While education is related to the civic status of the individual, the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous education that corresponds to changes in human experience unfolding under even more complex circumstances. It might well happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require more, much more, than literacy.
Book Four
Language and the Visual
Photography, film, and television have changed the world more than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how film and television have changed established reading habits, writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language. Patterns of publishing and distribution of information, including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still in its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis. Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama, even correspondence) has changed.
In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold surpassed that of television sets. In many countries, most children watch television and films before they learn to read. In a few countries, children play computer games before ever opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home, movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult generations by demands connected to their professions, their health, their hobbies, and by advertisement. After image-recording and playing equipment became widely available, the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes, laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also able to produce a video archive for family, school, community, or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which images can be pumped from practically any location into schools, homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone with access to the printing presses of the digital world can print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting because we are not only at the receiving end.
The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is not the impact of visual technology and computers on reading patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At the core of the development described so far is the fundamental shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among which the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly fail to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors' offices.
New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that result in the need for alternatives to language confirm that the focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on advertisement, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web, but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.
So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new structures of work and communication, even less the unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh look at necessary developments.
Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization of literacy: advertisement, theatrical and para-theatrical performance, and television drama. They carry with them efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry, happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and global networks. Within such experiences, a different dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on homogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate in the practical requirement to extend the human being's experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics of global economy.
How many words in a look?