Within each framework, be that of agriculture, pre-industrial,
industrial, or post- industrial practical experiences, continuity
of means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easily
established. What should most draw our attention are
discontinuities. We are going through such a discontinuity, and
the opposition between the civilization of literacy and the
civilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this. Evidently,
within the new practical experiences through which our own
identity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynamics of
economic change. Some industries disappear overnight. Many
innovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work has
a different condition. Discontinuity goes beyond analogy and
statistical inferences. It marks the qualitative change which we
see embodied in the new relations between work and language.
One of the major hypotheses of this book is that discontinuities,
also described in dynamic systems theory as phase shifts, occur
as scale changes. Threshold values mark the emergence of new
sign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences through
which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by
the scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such as
those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a
division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller
actions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to
divide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of our
age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now
is. In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it,
the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts
(subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range
of the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerful
mechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks of
growing complexity. The generation of choices, and the ability
to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these
affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of
decomposition.
Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible
complexity, helps as long as the depth of the division into
smaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do not
go beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it is
obvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effective
in managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow for
re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the management
of such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are able
to cope with. Indeed, although very powerful in many respects,
when faced with many pragmatic levels independent of language,
literacy (through which language attains its optimal
operational power) appears flat. Actually, not only literacy
appears flat, but even the much glorified human intelligence.
Distinctions that result from deeper segmentation of work,
brought about by the requirements of a scale of population and
demand of an order of magnitude exponentially higher than any
experience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped by
single minds. Since the condition of the mind depends on
interaction with other minds within practical experiences of
self-constitution, it results that means of interaction
different from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, and
dualism are necessary. This new stage is not a continuation of a
previous stage. It is even less a result of an incremental
progression. The wheel, once upon a time a rounded stone, along
with a host of wheel-based means of practical experiences,
opened a perspective of progression. So did the lever, and
probably alphabetic writing, and the number system. This is why
the old and new could be linked through comparisons, metaphors,
and analogies in a given scale of humankind. But this is also
why, when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuity
and avoid misleading translations in the language of the past.
A car was still, in some ways, the result of incremental
progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and
later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but
still conceptually close to our own practical experience with
flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction.
Nevertheless, a nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences.
The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of
any previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tame
the process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our use
of a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizes
actively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to the
enormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the power
of distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators,
unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree of
complexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudes
involved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-based
experiences of energy management.
The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, which
physically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, is
another example of the scale of work under the circumstances of
the new scale of human activity; and so are the telephone
networks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptual
hierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalized
communication of voice, data, and images make any comparison to
Edison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless. The
amount of information, the speed of transmission, and the
synchronicity mechanisms required and achieved in the
network-all participate in establishing a framework for remote
interaction that practically resets the time for all involved and
does away with physical distances. Literacy, by its intrinsic
characteristics, could not achieve such levels.
Finally, the computer, associated or not with networks, makes
this limit to our ability to grasp complexities even more
pressing. We have no problems with the fact that a passenger
airplane is 200 times faster than a pedestrian, and carries, at
its current capacity, 300-450 passengers plus cargo. The
computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond
anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the
functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents
to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in
its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or
direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer
users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash
register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol
manipulation follows language processing. (The word symbol
points to work become semiotic praxis, but this is not what I am
after here.)
In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makes
another distinction necessary. It replaces the world of the
continuum by a world of discrete states. Probably this
distinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift from
the universe of continuous functions and monotonic
behavior-whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everything
in between-were not concretized in a different condition of
human self-constitutive practical experience.
In the universe of literacy-based analog expectations,
accumulation results in progress: know more (language, science,
arts), have more (resources), acquire more (real estate). Even
striving-from a general attitude to particular forms (do better,
achieve higher levels)-is inherent in the underlying structure of
the analog. The digital is not linear in nature. Within the
digital, one small deviation (one digit in the phrase) changes
the result of processing so drastically that retracing the error
and fixing it becomes itself a new experience, and many times a
new source of knowledge.
In a written sentence, a misspelling or a typographical error is
almost automatically corrected. Through literacy, we dispose of
a model that tells us what is right. In the digital, the
language of the program and the data on which programs operate
are difficult to distinguish (if at all). Such machines can
manipulate more symbols, and of a broader variety, than the
human mind can. Free of the burden of previous practical
experiences, such machines can refer to potential experiences in
a frame of reference where literacy is entirely blind. The
behavior of an object in a multi- dimensional space (four, five,
six, or more dimensions), actions along a timeline that can be
regressive, or in several distinct and unrelated time frames,
modeling choices beyond the capability of the human mind-all
these, and many more, with practical significance for the
survival and development of humankind are acceptable problems
for a digital computer.
It is true, as many would hasten to object, that the computer
does not formulate the problem. But this is not the point.
Neither does literacy formulate problems. It only embodies
formulations and answers pertinent to work within a scale of
manageable divisions. The less expressive language of zeros and
ones (yes-no, open-closed, white- black) is more precise, and
definitely more appropriate, for levels of complexity as high as
those resulting from this new stage in the evolution. The
generality of the computer (a general-purpose machine), the
abstraction of the program of symbol manipulation, and the very
concrete nature of the data upon which it is applied represent a
powerful combination of reified knowledge, effective procedures
for solving problems, and high resolution capabilities. Those
who see the computer as only the principal technological
metaphor of our time (according to J. D. Bolter) miss the
significance of the new metrics of human activity and its degree
of necessity as it results from awareness of the limits of our
minds (after the limits of the body were experienced in
industrial society).
Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method of
coping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts to
creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be
translated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes is
right; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale of
human activity and the limits of our self-constitution require.
Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, many
others ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacy
and the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by our
practical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus of
the transformation we experience may foster its own forms of
fresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilized
society, language acted as the currency of cultural
transactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue to
drive the market and technology, will they eventually become
subservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, if
language in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pace
with the exponential growth of information, will it undergo a
restructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will we
generate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing,
before information is delivered to human beings? All these
questions relate to work, as the experience from which human
identities result together with the products bearing their mark.
The active condition of any sign system is quite similar to the
condition of tools. The hand that throws a stone is a hand
influenced by the stone. Levers, hammers, pliers, no less than
telescopes, pens, vending machines, and computers support
practical experiences, but also affect the individuals
constituting themselves through their use. A gesture, a written
mark, a whisper, body movements, words written or read, express
us or communicate for us, at the same time affecting those
constituted in them. How language affects work means, therefore,
how language affects the human being within a pragmatic
framework. To deal with some aspects of this extremely difficult
problem we can start with the original syncretic condition of the
human being.