The Civilization of Illiteracy

Book One

The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow Contrasting characters Choose a letter and click Keeping up with faster living Loaded literacy Man proposes, man disposes Beyond the commitment to literacy A moving target The wise fox "Between us the rift" Malthus revisited Captives to literacy

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy For the love of trade "The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental" The rear-view mirror syndrome

Book Two

From Signs to Language Semeion revisited The first record is a whip Scale and threshold Signs and tools

From Orality to Writing Individual and collective memory Cultural memory Frames of existence The alienation of immediacy

Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language? A feedback called confirmation Primitive orality and incipient writing Assumptions Taking literacy for granted To understand understanding Words about images

The Functioning of Language Expression, communication, signification The idea machine Writing and the expression of ideas Future and past Knowing and understanding Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous Making thoughts visible Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

Language and Logic Logics behind the logic A plurality of intellectual structures The logics of actions Sampling Memetic optimism

Book Three

Language as Mediating Mechanism The power of insertion Myth as mediating pre-text Differentiation and coordination Integration and coordination revisited Life after literacy

Literacy, Language and Market Preliminaries Products 'R' Us The language of the market The language of products Transaction and literacy Whose market? Whose freedom? New markets, new languages Literacy and the transient Market, advertisement, literacy

Language and Work Inside and outside the world We are what we do Literacy and the machine The disposable human being Scale of work, scale of language Innate heuristics The realm of alternatives Mediation of mediation

Literacy and Education "Know the best" Ideal vs. real Relevance Temples of knowledge Coherence and connection Plenty of questions The equation of a compromise To be a child Who are we kidding? What about alternatives?

Book Four

Language and the Visual How many words in a look? The mechanical eye and the electronic eye Who is afraid of a locomotive? Being here and there at the same time Visualization

Unbounded Sexuality Seeking good sex Beyond immediacy The land of sexual ubiquity The literate invention of the woman Ahead to the past Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS Sex and creativity Equal access to erotic mediocrity

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future Togetherness The quest for permanency What breaks down when family fails? The homosexual family To want a child Children in the illiterate family A new individuality Discontinuity How advanced the past. How primitive the future

A God for Each of Us But who made God? The plurality of religious experiences The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms? Challenging permanency and universality Religion and efficiency Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy Secular religion

A Mouthful of Microwave Diet Food and expectations Fishing in a videolake Language and nourishment Sequence and configuration revisited On cooks, pots, and spoons The identity of food The language of expectations Coping with the right to affluence From self-nourishment to being fed Run and feed the hungry No truffles (yet) in the coop We are what we eat

The Professional Winner Sport and self-constitution Language and physical performance The illiterate champion Gentlemen, place your bets! The message is the sneaker

Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers Rationality, reason, and the scale of things A lost balance Thinking about thinking Quo vadis science? Discovery and explanation Time and space: freed hostages Coherence and diversity Computational science Explaining ourselves away The efficiency of science Exploring the virtual Quo vadis philosophy? The language of wisdom In scientific disguise Who needs philosophy? And what for?

Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes Making and perceiving Art and language Impatience and autarchy The copy is better than the original A nose by any other name Crying wolf started early Meta-literature Writing as co-writing The end of the great novel

Libraries, Books, Readers Why don't people read books? Topos uranikos distributed

The Sense of Design Drawing the future Breakaway Convergence and divergence The new designer Designing the virtual

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning The commercial democracy of permissiveness How did we get here? Political tongues Can literacy lead politics to failure? Crabs learned how to whistle A world of worlds Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents Rhetoric and politics Judging justice The programmed parliament A battle to be won

"Theirs not to reason why" The first war of the civilization of illiteracy War as practical experience The institution of the military From the literate to the illiterate war The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited) The look that kills

Book Five

The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web Transcending literacy Being in language The wall behind the Wall The message is the medium From democracy to media-ocracy Self-organization The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution? From possibilities to choices Coping with choice Trade-off Learning from the experience of interface

A Sense of the Future Cognitive energy Literacy is not all it's made out to be Networks of cognitive energy The University of Doubt Interactive learning Footing the bill A wake-up call Consumption and interaction Unexpected opportunities

Foreword

No other time than ours has had more of the future and less of the past in it. The heat and beat of network interactions and the richness of multimedia and virtual reality reflect this time more than do the pages you are about to read. I wish I could put in your hands the new book, suggested on the cover, as the first page following all those that make up the huge library of our literate accumulation of knowledge.

Let's us imagine that it exists. As I see it, the book would read your mind.as you pause on a thought and start formulating questions. It should enable you to come closer to the persons whose thoughts are mentioned here, either through further investigation of their ideas or by entering into a dialogue with them. We would be able to interact with many of the individuals making this fascinating present happen.

The emergence of a new civilization, freed from constraints borne by its members during a time to which we must bid farewell-this is the subject of the book. Science and technology are themes of this intellectual expedition, but the subject is the ever-changing human being. The civilization we are entering is no promised land, make no mistake about that. But it is a realm of challenge. Tentative upon entering the territory of new possibilities, we have no choice but to go ahead.

Some-the pioneers, inventors, entrepreneurs, even politicians of the so-called Third Wave-rush into it, unable to contain an optimism based on their own opportunistic enthusiasm (as real or fake as it might be). The young lead, unburdening themselves of the shackles of an education which made the least contribution to their innovative accomplishments.

Others hesitate. They don't even notice the chains of a literate heritage, a heritage that buffers them, as it buffers us all at various times, from the often disquieting changes we experience at all levels of our existence. In the palace of books and eternity, we were promised love and beauty, prosperity, and above all permanence.

Disinheriting ourselves from all that was, we are nostalgic for our lost sense of continuity and security. Still, we cannot help feeling that something very different from what we used to expect is ahead of us. We are excited, though at times apprehensive.

It might be that the cutting-edge language and look of Wired, the magazine of the Netizens, is more appropriate to the subject than is the elaborate prose of this book. But this is not yet another product of the cottage industry of predictions, as we know them from Naisbitt, Gilder, or the Tofflers.

To explain without explaining away the complexity of this time of change was more important to me than to ride the coattails of today's sound-byte stars. Solid arguments that suggest possibilities fundamentally different from what they are willing to accept, or even entertain, make for a more deeply founded optimism.

If you get lost along the intellectual journey to which this book invites, it can be only my fault. If you agree with the argument only because it tired you out, it will be my loss. But if you can argue with me, and if your argument is free of prejudice, we can continue the journey together.

Try reaching me, as my thoughts try to reach you through this book. Unfortunately, I am not yet able to hand you that ideal book that would directly connect us. Short of this, here is an address you can use:

nadin@utdallas.edu. Let's keep on touch!

Literacy in a Changing World

Thinking about alternatives

Preoccupation with language is, in fact, preoccupation with ourselves as individuals and as a species. While many concerns, such as terrorism, AIDS, poverty, racism, and massive migration of populations, haunt us as we hurry to achieve our portion of well-being, one at least seems easier to allay: illiteracy. This book proclaims the end of literacy, as it also accounts for the incredible forces at work in our restlessly shifting world. The end of literacy-a chasm between a not-so-distant yesterday and the exciting, though confusing, tomorrow-is probably more difficult to understand than to live with. Reluctance to acknowledge change only makes things worse. We notice that literate language use does not work as we assume or were told it should, and wonder what can be done to make things fit our expectations. Parents hope that better schools with better teachers will remedy the situation. Teachers expect more from the family and suggest that society should invest more in order to maintain literacy skills. Professors groan under the prospect of ill-prepared students entering college. Publishers redefine their strategies as new forms of expression and communication vie for public attention and dollars. Lawyers, journalists, the military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of language in society. Probably most concerned with their own roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their institutions, they would preserve those structures of human activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of power and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprises not only skills, but also ideals and values, say that the destiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline in literacy has dreadful implications. Opportunity is not part of the discourse or argument.

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