Literacy and the machine
Man built machines which imitated the human arm and its functions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skills needed to master such machines were quite different from the skills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation to generation, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution made possible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for the maintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possible the improvement of machines and required better qualified operators, who were educated to extract the maximum from the means of production entrusted to them.
At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans have developed in the processes of labor division, natural language has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's practical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, and verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through work and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlying structure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means of expression and communication are substituted, not just complemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Or they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to mechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeing an automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine, participating in a very segmented activity without having a real overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to be part of a situation in which the subject's competence is progressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalized away, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition to that of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmed according to the reduced amount of communication possible or necessary, and according to situations that change continuously and very fast.
Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highly sophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words than images. The words still used can be recorded and associated with the image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be called upon when necessary. The machine can contain its computerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen) appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generating synthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned dialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasury designs dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination; cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgot to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain voice messages (and in the future they will probably contain animated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of the most superficial tastes people might have. But once the gratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, we face a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messages are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted to the complexities of the new scale of humankind.
The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might even become useless when transactions become entirely electronic. The voice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalized network for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we have to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations ("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech car itself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomes so distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hour clogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of work and life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image of what such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card might be replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it is and, after searching the mugshot of the addressee (likes rap, wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio), custom designs an original message delivered with the individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. A modest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's still primitive applications in the networked world, could already do this.
Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of production that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless, the market of human work is at a relatively low level of literacy because human being do not need to be literate for most types of work. One reason for this is that the new machines incorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. The machines have become more efficient than humans. The university system that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for the world of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency as any other human practical experience. Universities become more and more training facilities for specific vocations, instead of carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal education in the domain of ideas.
The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect the longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower market. What we encounter is the structurally determined fact that natural language is no longer, at least in its literate form, the main means of recording collective experience, nor the universal means of education. For instance, in all its aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and more on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned (formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect this is only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quite different. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain norm or rule has to be observed. This is not a question of transcending various national languages (as in airports or Olympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactions pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and functioning. The visual dominates communication today.
Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in various social, geographical, and historical contexts, became too ambiguous and require too much educational overhead for successful communication. Communication based on literacy requires an investment higher than the one needed for producing, perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivist attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced. Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuming instruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the use of images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results from the new scale of human survival and future well-being. The change from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the result of media development, as romantic media ecologists would like us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is the result of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods, within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible their production, dissemination, and their continuous diversification.
The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demands of mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of mass communication (television, computers, telecommunication, networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individual in the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expression in this mutation. Transition from language to languages, and from direct to indirect, multimediated communication is not reducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structural characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic attached to it. We participate in the process of establishing many centers of importance that replace the word, and compete with language as we know it. These can be found in subculture, but also within the entrenched culture. One example is the proliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping their coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in Barcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of the Soviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibit opening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters from Budapest. These experiences take place in what is known generically as cyberspace.
The disposable human being