entire realm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includes coordination and the very rich forms of relating to s.p.a.ce, time, and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitive research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various organisms survive without the benefits of representation. Very personal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, and joy-happen without the benefits and constraints of language representation.

There are skills for which we have no representation in language.

Various tags are used to name them under the heading of parapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once these are described through their results only, they cause reactions ranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicable performances of individuals called idiots savants belong to this category. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it masterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. A matchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking at the box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These are feats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to go through long sequences of phone numbers, produce complete listings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication and division. Researchers can only observe and record such accomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simply have no concept available: the amazing last moments before death, the power of illusion, and the visualization apt.i.tudes of some individuals. Researchers have acc.u.mulated data on the power of prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is not the intention of this book to venture explanations of these phenomena, but to point out the great variety of experiences which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merely because they still defy explanation in language.

Functioning in a world that we read through the gla.s.ses of literacy makes us often blind to what is different, to what literacy does not encompa.s.s. A realm of fact and possible abstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existence that language reports about, remains to be explored. When the n.o.bel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on a difference in machine and human computation, this report pointed to aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as a useful interface, and to a realm different from representation.

Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of a given pragmatic context. They are references as to how far such a context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe of fundamental change and revolution, const.i.tutive of a new framework. The really interesting level of language, and of any other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of const.i.tuting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extend the old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previous pattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences are more than the sum of individual contributions. They are const.i.tutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtual office is but another form of office. Virtual community is a const.i.tutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned in experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the partic.i.p.atory aspect of human self-const.i.tution in an environment of fluidity and unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform, but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine, of construction materials, or of electronic components continues earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices, const.i.tutes a new domain of practical experiences.

Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework different in nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacy embodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-, techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have exhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergent pragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within them can only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in the avatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at the juncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of language is not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what the world is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books, and social concerns. The networks of objects and their properties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization of literacy only through language: things are real insofar as they are in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge well beyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the new pragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and of cooperative, parallel human interactions is a human being self-const.i.tuted in a plurality of interconditioning means of expression, communication, and signification. We might just be on the verge of a new age.

A Sense of the Future

Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still science fiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to define direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversity of this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practical experiences of self-const.i.tution. The landscape mapped out by these experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. One marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. But this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology, in general.

Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language and in its literate experience-we suggested that a mult.i.tude of various sign processes effectively override the need for and justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the sense that human practical experiences become more and more subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final a.n.a.lysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs.

Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond computers and symbolic processing.

As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness is expressed in choices (of means of expression and communication) and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no less than the new media, global interaction through networks, cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semiotic identifiers. Interfaces are semiotic ent.i.ties through which difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and society are addressed. More precisely, to interface means to advance methods and notions of a new form of cultural engineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering, although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the proponents of memetics would like us to believe.

No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast the rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of humankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change.

To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stone of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern is not with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probably insane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense of optimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, not on its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether a spectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment, genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or cooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitive resources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible to language and literacy, at work under circ.u.mstances of globality.

Cognitive energy

It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from which many will people benefit, but which many resent even before these applications become available. They all become possible once they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilization of literacy because they are based on structurally different means of expression, communication, and signification. We have all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to unharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. A child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his condition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired by interpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physical world in the rough draft of the simulated world. People are helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported in acquiring skills in an environment where the individual sets the goals. In j.a.pan, virtual reality helps people prepare for earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for fast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support human interactions in the s.p.a.ce of their scientific, poetic, or artistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating the hope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance.

Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit data pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world.

Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory of human interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows people and machines to remember. You step into a room, and your presence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets you know how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. It evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the information so you can see it from that distance. It reminds you of things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant to our continuous self-const.i.tution through extremely complex practical experiences play an important role in making such interactions more efficient. A personal diary of actions, dialogues, and thinking out loud can be automatically recorded.

Storing data from the active badge and from images captured during a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone keep track of us. This is a new form of personal diary, protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or misuse.

This diary collects routine happenings that might seem irrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading, drawing, building models, and a.n.a.lyzing data. The record can be completed by doc.u.menting patterns of behavior of emotional or cognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing, wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end of the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be e-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day or search for a certain moment, for those details that make one's time meaningful.

In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical experiences, we can search for artistic events. A play by Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where the boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play will feature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can even intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and deliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can be viewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiate dialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the community we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense, means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that seem as alien as almost all the ma.s.s-media performances they are fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others, physically present or not. To see the world differently can lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. How does a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the people of the country he has landed in? What do human beings look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person negotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in a hurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatrics in many schools. But once a person a.s.sumes the handicapped body in a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer based on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of self-const.i.tution as handicapped. People can learn more about each other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And, hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond empty expressions of sympathy.

That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic sign systems-change the nature of individual practical experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough.

Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt, sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually produced. The active badge can be attached to a simulated person- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a new building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. The diary of s.p.a.ce discovery is at least as important as the personal diary of a person working in a real factory, research facility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before another riverbed is moved, before a new housing development is constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out what changes of immediate and long-term impact might result.

It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of command, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can be turned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimes fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks a.s.sociated with the unpredictability of human behavior. The active badge can be connected, through a local area network of wall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neural network-based procedure designed to process the many bits and pieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. People could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive processes a.s.sociated with it. They can derive knowledge from the immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity and un.o.btrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical care, for the support of child development, and for the growing elderly population. With the advent of optical computers, and even biological data processing devices, chances will increase for a complete restructuring of our relation to data, information processing, and interhuman relationships.

Individuals will ascertain their characteristics more and more, thus increasing their role in the socio-political network of human interaction.

Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for the elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where does life end and biological survival become meaningless? These people exercise power within the set of inherited values that originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy a.s.sociated with literacy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of the many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above.

Our relation to life and death, to universality, permanence, non-hierarchical forms of life and work, to religion and science, and last but not least to all the people who make up our world of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality is redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems, not just as an ident.i.ty to be explained away in the generality that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself will be redefined.

Literacy is not all it's made out to be

Enthusiasm over technology is not an argument; and semiotics, obfuscated by semiologues, is not a panacea. George Steiner pointed out that scientists, who "have been tempted to a.s.sert that their own methods and vision are now at the center of civilization, that the ancient primacy of poetic statement and metaphysical image is over." This is not an issue of criteria based on empirical verification, or the recent tradition of collaborative achievement, correctly contrasted to the apparent idiosyncrasy and egotism of literacy. The pragmatic framework reflects the challenge of efficiency in our world of increased population, limited resources, and the domination of nature. This framework is critical to the human effort to a.s.sess its own possibilities and articulate its goals. Let us accept Steiner's idea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-that sciences "have added little to our knowledge or governance of human possibility." Let us further accept that "there is demonstratably more insight into the matter of man in Homer, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky than in the entire neurology of statistics." This, if it were true, would only mean that such an insight is less important to the practical experience of human self-const.i.tution than literacy-based humanities would like us to believe.

Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand the epistemological consequence of a statement like "No discovery of genetics impairs or surpa.s.ses what Proust knew of the spell or burden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practical experience of self-const.i.tution, a pragmatics other than genetics proves more consequential. n.o.body can argue with this. But from the particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer that consequences for a broader number of people, the majority of whom will probably never know anything about genetics, are not connected to its discoveries. We may be touched by the elegant argument that "each time Oth.e.l.lo reminds us of the rust of dew on the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pa.s.s than it is the business or ambition of physics to impart." After all the rhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, the physics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universe proves to be no less metaphysical, and no less touching, than any example from the arts, literature, or philosophy that Steiner or anyone else can produce. Science only has different motivations and is expressed in a different language. It challenges human cognition and sentiment, and awareness of self and others, of s.p.a.ce and time, and even of literature, which seems to have stagnated once the potential of literacy was exhausted. The very possibility of writing as significantly as the writers of the past did diminishes, as the practical experience of literate writing is less and less appropriate to the new experiences of self-const.i.tution in the civilization of illiteracy.

The argument can go on and on, until and unless we settle on a rather simple premise: The degree of significance of anything connected to human ident.i.ty-art, work, science, politics, s.e.x, family-is established in the act of human self-const.i.tution and cannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our humanistic tradition. The air, clean or polluted, is significant insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of life. Homer, Proust, van Gogh, Beethoven, and the anonymous artist of an African tribe are significant insofar as human self-const.i.tution integrates each or every one of them, in the act of individual identification.

Projecting their biological const.i.tution into the world- we all breathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive the world-humans ascertain their natural reality. The experience of making oneself can be as simple as securing food, water, and shelter, or as complex as composing or enjoying a symphony, painting, writing, or meditating about one's condition. If in this practical experience one has to integrate a stick or a stone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, or to project the individual in a sculpture or musical piece, the significance of the stick or stone or the noise is determined in the pragmatic context of the self-const.i.tutive moment.

Many contexts confirm the significance of literacy-based practical experiences. History, even in its computational form or in genetic shape, is an example. Literacy made quite a number of practical experiences possible: education, ma.s.s media, political activism, industrial manufacture. This does not imply that these domains are forever wed to literacy. A few contexts, such as crafts, predated literacy. Information processing, visualization, non-algorithmic computation, genetics, and simulation emerged from the pragmatics that ascertained literacy. But they are also relatively independent of it.

Steiner was correct in stating that "we must countenance the possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a pa.s.sionate luxury like the preservation of the antique." His a.s.sertion needs to be extended from literature to literacy.

The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety.

Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated in ancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy, point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once it started to be tamed and its regulated use enforced upon people.

Again, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view: "...we should not a.s.sume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable.

There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies, such as the icon or the musical note." He correctly describes how mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and Newton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists, knowing no syllable of each other's language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common to their craft."

Networks of cognitive energy

Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other practical experiences of human self-const.i.tution, formed their own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take place is not a pa.s.sive component of the experience. It is imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a const.i.tutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the process of self-identification of the people who projected themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them, and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000 ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use.

The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in different alphabets and different pragmatic structures, reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran.

Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different.

Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing presses were invented, writing extends a different thought- machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw materials into products.

All the characteristics a.s.sociated with literacy are characteristics of the underlying structure of practical experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the limited sequences of human self-const.i.tutive practical experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines.

The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different activities carried through at the same time, at one location or at several, are qualitatively different from sequential activities. Self-const.i.tution in such parallel experiences results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.

Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates emanc.i.p.ation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of literacy be replaced through ma.s.sive distribution of tasks, and non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits of integration to human acts of self-const.i.tution. Mediation replaces the a.n.a.lytic strategy inherited through literacy, opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an experience of building hypotheses and performing effective synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing, distribution, and integration of computers in applications ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.

The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems, telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design, and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different from anything we know of from previous practical experiences.

Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in the new product.

Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the pragmatics a.s.sociated with literacy, this is a very good representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new experiences come about. Chances are that the ma.s.s-produced machines increasingly present in a great number of households reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the PC might have been compared.

Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone.

Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web should understand that what makes them so promising is not the potential for surfing, or its impressive publication capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is transported through networks.

b.u.mps and potholes

Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ in their condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely more chances open continuously, but the risks a.s.sociated with them are at least of the same order of magnitude as the changes.