Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identify their presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, a mobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a difference in the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awareness that affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple act of greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequence of feedback (double confirmation, each participant's awareness, and shared awareness). This says, probably in too many words: 1.
To understand language means to understand all the others with whom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2.
All the others must realize this implicit expectation of communication. 3.
Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and new forms of awareness. This understanding can go something along the line of, "I know that you know that I know that you know" what the hunted animal is, what fire is, which tool can be used and how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is, what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in a production cycle affects, what the function of a particular government office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, or another means of expression (such as recreating fire, or demonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in the past and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know how to drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how."
Confirmation in language, gestures, and facial expression signals the understanding. Whenever this understanding fails, it fails on account of the missing confirmation. When this confirmation is no longer uniquely provided by means characteristic of literacy-let us recall modern warfare, technology controlling nuclear reactors, electronic transactions-the need for literacy is subject to doubt. Since the majority of instruction conveyed today is through images (drawings), or image and sound (videotapes), or some combination of media, it is not surprising that literacy is met with skepticism, if not by those who teach, at least by those who are taught. In the pragmatics of their existence they already live beyond the literate understanding. This applies not only to the Internet, but just as well to places of work, schools, government, and other instances of pragmatic activity.
Primitive orality and incipient writing
In addition to the general background of understanding, there are many levels, represented by the clues present in speech or writing, or in other forms of expression and communication. For example, a question is identified by some vocal expression accepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted by a particular sign, depending on the particular language. But other clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. They refer to such things as intention, who is talking-man, woman, child, policeman, priest-the context of the talk, hierarchies-social, sexual, moral-and many other clues. Much extra-language background knowledge goes into human language and directs understanding from experience to language use. Dialogue is more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It is a pragmatic situation requiring as much language as understanding of the context of the conversation because each partner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for the other. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communication experience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the many other sign systems through which human self-constitution takes place. Dialogues make it clear that understanding language becomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires the discovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of their relationship. But more importantly, it requires the reconstruction of experience as it is embodied in background knowledge.
By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we can understand that the process of establishing conventions is motivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access a new cognitive realm that a different pragmatic context necessitates. By understanding how experience affects their relation, we can consider orality and writing in successive moments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale of humankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of orality corresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproduced in its structure because they were continued at the cognitive level. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimic orality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner, While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, are examples to the contrary. These attempts to compress language represent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving a synthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information. We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in the heavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is no literacy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decoding the message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristics reminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is the visual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction of a valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is one example in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing care labels are others.
Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature of processes characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneous transactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapid change of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in a written text. In the global world, Now means quite a different thing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunrise experienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can be immediately associated to poetic text through a link. But the implicit experience of time (and space) carried by language and made instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh itself.
It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted with the conventions of writing. It is possible that some of these conventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supporting cognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms of self-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness of the avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practical endeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time, implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted in changed conventions. For instance, the discovery that time and space could be fragmented, a major realization probably not possible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practical experiences and new theories of space and time.