Humans are heuristic animals. Our society is one of creativity and diversity, operating on a scale of human interaction to which we exponentially add new domains: outer space, whose dimensions can be measured only in light years, and whose period of observation extends over lifetimes; the microcosmos, mirroring the scale in the opposite direction of infinitesimal differentiations; the new continents of man-made materials, new forms of energy, genetically designed plants and animals, new genetic codes, and virtual realities to experience new spaces, new times, and new forms of mediation. Networking, which at its current stage barely suggests things to come, can only be compared to the time electricity became widely available. Cognitive energy exchanged through networks and focused on cooperative endeavors is part of what lies ahead as we experience exponential growth on digital networks and fast learning curves of efficient handling of their potential.
The past corresponds to a pragmatic framework well adapted to the survival and development of humankind in the limited world of direct encounters or limited mediations. In terms pertinent to a civilization built around the notion of literacy, the current lower levels of literacy can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis, or even a breakdown. But what defines the new pragmatic context is the shift from a literacy- centered model to one of multiple, interconnected, and interconditioned, distributed literacies. It is well justified to repeat that some of the most enlightened minds overlook the pragmatics of bygone practice. Challenged, confused, even scared by the change, they call for a journey to the past: back to tradition, to discipline, to the ethics of our forefathers, to old-time religion and the education that grew out of it, to permanence, and hopefully to stability. Even those who wholeheartedly espouse evolutionary and revolutionary models seem to have a problem when it comes to literacy. All set to do away with authority, they have no qualms about celebrating the imperialism of the written word. Other minds confess to difficulties in coping with a present so promising and, at the same time, so confusing in its structural contradictions. What we experience, from the extreme of moral turpitude to a disquieting sense of mediocrity and meaninglessness, nourishes skeptical, if not fatalistic, visions. The warning is out (again): We will end up destroying humankind! Yet another part of the living present accepts the challenge without caring about the implications it entails. The people in this group give up their desire to understand what happens, as long as this makes life exciting and rewarding. Hollywood thrives on this. So do the industries of digital smoke- and-mirrors, always a step from fame, and not much farther from oblivion. Addresses on the Internet fade as quickly as they are set up. The most promising links of yesterday show up on the monitor as a "Sorry" message, as meaningful as their short- lived presence was. Arguing with success is a sure recipe for failure. Success deserves to be celebrated in its authentic forms that change the nature of human existence in our universe.
The future suggested in the labels technocracy, information age, and service society might capture some characteristics of today's world, but it is limited and limiting. This future fails to accommodate the development of human activity at the new scale in terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it has reached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as the underlying structure the current set of dependencies among the many parts involved in human activity, and a stubborn deterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflected celebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must be treated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The current participation of technology in human activity is indeed impressive. So are the extent of information processing and information mining, and the new relation between productive activities and services. To make sense of disparate data and from them form new productive endeavors is a formidable task. Science, in turn, made available enormously challenging theories and extremely refined models of the world.
But after all is done and said, these are only particular aspects of a much more encompassing process. The result is a pragmatic framework of a new condition. Highly mediated work, distributed tasks, parallel modes, and generalized networking of rather loosely coordinated individual experiences define this condition. Within this framework, the connection between input (for instance, work) and output (what results) is of a different order of magnitude tfrom that between the force applied on a lever and the outcome; or that between the energy necessary to accomplish useful tasks through engines or electric, or pneumatic devices, no matter how efficient, and the result. In addition, even the distinction between input and output becomes fuzzy. The wearable computer provides interoperability and interconnectedness-an increase in a person's heart rate can be a result of an increase in physical exertion or cause for communicating with a doctor's office or for alerting the police station (if an accident takes place). It might be that the next interaction will involve our genetic code.
The capacity for language and the ability to understand its various implications are only relatively interdependent, and thus only relatively open to scrutiny and understanding. This statement, as personal as it sounds, and as much as it expresses probably less resignation than uncertainty, is crucial to the integrity of this entire enterprise. Indeed, once within a language, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneself from the perspective of that language as the medium for partial self-constitution and evaluation. Participating in its dynamics affects what I am able to see and describe. This affects also what I am no longer able to perceive, what escapes my perception, or even worse, filters it to the point that I see only my own thoughts. This dual identity-observer and integral part of the observed phenomena-raises ethical, axiological, and epistemological aspects almost impossible to reconcile. Since every language is a projection of ourselves-as participants in the human experience, yet as distinct instantiations of that experience-we do not see the world so much as ourselves in relation to it, ourselves in establishing our culture, and again ourselves in taming and appropriating the universe around us. The fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince says it much better: "One only understands the things one tames."
"Between us the rift"
Huge industrial complexes where an immense number of workers participate in the production of goods, and densely populated urban centers gravitating around factories, make up the image characteristic of industrial society. This image is strikingly different from the new reality of interconnected, yet decentralized, individual activities going well beyond telecommuting. Various mediating elements contribute to increasingly efficient practical experiences of human self-constitution. The computer is one of the varied embodiments of these mediating elements, but by no means the only one. Through its functions, such as calculation, word, image, and information processing, and control of manufacturing, it introduces many layers between individuals and the object of their actions. The technology of interconnecting provides means for distributive task strategies. It also facilitates parallel modes of productive work. This is a world of progressive decentralization and interoperative possibilities. All kinds of machines can be an address in this interconnected world. Their operations can range from design tasks to computer-aided manufacturing. Distributed work and cognitive functions pertinent to it afford practical experiences qualitatively different from the mechanical sequencing of tasks as we know it from industrial modes of production.
Obviously, large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as part of the European and North American continents, do not necessarily fit this description in detail. Industrial activities still constitute the dominant practical experience in the world. Although nomadic and jungle tribes are part of this integrated world, the Industrial Revolution has not yet reached them all. In some cases, the stages leading to agriculture have not yet been attained. In view of the global nature of human life and activity today, I submit that despite the deep disparity in the economic and social evolution of various regions of the world, it is plausible to assume that centralized modes of production peculiar to industrial economies are not a necessary development. Efficiency expectations corresponding to the global scale of human activity can be reached only by development strategies different from those embodied in the pragmatic framework of industrial activity. It is therefore probable that countries, and even subcontinents, not affected by the Industrial Revolution will not go through it. Planners with an ecological bent even argue that developing countries should not take the path that led industrial nations to augment their population's living standard to the detriment of the environment or by depleting natural resources (A German Manifest, 1992).
Industrial production and the related social structures rely on literacy. Edmund Carpenter formulated this quite expressively: "Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line…." His description, made in broad strokes, is to the point. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, children and women became part of the labor market. For the very limited operation one had to perform, no literacy was necessary; and women and children were not literate. Still, the future development of the industrial society could not take place without the dissemination of literacy skills. For instance, industry made possible the invention, in 1830, of the steel pen indispensable to the compulsory elementary education that was later instituted. The production of steel needles seemed to extend domesticity, but actually created the basis for the sweat trades following what Louis Mumford called carboniferous capitalism. Gaslight and electricity expanded the time available for the dissemination of literacy skills. Housing improvements made possible the building of the individual library. George Steiner sees this as a turning point in the sense that a private context of the experience of the book was created.
As far as national structures were concerned, phenomena characteristic of the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood outside the wider context of the formation and consolidation of nations. Affirmation of national identity is a process intimately connected to the values and functions of literacy. The production process of the industrial age of mechanical machinery and electric power required not brute force, but qualified force. Administrative and management functions required more literacy than work on the assembly line. But literacy projected its characteristics onto the entire activity, thus making a literate workforce desirable. The market it generated projected the condition of the industry in the structure of its transactions. The requirements for qualified work expanded to requirements for qualified market activities and resulted in the beginnings of marketing and advertising. That market was based on the recognition of national boundaries, i.e., boundaries of efficiency, self-sufficiency, and future growth offering markets of a size and complexity adequate to industrial output. Nations replaced the coarse fragmentation of the world. They were no longer, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno notices, a disguise of tribal structures, but a political space within which democracy could be established.