Images substitute text; sounds add rhythm or nuance; visual
representations other than written words become dominant;
animation introduces dynamics where written words could only
suggest it. In technologically advanced societies, interactive
multimedia (or hypermedia) combine visual, aural, dynamic, and
structural representations. Environments for personal
exploration, organization, and manipulation of information
proliferate in CD-ROM formats, interactive games, and tutorial
networks. High fidelity sound, rich video resources, computer
graphics, and a variety of devices for individualized human
interaction provide the technological basis for what emerges as
a ubiquitous computing environment.
The entire process can be provisionally summarized as follows:
Human cooperation and interaction corresponding to the
complexity of the undertakings of our age is defined by
expectations of high efficiency. Relatively stable and well
structured literate communication among the people involved is
less efficient than rather fast and fragmentary contact through
means other than those facilitated by, or based on, literacy.
Stereotyped, highly repetitive or well defined unique tasks, and
the literate language associated with them, have been
transferred to machines. Unique tasks require strategies of
specialization. The smaller the task assigned to each
participant, the more effective the ways to carry it out at the
expense of variety of forms and extent of direct human
interaction, as well as at the expense of literacy-based
interactions. Accordingly, human self-constitution today
involves means of expression and communication no longer based
on or reducible to literacy. Characteristics immanent in
literacy affect cognitive processes, forms of human interaction,
and the nature of productive effort to a lesser extent.
Nevertheless, the reshaping of human pragmatics does not take
place by general agreement or without conflict, as will be
pointed out more than once.
While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and the
deterioration of language in our life today, others surrender to
illiteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We live
in a world in which many people-especially those with more than
undergraduate college education-complain about the low level of
literacy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods and
necessities that make literacy less and less significant.
Furthermore, when invoking literacy, people maintain a nostalgia
for something that has already ceased to affect their lives.
Their thinking, feeling, interpersonal relations, and
expectations regarding family, religion, ethics, morals, art,
dining, cultural and leisure activities already reflect the new
illiterate condition. It is not a matter of personal choice, but
a necessary development. The low level of literacy of those who
receive an education from which society used to expect literate
adults to graduate worries politicians, educators, and literacy
professionals (writers, publishers, booksellers). They fear,
probably for the wrong reasons, that people cannot live and
prosper without knowing how to write or read at high levels of
competence. What actually worries them is not that people write
less well, or less correctly, or read less (some if at all), but
that some succeed despite the odds. Self-styled champions of
literacy, instead of focusing on change, spend money, energy, and
intelligence, not in exploring how to optimally benefit from
change, but on how to stop an inexorable process.
The state of affairs characteristic of the civilization of
illiteracy did not come about overnight. Norbert Wiener's
prophetic warning that we will become slaves of intelligent
contraptions that take over intellectual faculties deserves more
than a parenthetic reminder. Some commentators point to the
disruption of the sixties, which put the educational system all
over the world in turmoil. The events of the sixties, as much as
the new machines Wiener discussed, are yet another symptom of,
but not a reason for, the decline of literacy. The major
hypothesis of this book is that illiteracy, in its relative
terms mentioned so far, results from the changed nature of human
practical experiences; that is, from the pragmatics
corresponding to a new stage of human civilization. (I prefer to
use pragmatics in the sense the Greeks used it: pragma, for
deeds, from prattein, to do.) Regardless of our vocations-working
in a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming,
creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, or
even participating in a university's board of trustees- we
accept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization of
language. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal
world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords,
and word processed letters. The Internet, as World Wide Web,
e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides
constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of
language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and
more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that
take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which
literacy is not appropriate.
Still, complex interdependencies are reflected in our relation to
language in general, and in our use of it, in particular. It
seems that language is a key-at least one among many-to the
mind, the reason for which artificial intelligence is interested
in language. It also seems to be a major social ingredient.
Accordingly, no one should be surprised that once the status of
language changes, there are also changes far beyond what we
expect when we naively consider what a word is, or what is in a
word or a rule of grammar, or what defines a text. A word on
paper, one like the many on this page, is quite different from a
word in the hypertext of a multimedia application or that of the
Web. The letters serve a different function. Omit one from this
page and you have a misspelling. Click on one and nothing
happens. Click on a letter displayed on a Web page and you might
be connected to other signs, images, sounds, and interactive
multimedia presentations. These changes, among others, are the
implicit themes of this book and define the context for
understanding why illiteracy is not an accident, but a necessary
development.