The answer to the second question posed a few pages back is not
an exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests of
futurology.) This is why the question concerns circumstances
under which the dominant mediating function of language can be
assumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a moving
target because today the notion of literacy is a changing
representation of expectations and requirements. We know that
there is a before to literacy; and this before pertains to
mediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, we
can, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what its
characteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and the
need to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially,
complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure some
form of human integration.
What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, from
a certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself.
Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constituted
themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation
took place through the insertion of rather homogeneous objects,
such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing.
Interaction was a matter of co-presence. Language resulted in
the context of diversification of practical human experiences.
Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and the
perspective of the whole into which variously mediated components
usually come together. Later on, literacy freed humans from the
requirement of co-presence. Language's mediating capabilities
relied on space and time conventions built into language
experience over a very long time and interiorized by literate
societies.
Characteristics of writing specific to different notational
systems resulted from characteristics of practical experiences.
Literacy only indirectly reflects the encoding of experience in
a medium of expression and communication. Moreover, the shift
from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of partial
literacies involves the encoding of the experience in media that
are no longer appropriate for literate expression. We write to
tape or to digital storage. We publish on networks. We convert
texts into machine- readable formats. We edit in non-linear
fashion. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types
(that constitute multimedia). Experiences encoded in such media
reflect their own characteristics in what is expressed and how it
is expressed.
Although there are vast qualitative differences in linguistic
performance within a literate society, a common denominator-the
language reified in the technology of literacy-is established.
The expectation is a minimum of competence, supposed to meet
integration requirements at the workplace, the understanding of
religion, politics, literature, and the ability to communicate
and comprehend communication. But as literacy became a socially
desirable characteristic, language became a tool-at least in
some professions and trades-and the command of language became a
marketable skill. For example, during periods of greater
political activity in classical Greece and Rome, the practical
experience of rhetoric was a discipline in itself. Orators,
skilled in persuasion, for which language is necessary, made a
career out of language use. The written texts of the Middle Ages
were also intended to foster the rhetorical skills of the
clergy in presenting arguments. In our time, speechwriters and
ghostwriters have become the language professionals, and so have
priests, prophets, and evangelists (of all religions).
But what is only an example of how language can become an end in
itself has become a very significant development in human
praxis. Not only in professions such as expository writing (for
journalists, essayists, politicians, and scientists), poetry,
fiction, dramaturgy, communications, but also in the practice of
law (normative, enforcement, judicial), politics, economics,
sociology, and psychology has language become a principal tool.
Nevertheless, the language used in such endeavors is not the
standard, national, or regional language, but a specialized
subset, marginally understood by the literate population at
large. While the grammar governing such sub- languages is, with
some exceptions, the grammar of the language from which they are
derived, the vocabulary is more appropriate to the subject
matter. Moreover, while sharing language conventions and the
general frame of language, these sub-languages project an
experience so particular that it cannot be properly understood
and interpreted without some translation and commentary. And
each commentary (on a law, a new scientific theory, a work of
art or poetry) is yet another insertion of a third, which
refers to the initial object sometimes so indirectly that the
relation might be difficult to track and the meaning is lost.
A similar process can be identified in our present relation to
the physical environment. Many things mediate between us and the
natural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processing
industry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, or
water channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion between
us and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences of
survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing,
agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weather
and climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floods
and earthquakes. The mediating function of language is different
here than on the production line.
Mediated practice leads to distributed knowledge along successive
or parallel mediations that are not at all literacy-based or
literacy-dependent. Within the global scale of human experience,
it makes sense to use a global perspective (of resources,
factors affecting agriculture, navigation, etc.) in order to
maximize locally distributed efforts. For example: people
involved in various activities must rely on persons specialized
to infer from observation (of plants, trees, animals, water
levels in rivers and lakes, wind direction, changes in the
earth's surface, biological, chemical, atmospheric factors) and
generate predictions regarding natural events (drought, plant or
animal disease, floods, weather patterns, earthquakes). What we
acknowledge here is the new scale of the practical experience of
meteorology, as well as methods of collecting and distributing
information through vast networks of radio, television, and
weather services. Both the means for acquiring the information
and for disseminating it are visual. Local networks subscribe to
the service and receive computer-generated maps on which clouds,
rain, or snow are graphically depicted. The equations of weather
forecasting are obviously different from local observations of
wind direction, precipitation, dew point, etc. The chaotic
component captured and the necessity to visually display
information as it changes over time are not reducible to
equations or direct observation. It is hard to imagine having
weather predicted through very mediated meteorological practice,
and even harder to imagine forecasting earthquakes or volcanic
activity from remote stations, such as satellites. Still,
weather patterns display dynamic characteristics that made the
metaphor of the butterfly causing a hurricane the most
descriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by the
flapping of the butterfly's wings-can result in impressive
consequences-the hurricane. The language of the forecast only
translates into common language the data (the majority in visual
form) that represents our new understanding of natural
phenomena.
There is yet another aspect, which is related to the status of
knowledge and our ways of acquiring, transmitting, and testing
it. Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion,
thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and genetic
codes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantly
based on inductions from observed facts to theories explaining
such facts. It seems that we project theories, founded on
abstract thinking, onto physical reality and turn these theories
into means of adapting the world to our goals or needs, which
are much more complex than survival. Memetics is but the more
recent example in this respect. It projects the abstract models
of natural evolution into culture, focusing on replicative
processes for the production of phenomena such as ideas,
behavioral rules, ways of thinking, beliefs, and norms.
Mediation probably qualifies for a memetic approach, too.
Theories require a medium of expression, and this is represented
by new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms,
chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in some
pseudo- language. The formalism of memetics reminds many of us of
formal languages, as well as of the shorthand used in genetics.
The goal is to describe whatever we want to describe through
computational functions or through computable expressions.
Since experiential space and time are housed in our language, we
can account for only a three-dimensional space and a homogeneous
time that has only one direction-from past to future.
Nevertheless, we can conceive of multidimensional spaces and of
non-homogeneous time. To describe the same in language,
especially through literate expression, is not only inadequate,
but also raises obstacles. With the advent of digital
technology, a language of two letters-zero and one-and the
grammar of Boolean logic, we have stepped into a new age of
language, no longer the exclusive domain of the human being.
Such a language introduces new levels of mediation, which allow
for the use of machines by means of sentences, i.e., sequences
of encoded commands triggered by a text written in a language
other than natural language. Physical contact is substituted by
language, inserted in processes of complexity impossible to
control directly or even to relate to in forms characteristic of
previous scientific and technological praxis.
Indeed, there are instances when the speed of a process and the
requirement of sequencing make direct human control not only
impossible, but also undesirable. This mediation is then
continued by sequences automatically generated by machines, i.e.,
mediation generating new mediation. Although the structure of
all these new languages (which describe phenomena, support
programming, or control processes) is inspired by the structure
of natural language, they project experiences which are not
possible in the universe of standard language. New forms of
interaction, higher speeds, and higher precision become
available when such powerful cognitive tools are designed as
custom-made instruments for advancing our understanding of
phenomena that evade analytic or even small-scale synthetic
frameworks.
The discussion of mediation brought up other sign systems that
assume the mediating function characteristic of literacy. Not
only artificial languages-instruments of knowledge and action,
new pragmatic dimensions, in fact-but also natural languages are
increasingly used in a mediating capacity. I would submit to the
reader the observation that the visual, primarily, and other
sensory information are recuperated and used in ways that change
human experience. Where words no longer suffice, visualized
images of the unseen constitute a mediating language, allowing us
to understand phenomena otherwise inaccessible-the micro- or
remote universe, for instance. Touch, smell, and sound can be
articulated and introduced as statements in a series of events
for which written and spoken language are no longer adequate.
Virtual reality is synthesized as a valid simulation of real
reality. Virtual realities can be experienced if we simply put
on body-sensitive gloves, headgear (goggles and earphones),
special footwear, or a whole suit. Powerful computer graphics,
with a refresh rate high enough to maintain the illusion of
space and motion, make a virtual space available. Within this
space, one's own image can become a partner of dialogue or
confrontation. Journeys outside one's body and inside one's
imagination are experienced not only in advanced laboratories,
but also in the new entertainment centers that appeal to
children as well as adults. Such projections of oneself into
something else represent one of the most intriguing forms of
interaction in the networked world. The experience of
self-constitution as an avatar on the Internet is no longer one
of a unique self, but of multiples.
Language guards the entrance to the experience, but once the
human subject is inside, it has only limited power or
significance. Mediations other than through language dominate
here, invoking all our senses and deep levels of our existence,
for which literacy produced only psychoanalytic rhetoric. In
other words, we notice that while language constituted a
projection of the human being in the conventions of abstract
systems of expression, representation, and communication, it also
exercised an impoverishing function in that it excluded the
wealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signs
addressing them. Language made of us one monolithic entity. In
the meantime, we have come to realize that the transitions
between our many inner states can be a source of new
experiences.
The answer to the question regarding alternatives to literacy is
that part of the mediating function of language has extended to
specialized languages, and to sign systems other than verbal
language, when those systems are better adapted to the
complexities of heretofore unencountered challenges. Virtual
reality is not a linear reality but an integrating, interacting
reality of non-linear relations between what we do and what
results. Among these newly acquired, different mediating
entities, relations and interdependencies are continuously
established and changed at an ever faster pace. It appears that
once human activity moves from the predominantly object level to
the meta condition (one of self-awareness and
self-interpretation), we have several languages and several
contingent literacies instead of a dominant language and
dominant literacy. When writing is replaced by multimedia along
the communication channels of the networked world, we seem to
enjoy rediscovering ourselves as much richer entities than we
knew or were told about through literate mediation.
The entire transition is the result of pragmatic needs resulting
from the fundamental change in continuous human
self-constitution and the scale in which it is exercised.
Mediations break activities into segments that are more intensive
and shorter than the cycle from which they were extracted.
Therefore, mediation results in the perception of the reality of
faster rhythms and of time contraction. Massive distribution of
tasks, finer levels of parallelism, and more sophisticated
integrating and coordinating mechanisms, result in new pragmatic
possibilities, for which literacy is not suitable, and even
counter-productive. This entire transition comprises another
vector of change: from individual to communal survival, from
direct work to highly mediated praxes, from local to global to
universal, from the visible to the invisible of macro and
micro-universe, from the real to the virtual. Mediation, in its
newest digital forms of enmeshed nature and evolving culture,
causes boundaries to disappear between the elements involved in
practical experiences of our self-constitution.