The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety.
Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated in ancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy, point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once it started to be tamed and its regulated use enforced upon people. Again, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view: "…we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies, such as the icon or the musical note." He correctly describes how mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and Newton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists, knowing no syllable of each other's language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common to their craft."
Networks of cognitive energy
Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other practical experiences of human self-constitution, formed their own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take place is not a passive component of the experience. It is imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a constitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the process of self-identification of the people who projected themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them, and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000 ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use. The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in different alphabets and different pragmatic structures, reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran.
Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different. Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing presses were invented, writing extends a different thought- machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw materials into products.
All the characteristics associated with literacy are characteristics of the underlying structure of practical experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines. The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different activities carried through at the same time, at one location or at several, are qualitatively different from sequential activities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiences results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.
Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates emancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of literacy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, and non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits of integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediation replaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy, opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an experience of building hypotheses and performing effective synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing, distribution, and integration of computers in applications ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.
The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems, telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design, and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different from anything we know of from previous practical experiences. Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in the new product.
Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the pragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very good representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new experiences come about. Chances are that the mass-produced machines increasingly present in a great number of households reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the PC might have been compared.
Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone. Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web should understand that what makes them so promising is not the potential for surfing, or its impressive publication capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is transported through networks.