Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other
practical experiences of human self-constitution, formed their
own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take
place is not a passive component of the experience. It is
imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a
constitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the
sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and
awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could
not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the
theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better
expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the
process of self-identification of the people who projected
themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them,
and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well
explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and
Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and
writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000
ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use.
The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry
and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in
different alphabets and different pragmatic structures,
reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran.
Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and
writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's
automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different.
Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet
mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred
objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic
thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving
type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the
life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious
texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing
presses were invented, writing extends a different thought-
machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw
materials into products.
All the characteristics associated with literacy are
characteristics of the underlying structure of practical
experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing
machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the
lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was
also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders
language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the
limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical
experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines.
The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate
experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us
for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly
complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different
activities carried through at the same time, at one location or
at several, are qualitatively different from sequential
activities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiences
results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new
resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic
component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences
reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature
is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the
literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.
Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual
or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy
have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear
functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying
structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a
different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued
systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates
emancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in
literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the
civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of
literacy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, and
non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by
worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in
scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays
in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation
increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits
of integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediation
replaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy,
opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an
experience of building hypotheses and performing effective
synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think
of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing,
distribution, and integration of computers in applications
ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated
simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.
The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to
new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a
large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as
mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems,
telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design,
and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different
from anything we know of from previous practical experiences.
Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software
that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and
simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all
the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in
the new product.
Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as
a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the
pragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very good
representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this
linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new
experiences come about. Chances are that the mass-produced
machines increasingly present in a great number of households
reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the
PC might have been compared.
Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the
civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not
unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the
past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the
years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of
the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial
Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put
a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to
make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone.
Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web
should understand that what makes them so promising is not the
potential for surfing, or its impressive publication
capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is
transported through networks.