The print media, as an overlapping practical experience uniting literacy and the power of sight, are more visual today than at any previous time. We are no longer subjected-sometimes with good reason, other times for dubious motives-to the sequentiality of literacy-dominated modes of communication. An entire shared visual language is projected upon us in the form of comic strips, advertisements, weather maps, economic reports, and other pictorial representations. Some of these representations are still printed on paper. Others are displayed through the more dynamic forms at public information kiosks, or through interactive means of information dissemination, such as computer-supported networks and non-linear search environments, which Ted Nelson anticipated back in 1965. The World Wide Web embodies many of his ideas, as well as ideas of a number of other visionaries.
Parallel to these developments, we are becoming more and more aware of the possibilities of using images in human activities where they played a reduced role within literacy-civic action, political debate, legal argumentation. Lawyers already integrate visual testimony in their cases. Juries can see for themselves the crime being committed, as well as the results of sophisticated forensic tests. Human destinies are defended with arguments that are no longer at the mercy of someone's memory or another's talent for rhetoric or drama. The citizen is frequently addressed by increasingly visual messages that explain how tax dollars are spent and why he or she should vote for one or another candidate. In becoming the Netizen, he or she will participate in social interactions fundamentally new in nature. On the Net, politicians claiming credit for some accomplishment can be immediately challenged by the real image. Political promises can be modeled and displayed while the campaign speech is given. A decision to go to war can be subjected to an instant referendum while the simulation of the war itself, or of alternatives, is played on our monitors. But again, to idealize these possibilities would be foolish. The potential for abusive use of images is as great as that for their meaningful application.
Many factors are at work slowing down the process of educating visually literate individuals. We continue to rediscover the wheel of reading and writing without advancing comprehensive programs for visual education. Illustrative visual alternatives, advanced more as an alibi for the maintenance of literacy-dominated communication, are by the nature of their function inappropriate in the context of higher efficiency requirements. Utilized as alternatives, these materials can be, and often are, irrelevant, ugly, insignificant, and expensive. More often than not, they are used not to enhance communication, but to direct it, to manipulate the addressee. It will take more than the recognition of the role of the visual to understand that visual literacy, or probably several such literacies, comprising the variety of visual languages we need, less confining, less permanent, and less patterned, are necessary in order to improve practical experiences of self-constitution through images. We are yet to address the ethical aspects of such experiences, especially in view of the fact that the visual entails constraints different from those encoded in the letter of our laws and moral principles.
In discussing the transition to the visual, I hope to have made clear that the process is not one of substituting one form of literacy for another. The process has a totally different dynamics. It implies transition from a dominating form of literacy to a multitude of highly adaptive sign systems. These all require new competencies that reflect this adaptability. It also requires that we all understand integrative processes in order to make the best of individual efforts in a framework of extremely divided and specialized experiences of self-constitution. If seeing is believing, then believing everything we see in our day is a challenge for which we are, for all practical purposes, ill prepared.
Unbounded Sexuality
"Freedom of speech Is as good as sex." Madonna
The Netizens were up in arms: The Communications Decency Act must be repealed. Blue ribbons appeared on many Websites as an expression of solidarity. This Act was prompted by the American government's attempt to prevent children from accessing the many pornographic outlets of the Internet. This first major public confrontation between a past controlled by literate mechanisms and a future of illiterate unrestricted freedom seemed to be less about sex and more about democracy. But that the two are related, and defined within the current pragmatics of human self- constitution, has escaped both parties to the dispute.
Seeking good sex
In Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Karl Marx (a product of the civilization of literacy) addressed alienation: "We thus arrive at the result that man feels that he acts freely only in his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreation, or at most using shelter, jewelry, etc.-while in his human functions, he feels only animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal." How an analysis of industrial capitalism, with its underlying pragmatic structure reflected in literacy, can anticipate phenomena pertinent to the post-industrial, and reflected in illiteracy, is not easy to explain.
Although he referred to economic self-constitution, his description is significant in more than one way. Sexuality is of concern in the civilization of illiteracy insofar as the human being in its multi-dimensionality is of concern. This might sound too broad to afford any meaningful inference from the condition of literacy to the condition of human sexuality, but it is an existential premise. Through sexuality humans project their natural condition and the many influences, language included, leading to its humanization. An understanding of the multiple factors at work in conditioning human experiences as intimate as sexual relations, depends upon the understanding of the pragmatic framework in which they unfold. Child pornography on the Internet is by no means the offspring of our love affair with technology. Neither is pornography being invoked for the first time as a justification for censorship. Nevertheless, the commotion regarding the Communications Decency Act constitutes a new experience that is intimately related to the condition of human existence in today's world.