In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will constitute their identity in experiences through which their particular contribution might be integrated in different actions or products. They will share resources and use communication means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy, freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the life of each social cell thus constituted.
Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together. We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.
Since human activity reflects the human being's multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in environments where resources are shared and results constitute the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through many literacies, and survival skills geared towards co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early 1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe the individuals working towards building a cooperative and collective activity that would benefit the world at large. Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is expressed in how much more diversity it can generate.
The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?
The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the main sign system of the human species, is brought more forcefully to light against the background of new forms of practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances, predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival, make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented with alternative means of expression, communication, and signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a higher dynamics of human existence.
Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in language-everything people do in the act of their practical self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we know of the diverse components of the practical experience of mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition, aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component. Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated? Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?
The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social activities. Interactions among people involve their physical presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate; their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we know very little about the specific impact each one has. Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass delusion, with or without television as part of the political performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows, there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology. Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural practice, but has failed to project anything particularly relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.
We must give serious thought to our obsession with invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language. It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days. What we already know is that populations were decimated once new patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance, life patterns were affected. This happened not only to populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also in the native populations of the American continents. Medical concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."
Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language, people have been able to change the patterns of training, instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text, and then having the text control the use of visual elements, people use the mediating power of design systems with integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost, ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking, and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal language.
There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable, literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web, it complements the repertory of means of human interaction characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful one-to-one and one-to-many interactions.