Ours is a world of efficiency. Although more obvious on the
computer screen, and on the command buttons and touch-sensitive
levers of the machines we rely quite heavily upon, efficiency
expectations met in business and financial life insinuate
themselves into the intimacy of our private lives as well. As a
result of efficiency expectations, we have changed almost
everything we inherited in our homes-kitchen, study, or
bathroom-and redefined our respective social or family roles. We
do almost everything others used to do for us. We cook (if
warming up prefabricated dishes in a microwave oven still
qualifies as cooking), do the laundry (if selecting dirty sheets
or clothes by color and fabric and stuffing them into the
machine qualifies as washing), type or desktop publish,
transport (ourselves, our children). Machines replaced
servants, and we became their servants in turn. We have to learn
their language of instructions and to cope with the consequences
their use entails: increased energy demand, pollution, waste,
and most important, dependence. Ours is a world of brief
encounters in which "How are you?" is not a question reflecting
concern or expecting a real answer, but a formula. Once it meant
what it expressed and prefaced dialogue. Now it is the end of
interaction, or at best the introduction to a dialogue totally
independent of the question. Where everyone living within the
model of literacy expected the homogeneous background of shared
language, we now find a very fragmented reality of
sub-languages, images, sounds, body gestures, and new
conventions.
Despite the heavy investment society has made in literacy over
hundreds of years, literacy is no longer adopted by all as a
desired educational goal. Neither is it actively pursued for
immediate practical or long-term reasons. People seem to
acknowledge that they need not even that amount of literacy
imposed upon them by obligatory education. For quite a
few-speech writers, editors, perhaps novelists and
educators-literacy is indeed a skill which they aptly use for
making a living. They know and apply rules of correct language
usage. Methods for augmenting the efficiency of the message they
put in the mouths of politicians, soap-opera actors, businessmen,
activists and many others in need of somebody to write (and
sometimes even to think) for them are part of their trade. For
others, these rules are a means of exploring the wealth of
fiction, poetry, history, and philosophy. For a great majority,
literacy is but another skill required in high school and
college, but not necessarily an essential component of their
current and, more important, future lives and work. This
majority, estimated at ca. 75% of the population, believes that
all one has to know is already stored for them and made
available as an expected social service-mathematics in the cash
register or pocket calculator, chemistry in the laundry
detergent, physics in the toaster, language in the greeting
cards available for all imaginable occasions, eventually
incorporated, as spellers or writing routines, into the word
processing programs they use or others use for them.
Four groups seem to have formed: those for whom literacy is a
skill; those using it as a means for studying values based on
literacy; those functioning in a world of pre- packaged literacy
artifacts; and those active beyond the limitations of literacy,
stretching cognitive boundaries, defining new means and methods
of communication and interaction, constituting themselves in
practical activities of higher and higher efficiency. These four
groups are the result of changes in the condition of the human
being in what was broadly (in fact, too broadly) termed
Post-Industrial Society. Whether specifically identified as such
or assuming labels of convenience, the conflict characteristic of
this time of fundamental change has its locus in literacy; and
more specifically in the direction of change towards the
civilization of illiteracy.
At first glance, it is exceedingly difficult to say whether
language, as an instrument of continuity and permanence, is
failing because the rhythm of existence has accelerated
increasingly since the Industrial Revolution, or the rhythm of
existence has accelerated because human interaction is no longer
at the mercy of language. We do not know whether this
acceleration is due to, or nourished by, changes in language and
the way people use it, or if changes in language reflect this
acceleration. It is quite plausible that the use of images,
moreover of interactive multimedia and network-based exchange of
complex data are more appropriate to a faster paced society than
texts requiring more time and concentration. But it is less
clear whether we use images and synesthetic means of expression
because we want to be faster, and thus more efficient, or we can
be faster and improve efficiency if we use such means.
Shorter terms of human interaction and, for example, the change
in the status of the family have something in common. The new
political condition of the individual in modern society also has
something in common with the characteristics of human
interaction and the means of this interaction. But again, we do
not really know whether the new socio-economic dynamics resulted
from our intention to accelerate interactions, or the
acceleration in human interaction is only the background (or a
marginal effect) of a more encompassing change of our condition
under circumstances making this change necessary. My hypothesis
is that a dramatic change in the scale of humankind and in the
nature of the relation between humans and their natural and
cultural environments might explain the new socio-economic
dynamics.