This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's
typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the
taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The
underlying structure of human practical experiences through which
average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobel
prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen,
writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other
professionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a new
type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux.
Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can be
rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual
capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to
harmonize the relation between human experience and the
functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises
the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the
relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order
to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed
to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know
the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how
to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how
to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to
know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore
value altogether.
The roots of almost everything involved in current practical
experiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, but
in the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. At
a time when books are merely an interior designer's concept of
decoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessary
bookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded
in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind
out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human
self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any
other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of
genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality
that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone
explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the
past, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the many
things we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiency
which neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponic
tomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digital
book, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy have
more in common than one thinks at the mere mention of this
opinion.
The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive,
entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Free
to constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiences
opened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploring
new territories of human expression and communication, and of
achieving levels of significance. Individual performance in the
civilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But this
formulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question
"Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are so
many, we are so talented, we are so well informed. The
civilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactive
education centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, and
cultivation and use of all senses do not just happen.
Understanding new necessities, in particular the relation
between the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiency
to be reached in order to effectively address higher
expectations of well being, does not come through divine
inspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. It
results from the experience of self-constitution itself, in the
sense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions,
which transcends the individual.
The realization of potential is probably less direct than the
realization of dangers and risks. We are still singing the
sirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to our
new condition. One area in which goals have been articulated and
are being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books from
various libraries to new media allowing for storage of
information, more access to it, and creative interaction. The
library, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space of
topos uranikos filled with eternal information, was the
collection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in need
of guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University of
Paris almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesture
would mean to the few scholars who had access to this
collection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one of
the readers would jot down the observation that he would need
ten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. One
hundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge University
and Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. The
Charles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow
(Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg and
Cologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), and
Copenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into national
cultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then became
entities in their own right. Today, billions of books are
housed in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes,
in town and city libraries, in research institutions, in
religious centers, in national and international organizations.
Under the guise of literacy, we are happy to be able to access,
regardless of the conditions (as borrowers or subscribers), this
enormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented the
permanent central storehouse of knowledge.
But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution moved
beyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book.
Therefore, a new library, representative of many
literacies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, and
models and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had to
come about. This library, to which we shall return, now resides
in a distributed world, accessible from many directions and in
many ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety that
books might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of the
world limited almost exclusively to reference books does not
speak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, and
talent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means of
access to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity.
Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing his
dictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for France
and the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimedia
encyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of the
virtual library.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in the
Atlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them." He went on to
illustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associated
opinions and decision of his whole experience." The patent
attorney could call "the millions of issued patents, with
familiar trails to every point of his client's interest." The
physician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestly
named Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a well
subdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if
he can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completely
and objectively his present problems."
Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article was
concerned with applying the benefits of scientific research for
warfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as a
rather independent application is now the reality of on-line
communities of people working on related topics or complementing
each other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of shared
files, of shared computing power are not what interest us here.
Ted Nelson, whose name is connected to Project Xanadu,
acknowledged the benefits deriving from Bush's vision, but he is
mainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned from
literacy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link),
to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (the
correlink, as he calls it). He designed his project as a
distributed library of ever new texts and images open to
everyone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking to
others, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity of
interpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency at
the global level, and integrity at the individual level. He
called his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supports
dedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyond
his initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, by
either writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Text
can be heard, images animated. Visualization increases
expressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the library
while simultaneously allowing others to see only what they want
to see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes;
interaction is under the control of each individual. In this
generalized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, and
live performances are brought together. The rule is simple:
"Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." In
translation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something,
i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connection
becomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant.
Relinquishing the right to control links, established in the
first place because one needed them, is part of the Xanadu
agreement. It is part of the living library, without walls and
bookshelves, called the World Wide Web.
Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading where
we don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched for
knowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear very
soon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent can
effectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful.
We have co-evolved with the results of our practical
experiences. Selection neither increases the chances of the
fittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Cultural
artifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes and
ones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and all
contents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasing
number of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would have
died. These individuals are able to constitute their practical
experiences through means, among which books and libraries do not
present themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not a
habitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium for
mind interactions of individuals who are physically far from
being equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtual
library is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth of
data types and retrieval procedures.
The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don't
we?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds one
answer here. As more and more people, within their realms of
needs and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to their
existence and experience, they also enter an agreement of
exchange that makes their linking part of the distributed space
of human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter the
agreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization of
illiteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventual
return of money to the publisher and the writer. It might also
have affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Some
people believe that good books make better people. Distributed
environments of knowledge, expression, and information change
the relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I will
forget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might not
remember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place.
The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line of
thought continues: Involvement returns value to others.