Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in the
research of artificial life. Knowledge derived from this
research can be used to advance models of individual and social
life. This knowledge tells us that diversity and
self-organization, for instance, prompted by structural
characteristics and externalized through emerging functions,
maintain the impetus of evolution in a living system. Obviously,
humans belong to such a system. In the past, we used to focus on
social forms of variable organization. Within such forms,
iterative optimization and learning take place as an expression
of internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposed
rules of functioning.
The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's states
and organizations in the business of population control, needs
to be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we can
expect that communities structured on such principles are endowed
with the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognize
themselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to the
pragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a change
of strategy from telling people what has to be done to engaging
them in the action. All the promises connected to the
fast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamental
assumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as a
mechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effective
functioning of each and every member of the community. Social
disease entails connotations characteristic of a system of good
and bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibility
that individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected.
Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity and
definition of unity, means, goals, and ideals.
Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability to
allocate resources within the dynamic community. More than in
the past, and more than today, individuals will partake in more
than one community. This is made possible by means of interaction
and by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only a
beginning when we think of the numbers of people involved and
the still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion of
community, associated mainly with location, will continue to give
way to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communities
on the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The major
characteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cells
is their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution,
which reflects the understanding that political and social
aspects of human interaction change as each person changes.
The model described, inspired by the effort to understand life
and simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations,
applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Global
economy, global political concerns, global responsibility for the
support system, global vested interests in communication and
transportation networks, and global concern for the meaningful
use of energy should not lead to a world state- not even
Boorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of many
worlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of political
practical experiences are such that self-destruction, through
social implosion, is probably what might happen if we continue
to play the game of world institutions. The alternative
corresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associated
with extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integrating
procedures.
In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will
constitute their identity in experiences through which their
particular contribution might be integrated in different actions
or products. They will share resources and use communication
means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge
through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is
part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once
they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of
information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing
human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the
multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy,
freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the
life of each social cell thus constituted.
Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their
practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical
notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates
the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to
meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to
each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together.
We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow
specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing
synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.
Since human activity reflects the human being's
multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping
experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in
environments where resources are shared and results constitute
the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people
constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that
ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through
many literacies, and survival skills geared towards
co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an
example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early
1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been
a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the
Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe
the individuals working towards building a cooperative and
collective activity that would benefit the world at large.
Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of
perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which
imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on
differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is
expressed in how much more diversity it can generate.
The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?
The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the
main sign system of the human species, is brought more
forcefully to light against the background of new forms of
practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through
many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances,
predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival,
make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand
out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented
with alternative means of expression, communication, and
signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity
and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of
human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of
literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a
higher dynamics of human existence.
Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in
language-everything people do in the act of their practical
self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how
a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the
intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we
know of the diverse components of the practical experience of
mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition,
aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component.
Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only
reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power
of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or
on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated?
Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?
The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social
activities. Interactions among people involve their physical
presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate;
their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of
persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we
know very little about the specific impact each one has.
Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass
delusion, with or without television as part of the political
performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in
their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for
that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their
fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows,
there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology.
Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural
practice, but has failed to project anything particularly
relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural
behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the
patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have
acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.
We must give serious thought to our obsession with
invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language.
It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the
civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking
the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us
understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in
the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life
in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic
reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the
outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is
medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the
realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms
a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern
disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days.
What we already know is that populations were decimated once new
patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When
an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance,
life patterns were affected. This happened not only to
populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also
in the native populations of the American continents. Medical
concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of
self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the
civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances
and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."
Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the
universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex
pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally
abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language,
people have been able to change the patterns of training,
instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and
healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which
for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also
affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a
result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience
are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through
words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text,
and then having the text control the use of visual elements,
people use the mediating power of design systems with
integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a
new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while
the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost,
ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal
communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still
involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new
skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking,
and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those
characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal
language.
There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to
reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable,
literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web,
it complements the repertory of means of human interaction
characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television
holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The
ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful
one-to-one and one-to-many interactions.
The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on
the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed,
several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet
developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self-
constitution the ability to think in media other than natural
language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still
translate from one language to another. When this does not work,
they look for help in the language they know, instead of
formulating questions in the alternative language in which they
suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by
rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards
understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics,
medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills,
food preparation, and social activities.
In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great
extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human
relationships without affecting the general outcome of human
practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization
relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in
integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish
through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical
to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of
relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency
require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena
for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self-
constitution of individuals and of society.