A major mediating element in the rationale of industrial society, literacy fulfilled the function of a coordinating mechanism for mediations made otherwise than through language, along the assembly line, for instance. Obviously conceived on the linear, sequential model of time and language, the assembly line optimally embodied requirements characteristic of complex integration. Once the reductionist practice of dividing work into smaller, specialized activities became necessary, the results of these activities had to be integrated in the final product. At the level of technology of industrial society, literacy-based human practical experiences of self-constitution defined the scope and character of labor division, specialization, integration, and coordination.
Life after literacy
The answer to the second question posed a few pages back is not an exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests of futurology.) This is why the question concerns circumstances under which the dominant mediating function of language can be assumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a moving target because today the notion of literacy is a changing representation of expectations and requirements. We know that there is a before to literacy; and this before pertains to mediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, we can, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what its characteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and the need to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially, complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure some form of human integration.
What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, from a certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself. Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constituted themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation took place through the insertion of rather homogeneous objects, such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing. Interaction was a matter of co-presence. Language resulted in the context of diversification of practical human experiences. Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and the perspective of the whole into which variously mediated components usually come together. Later on, literacy freed humans from the requirement of co-presence. Language's mediating capabilities relied on space and time conventions built into language experience over a very long time and interiorized by literate societies.
Characteristics of writing specific to different notational systems resulted from characteristics of practical experiences. Literacy only indirectly reflects the encoding of experience in a medium of expression and communication. Moreover, the shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of partial literacies involves the encoding of the experience in media that are no longer appropriate for literate expression. We write to tape or to digital storage. We publish on networks. We convert texts into machine- readable formats. We edit in non-linear fashion. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types (that constitute multimedia). Experiences encoded in such media reflect their own characteristics in what is expressed and how it is expressed.
Although there are vast qualitative differences in linguistic performance within a literate society, a common denominator-the language reified in the technology of literacy-is established. The expectation is a minimum of competence, supposed to meet integration requirements at the workplace, the understanding of religion, politics, literature, and the ability to communicate and comprehend communication. But as literacy became a socially desirable characteristic, language became a tool-at least in some professions and trades-and the command of language became a marketable skill. For example, during periods of greater political activity in classical Greece and Rome, the practical experience of rhetoric was a discipline in itself. Orators, skilled in persuasion, for which language is necessary, made a career out of language use. The written texts of the Middle Ages were also intended to foster the rhetorical skills of the clergy in presenting arguments. In our time, speechwriters and ghostwriters have become the language professionals, and so have priests, prophets, and evangelists (of all religions).
But what is only an example of how language can become an end in itself has become a very significant development in human praxis. Not only in professions such as expository writing (for journalists, essayists, politicians, and scientists), poetry, fiction, dramaturgy, communications, but also in the practice of law (normative, enforcement, judicial), politics, economics, sociology, and psychology has language become a principal tool. Nevertheless, the language used in such endeavors is not the standard, national, or regional language, but a specialized subset, marginally understood by the literate population at large. While the grammar governing such sub- languages is, with some exceptions, the grammar of the language from which they are derived, the vocabulary is more appropriate to the subject matter. Moreover, while sharing language conventions and the general frame of language, these sub-languages project an experience so particular that it cannot be properly understood and interpreted without some translation and commentary. And each commentary (on a law, a new scientific theory, a work of art or poetry) is yet another insertion of a third, which refers to the initial object sometimes so indirectly that the relation might be difficult to track and the meaning is lost.
A similar process can be identified in our present relation to the physical environment. Many things mediate between us and the natural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processing industry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, or water channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion between us and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences of survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing, agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weather and climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floods and earthquakes. The mediating function of language is different here than on the production line.
Mediated practice leads to distributed knowledge along successive or parallel mediations that are not at all literacy-based or literacy-dependent. Within the global scale of human experience, it makes sense to use a global perspective (of resources, factors affecting agriculture, navigation, etc.) in order to maximize locally distributed efforts. For example: people involved in various activities must rely on persons specialized to infer from observation (of plants, trees, animals, water levels in rivers and lakes, wind direction, changes in the earth's surface, biological, chemical, atmospheric factors) and generate predictions regarding natural events (drought, plant or animal disease, floods, weather patterns, earthquakes). What we acknowledge here is the new scale of the practical experience of meteorology, as well as methods of collecting and distributing information through vast networks of radio, television, and weather services. Both the means for acquiring the information and for disseminating it are visual. Local networks subscribe to the service and receive computer-generated maps on which clouds, rain, or snow are graphically depicted. The equations of weather forecasting are obviously different from local observations of wind direction, precipitation, dew point, etc. The chaotic component captured and the necessity to visually display information as it changes over time are not reducible to equations or direct observation. It is hard to imagine having weather predicted through very mediated meteorological practice, and even harder to imagine forecasting earthquakes or volcanic activity from remote stations, such as satellites. Still, weather patterns display dynamic characteristics that made the metaphor of the butterfly causing a hurricane the most descriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by the flapping of the butterfly's wings-can result in impressive consequences-the hurricane. The language of the forecast only translates into common language the data (the majority in visual form) that represents our new understanding of natural phenomena.
There is yet another aspect, which is related to the status of knowledge and our ways of acquiring, transmitting, and testing it. Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion, thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and genetic codes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantly based on inductions from observed facts to theories explaining such facts. It seems that we project theories, founded on abstract thinking, onto physical reality and turn these theories into means of adapting the world to our goals or needs, which are much more complex than survival. Memetics is but the more recent example in this respect. It projects the abstract models of natural evolution into culture, focusing on replicative processes for the production of phenomena such as ideas, behavioral rules, ways of thinking, beliefs, and norms. Mediation probably qualifies for a memetic approach, too. Theories require a medium of expression, and this is represented by new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms, chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in some pseudo- language. The formalism of memetics reminds many of us of formal languages, as well as of the shorthand used in genetics. The goal is to describe whatever we want to describe through computational functions or through computable expressions.