The process of mediation expands well further. Family life
becomes the subject of practical experiences involving family
planning, health, psychology, socialized expectations of
education, the right to die. The private family owned their
offspring and educated it to the level of its own education, or
to the level it deemed advantageous, consistent with the
progress of literacy. To the extent that this family was
involved in other experiences, such as religion, sport, art, or
the military, children grew up partaking in them. Once one
aspect of the relation between environment, home, family, and
work changes-for example, living in the city reshapes the nature
of the dependence on the environment, the house is one of
several possible, family members work at different jobs-the
family is made more and more part of a bigger family: society. In
turn, this belonging dissolves into solitary individualism.
Nothing any longer buffers the child from the competitive
pressure that keeps the economic engine running. Industrial
society required centers of population while it still relied on
relatively nuclear families that embodied its own hierarchy. The
human scale reflected in industrial society required the
socialization of family in order to generate an adequate
workforce, as well as the corresponding consumption. With
networking, children as much as adults are on their own, in a
world of interactions that breaks loose from any conceivable
constraints. There is no need to fantasize here, rather to
acknowledge a new structural situation of consequences beyond
our wildest imagination.
Literacy unified through its prescriptions and expectations. It
facilitated the balance between the preserved naturalness and
the socialized aspect of family. It projected a sense of
permanency and shielded the family from the universe of machines
threatening to take over limited functions of the body: the
mechanical arm, the treadmill. As a human medium for practical
experiences involving writing and reading, literacy seemed to
represent a means of resistance against the inanimate. It helped
preserve human integrity and coherence in a world progressively
losing its humanity due to all the factors that the need for
increased efficiency put in place (machines, foremost). It
eventually became obvious that procreation had to be kept within
limits, that there is a social cost to each child and to each
mother giving birth. Moreover, family structural relations
needed to be reconsidered for the expected levels of efficiency
to be maintained and increased, as expectations took over
desires. The new pragmatic framework is established as this
borderline between the possible and the necessary. The
civilization of illiteracy is its expression.
At the family level, the civilization of illiteracy corresponds
to increased segmentation, affecting the very core of family
life, and mediation. The family can no longer be viewed as a
whole by the many mediating entities constituting the market.
The market is with us from birth to death. It deals in every
aspect of life, and extends the pressure of competition in each
moment of our existence. The market segments medical care. It is
most likely that each family member sees a different doctor,
depending on age, sex, and condition. It segments education,
religion, and culture. It is not uncommon that family members
constitute their identity in different religious experiences,
and some of them in none, as it is not uncommon that their
educational needs run the gamut from a modicum of instruction to
never-ending study. They live together, or find togetherness on
the network matrix-one running a business on some remote
continent, the other pursuing solitary goals, and some adapting
to foreign cultures (less than to foreign languages).
The market has broken society into segments and the family into
parts on which it concentrates its message of consumption. There
is not one market entity that views the family as a whole.
Children are targeted on the basis of their economic, cultural,
and racial background for everything from food to clothing to
toys and recreation. And so are their respective natural or
adoptive parents, grandparents, and relatives. We can all decry
this as manipulation, but in fact it corresponds to the objective
need to increase commercial efficiency through narrow marketing.
Accordingly, a new moral condition emerges, focused on the
individual, not on the family. Part of the broader pragmatic
framework, this process stimulates the relative illiteracy of the
partners constituting the family. This illiteracy is reflected
in varied patterns of sexual behavior, in new birth control
strategies, in a different reciprocal relation between men and
women, or between individuals of the same sex, and in as-yet
undefinable codes of family behavior. The condition of the child
in the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to the same
dynamics. Children are less and less cared for at home, often
entrusted to specialized caretakers, and finally started on
their way through the vast machine called the education system.