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-constitution 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 analyzing data. The record can be completed by documenting 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 mass-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 assumes 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-constitution 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 space 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 associated 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 associated with it. They can derive knowledge from the immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity and unobtrusiveness 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 associated 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 identity 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 assert 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 assess 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-constitution 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 surpasses what Proust knew of the spell or burden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practical experience of self-constitution, a pragmatics other than genetics proves more consequential. Nobody 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 Othello reminds us of the rust of dew on the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pass 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 space 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-constitution 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 identity-art, work, science, politics, sex, family-is established in the act of human self-constitution 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-constitution integrates each or every one of them, in the act of individual identification. Projecting their biological constitution 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-constitutive 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, mass 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 passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique." His assertion needs to be extended from literature to literacy.