The exciting adventure of artificially replicating human
characteristics and functions is probably as old as the
awareness of self and others. Harnessing tools and machines in
order to maximize the efficiency of praxis was always an
experience in language use and craftsmanship. So far, the most
challenging experience has been the use of computers to
replicate the ability to calculate, process words and images,
control production lines, interpret very complex data, and even
to simulate aspects of human thinking.
Programming languages serve as mediating entities. Using a
limited vocabulary and very precise logic, they translate
sequences of operations that programmers assume need to be
executed in order to successfully compute numbers, process
words, operate on images, and even carry out the logical
operations for playing chess and beating a human opponent at the
game. A programming language is a translation of a goal into a
description of the logical processes through which the goal can
be achieved. Computer users do not deal with the programming
language; they address the computer through the language of
interface: words in plain English (or any other language for
which interface is designed), or images standing for desired
goals or operations. The entire machine does not speak or
understand an interface's high-level language. The interaction
of the user with the machine is translated by interface programs
into whatever a machine can process. Providing efficient
interfaces is probably as important as designing high level
abstract programming languages and writing programs in those
languages. Without such interfaces, only a limited number of
people could involve themselves in computing. The experience of
interface design can help us understand the direction of change
to which the new pragmatics commits us. At the end of the road,
the computer should physically disappear from our desks. All that
will be needed is access to digital processing, not to the
digital engine. The same was true of electricity. Once upon a
time it was generated at the homes or workplaces where the
people who needed it could use it. Now it is made available
through distribution networks.
Natural language accomplished the function of interface long
before the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be the
permanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifying
factor in the relation between the individual and society.
Ideally, interface should not affect the way people constitute
themselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to their
identity. This means that people can change and tasks can vary.
The interface would account for the change and would accommodate
new goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists and
researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence,
who work with intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such a
living interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practical
experiences in computing. As these become more complex, a
breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead of
supporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them and
affect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quite
well under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each new
human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks
because the people constituted in language adapt. In the intimate
relation between humans and their language, language limits new
experiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence.
Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches its
climax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessary
exhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language no
longer enhances human abilities in practical experiences outside
its pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scope
of the experience to its own, and limits human growth.
Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of
them, are testimony to the powerful interface that literate
language is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony to
what occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain of
motivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goals
that result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacy
had been a neutral mediating entity, it would have scaled up to
the new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiency
expectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms of
religious, scientific, ideological, political, and economic
domination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. To
understand this predicament, we can compare the sequence of
interfaces connected to the experience of religion to the
sequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding the
fundamental differences between these two domains of practical
experience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Both
start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and
expand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very rich
multimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to the
wide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve as
double-headed entities: the language of the initiated
individuals interfaced with the language of the individuals
progressively integrated in the experience. No one should
misconstrue this comparison, meant only to illustrate the
constitutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We could
as well focus on the experiences of economics, politics,
ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art.
The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but also
in lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) that
disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to
resuscitate. The relation between the individual and community,
once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacy
took over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into a
multiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques applied
on literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require even
further standardization in order to be efficient. As a result,
the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes a
locus for data management instead of a place for human
interaction. The process exemplifies what happens when interface
takes over and interacts with itself.
The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how important
it is to understand the nature of interface processes. But
experience gained in computational research of knowledge points
to other aspects critical to the relation between the individual
and society. Humans constitute themselves in a variety of
practical experiences that require alternatives to language.
Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualization
techniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual space are such
alternative means. Non-linear association and cognitive paths,
until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience on
the World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processing
language is not equivalent to integrating these alternative
means.
Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiences
grounded in means different from language, on account of the
intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of
memory requirements. The genetic endowment formed in
language-based practical experiences of self-constitution is not
necessarily adapted to fundamentally different means of
expression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which is
established in an acculturation process that takes many
generations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does not
become more precise. Programs are conceived to enable the
understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned
and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into
short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to
everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means
on a routine basis, though the compass might be set on some
elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask
them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting
recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have
to articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating many
operations that human beings still perform will increase output,
and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the real
challenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation between
what is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that will
associate the output to the many criteria by which humans or the
machine determine how meaningful that output is, are more
important than raw technological performance. Until now,
literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for this
goal.
People and language change together. Individuals are formed in
language; their practical experiences reshape language and lead
to the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple language
and the human being, especially in view of the parallel
evolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we will
continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and
representation. The issue is not language per se, but the claim
that representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive,
paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy has
produced an alternative to representation.
There is more to physical reality than what language can lay
claim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of our
existence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it while
extending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in the
physical world-skills which children and newborn animals
display-are only partially represented in language. The entire
realm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includes
coordination and the very rich forms of relating to space, time,
and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitive
research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various
organisms survive without the benefits of representation. Very
personal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, and
joy-happen without the benefits and constraints of language
representation.
There are skills for which we have no representation in language.
Various tags are used to name them under the heading of
parapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once these
are described through their results only, they cause reactions
ranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicable
performances of individuals called idiots savants belong to this
category. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it
masterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. A
matchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking at
the box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These are
feats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to go
through long sequences of phone numbers, produce complete
listings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication
and division. Researchers can only observe and record such
accomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simply
have no concept available: the amazing last moments before
death, the power of illusion, and the visualization aptitudes of
some individuals. Researchers have accumulated data on the power
of prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is not
the intention of this book to venture explanations of these
phenomena, but to point out the great variety of experiences
which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merely
because they still defy explanation in language.
Functioning in a world that we read through the glasses of
literacy makes us often blind to what is different, to what
literacy does not encompass. A realm of fact and possible
abstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existence
that language reports about, remains to be explored. When the
Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on a
difference in machine and human computation, this report pointed
to aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as a
useful interface, and to a realm different from representation.
Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of a
given pragmatic context. They are references as to how far such
a context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe of
fundamental change and revolution, constitutive of a new
framework. The really interesting level of language, and of any
other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of
constituting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extend
the old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previous
pattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences are
more than the sum of individual contributions. They are
constitutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtual
office is but another form of office. Virtual community is a
constitutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned in
experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatory
aspect of human self-constitution in an environment of fluidity
and unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform,
but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of
chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine,
of construction materials, or of electronic components continues
earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize
intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices,
constitutes a new domain of practical experiences.
Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework different
in nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacy
embodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-,
techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, right
and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have
exhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergent
pragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within them
can only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in the
avatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at the
juncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of language
is not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what the
world is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books,
and social concerns. The networks of objects and their
properties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization of
literacy only through language: things are real insofar as they
are in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge well
beyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the new
pragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and of
cooperative, parallel human interactions is a human being
self-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning means of
expression, communication, and signification. We might just be on
the verge of a new age.
A Sense of the Future
Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still science
fiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to define
direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversity
of this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practical
experiences of self-constitution. The landscape mapped out by
these experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. One
marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for
doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. But
this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be
reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology,
in general.
Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language
and in its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of
various sign processes effectively override the need for and
justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency
expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic
framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the
sense that human practical experiences become more and more
subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final
analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs.
Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences
extends beyond computers and symbolic processing.
As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness is
expressed in choices (of means of expression and communication)
and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no less
than the new media, global interaction through networks,
cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semiotic
identifiers. Interfaces are semiotic entities through which
difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and
society are addressed. More precisely, to interface means to
advance methods and notions of a new form of cultural
engineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering,
although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the
proponents of memetics would like us to believe.
No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast the
rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the
quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of
humankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change.
To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stone
of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern is
not with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probably
insane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense of
optimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, not
on its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether a
spectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment,
genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or
cooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitive
resources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible to
language and literacy, at work under circumstances of globality.