How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place equal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature and even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein Kampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazi revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially the young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factual errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious, ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic expectations and on the practice of human-based values. Champions of literacy point to the classics of history and enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space do they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes? In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude that from all the books stored in homes and places of public access, the majority should probably have never been written, never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were only repetitive of what had been said and thought previously, they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness and deceit are consecrated through the associations that the printed word entails.
Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and use books less and less for their practical experiences. Titles make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry, television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezing the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply manufactured books.
Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles, high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapid acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge related to practical experiences. First among the factors affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change. Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics, and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel, even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence agencies.
Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies render obsolete facts associated with past observations published as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected pages and articles already substitute for the book on the desks of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year. The book will appear in a new edition, either because the information has been updated or because the publisher wants to make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.
The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the book necessary was relatively homogeneous. Heterogeneity entails a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the experience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary or historic function, books capture less than what other media, better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could. For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be realized, much less recorded. What is available is the accumulated human experience with alternate media, not necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to instances of parallelism and distributed activities.
Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions to questions related to non-sequential connections.
In addition to these major factors, there is the broader background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience, especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumed as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed world. There are the visually impaired and physically handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.
The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally different human practical experience of self-constitution. In line with the shift from manufacturing to service, books perform mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by a database), amusement, and filling time. Even if the great novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might be that literature today is passionless, or it might be that the seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered, the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent. The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy, the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation within the continuum of writing.
The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to self-constitution: all our senses-including common sense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are more efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to persecution and violence, even mass destruction. On the individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for developing other skills essential to his or her physical and mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its dominant position in our lives.
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