Man built machines which imitated the human arm and its
functions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skills
needed to master such machines were quite different from the
skills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation to
generation, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution made
possible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for the
maintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possible
the improvement of machines and required better qualified
operators, who were educated to extract the maximum from the
means of production entrusted to them.
At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans have
developed in the processes of labor division, natural language
has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's
practical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, and
verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through
work and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlying
structure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means of
expression and communication are substituted, not just
complemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Or
they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to
mechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeing
an automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine,
participating in a very segmented activity without having a real
overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to
be part of a situation in which the subject's competence is
progressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalized
away, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition to
that of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmed
according to the reduced amount of communication possible or
necessary, and according to situations that change continuously
and very fast.
Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highly
sophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words than
images. The words still used can be recorded and associated with
the image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser
disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be
called upon when necessary. The machine can contain its
computerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen)
appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generating
synthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned
dialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasury
designs dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination;
cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgot
to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain
voice messages (and in the future they will probably contain
animated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of the
most superficial tastes people might have. But once the
gratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, we
face a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messages
are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted
to the complexities of the new scale of humankind.
The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might even
become useless when transactions become entirely electronic. The
voice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalized
network for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we have
to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations
("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech car
itself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomes
so distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hour
clogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of work
and life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image of
what such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card might
be replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it is
and, after searching the mugshot of the addressee (likes rap,
wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio),
custom designs an original message delivered with the
individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. A
modest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's still
primitive applications in the networked world, could already do
this.
Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of
production that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless,
the market of human work is at a relatively low level of
literacy because human being do not need to be literate for most
types of work. One reason for this is that the new machines
incorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. The
machines have become more efficient than humans. The university
system that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for the
world of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency as
any other human practical experience. Universities become more
and more training facilities for specific vocations, instead of
carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal
education in the domain of ideas.
The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect the
longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower
market. What we encounter is the structurally determined fact
that natural language is no longer, at least in its literate
form, the main means of recording collective experience, nor the
universal means of education. For instance, in all its
aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical
experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and
more on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned
(formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect this
is only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quite
different. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain norm
or rule has to be observed. This is not a question of
transcending various national languages (as in airports or
Olympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactions
pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and
functioning. The visual dominates communication today.
Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in various
social, geographical, and historical contexts, became too
ambiguous and require too much educational overhead for
successful communication. Communication based on literacy
requires an investment higher than the one needed for producing,
perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivist
attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced.
Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuming
instruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the use
of images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results from
the new scale of human survival and future well-being. The change
from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the
result of media development, as romantic media ecologists would
like us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is the
result of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods,
within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for
these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible
their production, dissemination, and their continuous
diversification.
The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demands
of mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of mass
communication (television, computers, telecommunication,
networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individual
in the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expression
in this mutation. Transition from language to languages, and
from direct to indirect, multimediated communication is not
reducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structural
characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic
attached to it. We participate in the process of establishing
many centers of importance that replace the word, and compete
with language as we know it. These can be found in subculture,
but also within the entrenched culture. One example is the
proliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping their
coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in
Barcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of the
Soviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibit
opening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters
from Budapest. These experiences take place in what is known
generically as cyberspace.