This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The underlying structure of human practical experiences through which average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobel prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other professionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a new type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux. Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can be rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to harmonize the relation between human experience and the functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore value altogether.
The roots of almost everything involved in current practical experiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, but in the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. At a time when books are merely an interior designer's concept of decoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessary bookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the past, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the many things we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiency which neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponic tomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digital book, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy have more in common than one thinks at the mere mention of this opinion.
The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive, entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Free to constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiences opened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploring new territories of human expression and communication, and of achieving levels of significance. Individual performance in the civilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But this formulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question "Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are so many, we are so talented, we are so well informed. The civilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactive education centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, and cultivation and use of all senses do not just happen. Understanding new necessities, in particular the relation between the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiency to be reached in order to effectively address higher expectations of well being, does not come through divine inspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. It results from the experience of self-constitution itself, in the sense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions, which transcends the individual.
The realization of potential is probably less direct than the realization of dangers and risks. We are still singing the sirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to our new condition. One area in which goals have been articulated and are being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books from various libraries to new media allowing for storage of information, more access to it, and creative interaction. The library, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space of topos uranikos filled with eternal information, was the collection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in need of guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University of Paris almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesture would mean to the few scholars who had access to this collection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one of the readers would jot down the observation that he would need ten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. One hundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge University and Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. The Charles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow (Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg and Cologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), and Copenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into national cultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then became entities in their own right. Today, billions of books are housed in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes, in town and city libraries, in research institutions, in religious centers, in national and international organizations. Under the guise of literacy, we are happy to be able to access, regardless of the conditions (as borrowers or subscribers), this enormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented the permanent central storehouse of knowledge.
But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution moved beyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book. Therefore, a new library, representative of many literacies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, and models and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had to come about. This library, to which we shall return, now resides in a distributed world, accessible from many directions and in many ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety that books might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of the world limited almost exclusively to reference books does not speak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, and talent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means of access to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity. Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing his dictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for France and the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimedia encyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of the virtual library.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in the Atlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them." He went on to illustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associated opinions and decision of his whole experience." The patent attorney could call "the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest." The physician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestly named Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a well subdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems."
Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article was concerned with applying the benefits of scientific research for warfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as a rather independent application is now the reality of on-line communities of people working on related topics or complementing each other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of shared files, of shared computing power are not what interest us here. Ted Nelson, whose name is connected to Project Xanadu, acknowledged the benefits deriving from Bush's vision, but he is mainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned from literacy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link), to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (the correlink, as he calls it). He designed his project as a distributed library of ever new texts and images open to everyone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking to others, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity of interpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency at the global level, and integrity at the individual level. He called his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supports dedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyond his initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, by either writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Text can be heard, images animated. Visualization increases expressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the library while simultaneously allowing others to see only what they want to see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes; interaction is under the control of each individual. In this generalized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, and live performances are brought together. The rule is simple: "Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." In translation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something, i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connection becomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant. Relinquishing the right to control links, established in the first place because one needed them, is part of the Xanadu agreement. It is part of the living library, without walls and bookshelves, called the World Wide Web.
Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading where we don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched for knowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear very soon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent can effectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful. We have co-evolved with the results of our practical experiences. Selection neither increases the chances of the fittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Cultural artifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes and ones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and all contents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasing number of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would have died. These individuals are able to constitute their practical experiences through means, among which books and libraries do not present themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not a habitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium for mind interactions of individuals who are physically far from being equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtual library is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth of data types and retrieval procedures.
The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don't we?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds one answer here. As more and more people, within their realms of needs and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to their existence and experience, they also enter an agreement of exchange that makes their linking part of the distributed space of human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter the agreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventual return of money to the publisher and the writer. It might also have affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Some people believe that good books make better people. Distributed environments of knowledge, expression, and information change the relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I will forget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might not remember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place. The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line of thought continues: Involvement returns value to others.
The Sense of Design