Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences of
the pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the global
scale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of human
communities and the interaction between individuals and
community. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the Sahara
Desert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked up
to television than people living in technologically highly
developed countries. More important, the identities of peoples in
less developed societies on the global map of economic and
political interdependencies are already subject to the most
advanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the global
economy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect to
what they can contribute and through what they need and can
afford. People constituting virtual communities, in Silicon
Valley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe,
are subject to integration in the global scale through different
means and methods.
The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiences
of self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding the
social status of the individual and the nature of community
interdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to more
images than language. They have the tendency to perceive time as
a continuous present and expect gratification to be as
instantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieve
as connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts in
interactive games and in controlling extremely fast processes.
Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremely
adaptable to new circumstances and in a hurry to ascertain their
version of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership in
cults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. These
adolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also the
future explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, and
geneticists who create new materials and subject machines of
breathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of a
second is essential to the outcome. They are also the future
artists and record-breaking athletes; they are computer
programmers and designers of the future. And they will be the
service providers in an economy where change, predicated by the
need to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannot
be met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness of
literacy.
As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be less
involved in community life and less committed to the ethics of
the past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play a
major role in their lives, which are shaped by practical
experiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confused
with independence. In view of all these characteristics, which
reflect the decreasing role of literacy-based human
experiences, the question often asked is how will the relation
between the community and extremely efficient individuals,
constituted in relatively insular experience, be shaped?
Moreover, what will the status of community be? In this respect,
it is important to know what forces are at work, and to what
extent our own awareness can become a factor in the process.
In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state of
urban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment,
the feeling of disenfranchisement that individuals, and
sometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all the
countries they landed in; guest workers in the European
Community; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and the
countries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities in
the USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groups
faces problems reflecting the relation between them as a
different entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are not
necessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected to
integrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with which
citizens of the host country do not want to dirty their hands.
The young generation is expected to follow in their parents'
footsteps. One minority group will have problems with another,
and with society at large, in which they are supposed to
integrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefits
and eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacy
implied expectations of homogeneity. Immigrants were taught the
language of their new homeland so they could become like any
other citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in the
labor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary and
to peacefully return to their native countries. Young people,
processed through education, and the unemployed, after being
offered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machine
called national economy.
In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarized
as follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers;
individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transfer
of individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to the
community; integration in centralized community; distribution of
tasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent of
an individual's optimal performance: from very high individual
performance, essential to survival, to distributed
responsibility, until society takes over individual
responsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox of
socialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age of
political battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), but
opens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercial
democracy is neither the result of political action nor the
expression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, the
boundaries between the individual and the very unsettled
community represent the territory of conflict. Moral
individualism succeeds or fails within a framework of
adversarial human relations. Since moral individualism is
actually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best for
yourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive access
to abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only as
purveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion of
the priority of the state over the individual is accepted de
facto), not as moral instance.
The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performance
becomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanisms
ensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, is
definitive of this process. The relative significance of
malfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, for
example-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings,
prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different in
each of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change and
renewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less an
issue of the individual and more the result of orchestrated
efforts in a large network of interactions. The underlying
structure of the civilization of illiteracy supports a
pragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking.
Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longer
generate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise of
permanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. We
face new problems. Their formulation in literate form is
deceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in which
they emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concerns
about the civilization of illiteracy.