Bumps and potholes
Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ in their condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely more chances open continuously, but the risks associated with them are at least of the same order of magnitude as the changes. Walking along a road is less risky than riding a horse, bicycling, or driving a car. Flying puts the farthest point from us on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved in flight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in our endeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that provided by hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each new step in the direction of their increased participation in our praxis, we take a chance.
There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex and daring projects to successful or failed attempts to build new cities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived under cognitive assumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved in our time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a major scam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of the pragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at no moment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much more than the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of a network application.
We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences of constituting the post-literate languages of science, art, and the humanities than we have learned during the entire history of humankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed- integrate knowledge accumulated in a great variety of experiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally and emotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the very fabric of the human being involved in these practical experiences are reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction, refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhuman commitments that result from the practice of unprecedented means of expression, communication, and signification.
During the process, we have reached some of our most critical limitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To use Steiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" between many groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasingly vulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages of humankind than all that we believed we accumulated through the humanities. The new means are changing politics and economic activity, but first of all they are changing the nature of human transactions. And they are changing our sense of future.
Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away just because the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understood from a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means in question are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emerging structures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done in previous societies, is simply not possible. It is not for the love of the Internet that this constitutes a non-regulated domain of human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, the Internet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving, drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunity for transparency afforded by systems that replace the domination of literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused. The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from its implicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but not its global behavior. For instance, the integration required by parallelism and the massive distribution of tasks cannot take place successfully if the network of interactions is mined by gates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic control mechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if a person's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permission to participate in the self-constitution of the whole human being. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes, arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human entity involved in an experience that integrates everyone's participation. It is an intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it to be, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individual realization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broader system, but not its essential part.
The authenticity of each and every act of our self-making contributes to the integrity of the overall process-our ascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and a definite alienation from the overall of the system's goals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part of the picture described. Complemented by a sense of empowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of new forms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can be more humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories of industrial society-commuters rushing from home to job to shopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who will be watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort, entitled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know and caring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effort will not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is of interest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, but foremost to learn about those instances when we are less faithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords. It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacy educates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, as feedback mechanisms under our own control become the means of optimization, the burden is shifted from Big Brother, bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual.
It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework for action in at least some of the basic activities affected by the change brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. The reason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literate education is not appropriate, but this observation remains a critical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has to translate into positive attitudes, and into real attempts to meet the challenge of present and shape the future in full awareness of forces at work.
The University of Doubt
Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences, assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was to turn out standardized products, education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy.