In preceding paragraphs, we examined what is required, in
addition to a common language, for a conversation to make sense.
Scale is another factor. The scale that defines a dialogue is
very different from the scale at which human self-constitution,
language acquisition and use included, take place. Scale by
itself is not enough to define either dialogue or the more
encompassing language-oriented, or language- based, practical
activity through which people ascertain their biological
endowment and their human characteristics. There is sufficient
proof that at the early stage of humankind, individuals could be
involved only in homogeneous tasks. Within such a framework of
quasi-homogeneous activity, dialogues were instances of
cooperation and confirmation, or of conflict. Diversification
made them progressively gain a heuristic dimension-choosing the
useful from among many possibilities, sometimes against the
logical odds of maintaining consistency or achieving
completeness. A generalized language-supported practical
activity involved not only heuristics ("If it seems useful, do
it"), but also logic ("If it is right/If it makes sense"),
through the intermediary of which truth and falsehood take
occupancy of language experiences. Thus an integrative influence
is exercised. This influence increases when orality is
progressively superseded by the limited literacy of writing and
reading.
The quasi-generalized literacy of industrial society reflected
the need for unified and centralized frameworks of practical
experience, within a scale optimally served by the linearity of
language. In our days, people constitute themselves and their
language through experiences more diverse than ever. These
experiences are shorter and relatively partial. They are only an
instant in the more encompassing process they make possible. The
result is social fragmentation, even within the assumed
boundaries of a common language, which nations are supposed to
be, and paradoxically survive their own predicted end. In
reality, this common language ceases to exist, or at least to
function as it used to. What exists are provisional commitments
making up a framework for activities impossible to carry out as
a practical experience defined by literacy. Within each of these
fast-changing commitments, partial languages, of limited duration
and scope, come into existence. Sub-literacies accompany their
lives. Experience as such opens avenues to more orality, under
post-literate conditions-in particular, conditions of increased
efficiency made possible by technology that negates the
pragmatics of literacy. The most favorable case for the
functioning of language-direct verbal communication-becomes a
test case for what it really means to speak the same language,
and not what we assume a common language accomplishes when
written or read by everyone.
Instances of direct verbal communication today (in the family and
community, when visiting foreign countries, at work, shopping,
at church, at a football stadium, answering opinion polls or
marketing inquiries, in social life) are also instances of taking
for granted that others speak our own language. Many researchers
have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of communication in
these contexts. Their observations are nevertheless not
independent of the assumed premise of literacy as a necessity and
as a shared pragmatic framework. Some recent research on the
cognitive dimension of understanding language does not realize
how deep the understanding goes. One example given is the terse
instruction on a bottle of shampoo: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." It
is not a matter of an individual's ability to read the
instructions in order to know how to proceed. One does not need
to be literate, moreover, one does not even need to create
language in order to use shampoo, if one is familiar with the
purpose and use of shampoo (i.e., with the act). Indeed, for
most individuals, the word shampoo on a bottle suffices for them
to use it correctly with no written instructions at all. Icons or
hieroglyphics can convey the instructions just as well, even
better, than literacy can. These, by the way, are coming more
into use in our global economy. It is even doubtful that most
individuals read the instructions because they are familiar not
just with the conventions that go into using shampoo, but,
deeper still, the conventions behind the words of the
instructions. Should an adult, even a literate adult, who was
totally unfamiliar with the concept of washing his or her hair
be presented with a bottle of shampoo, the entire experience of
washing the hair with shampoo would have to be demonstrated and
inculcated until it became part of that adult's
self-constitutive repertory. Such analyses of language only
scrape the surface of how humans constitute themselves in
language.
Literacy forces certain assumptions upon us: Literate parents
educate literate children. A sense of community requires that
its members share in the functionality of literacy. Literate
people communicate better beyond the borders of their respective
languages. Literacy maintains religious faith. People can
participate in social life only if they are literate.
Considering such assumptions, we should realize that the abstract
concept of literacy, resulting from the assumption that a common
language automatically means a common experience, only maintains
false hope. Children of literate parents are not necessarily
literate. Chances are that they are already integrated in the
illiterate structures of work and life to the same degree
children of illiterate parents are. This is not a matter of
individual choice, or of parental authority. On the digital
highway, on which a growing number of people define their
coordinates, with the prevalent sign @ taking over any other
identification, communities emerge independent of location.
Participation in such communities is different in nature from
literate congregations maintained by a set of reciprocal
dependencies that involved spelling as much as it involved
accepting authority or working according to industrial
production cycles.
In all of today's communication, not only is the literate
component no longer dominant, it is undergoing the steepest
percentile fall in comparison to any other form of
communication. In this framework, states and bureaucracies are
putting up a good fight for their own survival. But the methods
and means of literacy on which their entire
activity-regulation, control, self-preservation-is based have
many times over proven inefficient. These statements do not
remove the need to deal with how people understand writing, to
which literacy is more closely connected than it is to speech. To
discover what makes the task of understanding language more
difficult as language frees itself from the constraints of
literacy within the new pragmatic framework is yet another goal
we pursue.