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.
The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been
the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a
general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension;
an alarming increase of packaged language (clichés used in
speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute
visual media (especially television and video) for written
language. Parallel to scholarship on the subject, a massive but
unfocused public opinion campaign has resulted in all kinds of
literacy enterprises. Frequently using stereotypes that in
themselves affect language quality, such enterprises plead for
teaching adults who cannot read or write, for improving language
study in all grades, and for raising public awareness of
illiteracy and its various implications. Still, we do not really
understand the necessary character of the decline of literacy.
Historic and systematic aspects of functional illiteracy, as well
as language degradation, are minimally addressed. They are
phenomena that affect not only the United States. Countries with
a long cultural tradition, and which make the preservation and
literate use of language a public institution, experience them as
well.
My interest in the subject of illiteracy was triggered by two
factors: the personal experience of being uprooted from an East
European culture that stubbornly defended and maintained rigid
structures of literacy; and involvement in what are commonly
described as new technologies. I ended up in the USA, a land of
unstructured and flawed literacy, but also one of amazing
dynamics. Here I joined those who experienced the consequences
of the low quality of education, as well as the opening of new
opportunities. The majority of these are disconnected from what
is going on in schools and universities. This is how and why I
started thinking, like many others, about alternatives.
My Mayflower (if I may use the analogy to the Pilgrims) brought
me to individuals who do many things-shop, work, play or watch
sports, travel, go to church, even love-with an acute sense of
immediacy. Worshippers of the instant, my new compatriots served
as a contrast to those who, on the European continent I came
from, conscientiously strive for permanency-of family, work,
values, tools, homes, appliances, cars, buildings. In contrast,
the USA is a place where everything is the present, the coming
moment. Not only television programs and advertisements made me
aware of this fact. Books are as permanent as their survival on
bestseller lists. The market, with its increasingly breathtaking
fluctuations, might today celebrate a company that tomorrow
disappears for good. Commencement ceremonies, family life,
business commitments, religious practice, succeeding fashions,
songs, presidents, denture creams, car models, movies, and
practically everything else embody the same obsession. Language
and literacy could not escape this obsession with change.
Because of my work as a university professor, I was in the
trenches where battles of literacy are fought. That is where I
came to realize that a better curriculum, multicultural or not,
or better paid teachers, or cheaper and better books could make a
difference, but would not change the outcome.
The decline of literacy is an encompassing phenomenon impossible
to reduce to the state of education, to a nation's economic
rank, to the status of social, ethnic, religious, or racial
groups, to a political system, or to cultural history. There was
life before literacy and there will be life after it. In fact,
it has already begun. Let us not forget that literacy is a
relatively late acquisition in human culture. The time preceding
writing is 99% of the entire story of the human being. My
position in the discussion is one of questioning historic
continuity as a premise for literacy. If we can understand what
the end of literacy as we know it means in practical terms, we
will avoid further lamentation and initiate a course of action
from which all can benefit. Moreover, if we can get an idea of
what to expect beyond the safe haven now fading on the horizon,
then we will be able to come up with improved, more effective
models of education. At the same time, we will comprehend what
individuals need in order to successfully ascertain their
manifold nature. Improved human interaction, for which new
technologies are plentifully available, should be the concrete
result of this understanding of the end of the civilization of
literacy.
The first irony of any publication on illiteracy is that it is
inaccessible to those who are the very subject of the concern of
literacy partisans. Indeed, the majority of the millions active
on the Internet read at most a 3-sentence short paragraph. The
attention span of students in high school and universities is
not much shorter than that of their instructors: one typed page.
Legislators, no less than bureaucrats, thrive on executive
summaries. A 30-second TV spot is many times more influential
than a 4-column in- depth article. But those who give life and
dynamics to reality use means other than those whose continued
predominance this book questions.
The second irony is that this book also presents arguments which
are, in their logical sequence, dependent on the conventions of
reading and writing. As a medium for constituting and
interpreting history, writing definitely influences how we think
and what we think about. I wondered how my arguments would hold
up in an interactive, non-linear medium of communication, in
which we can question each other, and which also makes
authorship, if not irrelevant, the last thing someone would worry
about. Since I have used language to think through this book, I
know that it would make less sense in a different medium.
This leads me to state from the outset-almost as
self-encouragement-that literacy, whose end I discuss, will not
disappear. For some, Literacy Studies will become a new
specialty, as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek has become for a handful
of experts. For others, it will become a skill, as it is already
for editors, proofreaders, and professional writers. For the
majority, it will continue in literacies that facilitate the use
and integration of new media and new forms of communication and
interpretation. The utopian in me says that we will find ways to
reinvent literacy, if not save it. It has played a major role in
leading to the new civilization we are entering. The realist
acknowledges that new times and challenges require new means to
cope with their complexity. Reluctance to acknowledge change
does not prevent it from coming about. It only prevents us from
making the best of it.
Probably my active practice of literacy has been matched by all
those means, computer-based or not, for coping with complexity,
to whose design and realization I contributed. This book is not
an exercise in prophesying a brave new world of people happy to
know less but all that they have to know when they need to.
Neither is it about individuals who are superficial but who
adapt more easily to change, mediocre but extremely competitive.
Its subject is language and everything pertaining to it: family
and sexuality, politics, the market, what and how we eat, how we
dress, the wars we fight, love, sports, and more. It is a book
about ourselves who give life to words whenever we speak, write,
or read. We give life to images, sounds, textures, to multimedia
and virtual reality involving ourselves in new interactions.
Transcending boundaries of literacy in practical experiences for
which literacy is no longer appropriate means, ultimately, to
grow into a new civilization.
Progressing towards illiteracy?
Here is as good a place as any to explain my perspective.
Language involves human beings in all their aspects: biology,
sense of space and time, cognitive and manual skills, emotional
resources, sensitivity, tendency to social interaction and
political organization. But what best defines our relation to
language is the pragmatics of our existence. Our continuous
self-constitution through what we do, why we do, and how we do
all we actually do-in short, human pragmatics-involves language,
but is not reducible to it. The pragmatic perspective I assume
originated with Charles Sanders Peirce. When I began teaching in
the USA, my American colleagues and students did not know who he
was. The semiotic implications of this text relate to his work.
Questioning how knowledge is shared, Peirce noticed that, without
talking about the bearers of our knowledge-all the sign carriers
we constitute-we would not be able to figure out how results of
our inquiries are integrated in our deeds, actions, and theories.
Language and the formation and expression of ideas is unique to
humans in that they define a part of the cognitive dimension of
our pragmatic. We seem endowed with language, as we are with
hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. But behind the
appearance is a process through which human self-constitution led
to the possibility and necessity of language, as it led to the
humanization of our senses. Furthermore, it led to the means by
which we constitute ourselves as literate as the pragmatics of
our existence requires under ever-changing circumstances. The
appearance is that literacy is a useful tool, when in fact it
results in the pragmatic context. We can use a hammer or a
computer, but we are our language. The experience of language
extends to the experience of the logic it embodies, as well as
to that of the institutions that language and literacy made
possible. These, in turn, influence what we are and how we think,
what we do and why we do. So does every tool, appliance, and
machine we use, and so do all the people with whom we interact.
Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts we
ourselves generated further affect the pragmatic
self-constitution of our identity.
The literate experience of language enhanced our cognitive
capabilities. Consequently, literacy became larger than life.
Much is covered by the practice of literacy: tradition, culture,
thoughts and feelings, human expression through literature, the
constitution of political, scientific, and artistic programs,
ethics, the practical experience of law. In this book, I use a
broad definition of literacy that reflects the many facets it
has acquired over time. Those readers who think I stretch the
term literacy too far should keep in mind all that literacy
comprises in our culture. In contrast, illiteracy, no matter
what its cause or what other attributes an individual labeled
illiterate has, is seen as something harmful and shameful, to be
avoided at any price. Without an understanding that encompasses
our values and ways of thinking, we cannot perceive how a
civilization can progress to illiteracy. Many people are willing
to be part of post- literate society, but by no means are they
willing to be labeled members of a civilization qualified as
illiterate.
By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate
characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of
effective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean a
civilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did until
around the turn of the century, and still does. This domination
takes place through imposition of its rules, which prevent
practical experiences of human self-constitution in domains where
literacy has exhausted its potential or is impotent. In
describing the post-literate, I know that any metaphor will do
as long as it does not call undue attention to itself. What
counts is not the provocativeness but that we lift our gaze,
determined to see, not just to look for the comforting
familiar.
This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacies, each
with its own characteristics and rules of functioning. Some of
such partial literacies are based on configurational modes of
expression, as in the written languages of Japan, China, or
Korea; on visual forms of communication; or on synesthetic
communication involving a combination of our senses. Some are
numerical and rely on a different notation system than that of
literacy. The civilization of illiteracy comprises experiences of
thinking and working above and beyond language, as
mathematicians from different countries communicating perfectly
through mathematical formulae demonstrate. Or as we experience
in activities where the visual, digitally processed, supports a
human pragmatics of increased efficiency. Even in its primitive,
but extremely dynamic, deployment, the Internet embodies the
directions and possibilities of such a civilization. This brings
us back to literacy's reason for being: pragmatics expressed in
methods for increasing efficiency, of ensuring a desired
outcome, be this in regard to a list of merchandise, a deed,
instructions on how to make something or to carry out an act, a
description of a place, poetry and drama, philosophy, the
recording and dissemination of history and abstract ideas,
mythology, stories and novels, laws, and customs. Some of these
products of literacy are simply no longer necessary. That new
methods and technologies of a digital nature effectively
constitute an alternative to literacy cannot be overemphasized.
I started this book convinced that the price we pay for the human
tendency to efficiency-that is, our striving for more and more
at an ever cheaper price-is literacy and the values connected to
it as represented by tradition, books, art, family, philosophy,
ethics, among many others. We are confronted with the increased
speed and shorter durations of human interactions. A growing
number and a variety of mediating elements in human praxis
challenge our understanding of what we do. Fragmentation and
interconnectedness of the world, the new technology of
synchronization, the dynamics of life forms or of artificial
constructs elude the domain of literacy as they constitute a new
pragmatic framework. This becomes apparent when we compare the
fundamental characteristics of language to the characteristics of
the many new sign systems complementing or replacing it.
Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds to
the stage of linear growth of humankind. Matched by the linear
increase of the means of subsistence and production required for
the survival and development of the species, this stage reached
its implicit potential. The new stage corresponds to
distributed, non-sequential forms of human activity, nonlinear
dependencies. Reflecting the exponential growth of humankind
(population, expectations, needs, and desires), this new stage
is one of alternative resources, mainly cognitive in nature,
compensating for what was perceived as limited natural means for
supporting humankind. It is a system of a different scale,
suggestively represented by our concerns with globality and
higher levels of complexity. Therefore, humans can no longer
develop within the limitations of an intrinsically centralized,
linear, hierarchic, proportional model of contingencies that
connect existence to production and consumption, and to the
life-support system. Alternatives that affect the nature of
life, work, and social interaction emerge through practical
experiences of a fundamentally new condition.
Literacy and the means of human self-constitution based on it
reached their full potential decades ago. The new means, which
are not as universal (i.e., as encompassing) as language, open
possibilities for exponential growth, resulting from their
connectivity and improved involvement of cognitive resources. As
long as the world was composed of small units (tribes,
communities, cities, counties), language, despite differences in
structure and use, occupied a central place. It had a unifying
character and exercised a homogenizing function within each
viable political unit. The world has entered the phase of global
interdependencies. Many local languages and their literacies of
relative, restricted significance emerge as instruments of
optimization. What takes precedence today is interconnectivity
at many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared.
Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to the
entire world, not only to where they happen to live and work.
The encompassing system of culture broke into subsystems, not
just into the "two cultures" of science and literacy that C.P.
Snow discussed in 1959, hoping idealistically that a third
culture could unite and harmonize them. Market mechanisms,
representative of the competitive nature of human beings, are in
the process of emancipating themselves from literacy. Where
literate norms and regulations still in place prevent this
emancipation-as is the case with government activity and
bureaucracies, the military, and legal institutions-the price is
expressed in lower efficiency and painful stagnation. Some
European countries, more productive in impeding the work of the
forces of renewal, pay dearly for their inability to understand
the need for structural changes. United or not in a Europe of
broader market opportunities, member countries will have to free
themselves from the rigid constraints of a pragmatic framework
that no longer supports their viability. Conflicts are not
solved; solutions are a long time in coming.
One more remark before ending this introduction. It seems that
those who run the scholarly publishing industry are unable to
accept that someone can have an idea that does not originate
from a quotation. In keeping with literacy's reliance on
authority, I have acknowledged in the references the works that
have some bearing on the ideas presented in this book. Few, very
few indeed, are mentioned in the body of the text. The line of
argument deserves priority over the stereotypes of referencing.
This does not prevent me from acknowledging here, in addition to
Leibniz and Peirce, the influence of thinkers and writers such
as Roberto Maturana, Terry Winograd, George Lakoff, Lotfi Zadeh,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, George Steiner, Marshall McLuhan,
Ivan Illich, Yuri M. Lotman, and even Baudrillard, the essayist
of the post-industrial. If I misunderstood any of them, it is
not because I do not respect their contributions. Seduced by my
own interest and line of reasoning, I integrated what I thought
could become solid bricks into a building of arguments which was
to be mine. I am willing to take blame for its design and
construction, remaining thankful to all those whose
fingerprints are, probably, still evident on some of the bricks I
used.
In the 14 years that have gone by since I started thinking and
writing about the civilization of illiteracy, many of the
directions I brought into discussion are making it into the
public domain. But I should be the last to be surprised or
unhappy that reality changed before I was able to finish this
book, and before publishers could make up their minds about
printing it. The Internet was not yet driving the stock market,
neither had the writers of future shock had published their
books churning prophecies, nor had companies made fortunes in
multimedia when the ideas that go into this book were discussed
with students, presented in public lectures, outlined to
policy-makers (including administrators in higher education),
and printed in scholarly journals. On starting this book, I
wanted it to be not only a presentation of events and trends, but
a program for practical action. This is why, after examination
of what could be called the theoretical aspects, the focus
shifts to the applied. The book ends with suggestions for
practical measures to be considered as alternatives to the beaten
path of the bandage method that only puts off radical treatment,
even when its inevitability is acknowledged. Yes, I like to see
my ideas tested and applied, even taken over and developed
further (credit given or not!). I would rather put up with a
negative outcome in discussions following publication of this
book, than have it go unnoticed.