Book one, Chapter 1: The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

There was life before literacy and there will be life after it. In fact, it has already begun. Let us not forget that literacy is a relatively late acquisition in human culture. The time preceding writing is 99% of the entire story of the human being. If we can understand what the end of literacy as we know it means in practical terms, we will avoid further lamentation and initiate a course of action from which all can benefit.

Human cooperation and interaction corresponding to the complexity of the undertakings of our age is defined by expectations of high efficiency. Relatively stable and well structured literate communication among the people involved is less efficient than rather fast and fragmentary contact through means other than those facilitated by, or based on, literacy.

Because we inherited, along with our reverence for language, a passive attitude regarding what is logically permissible under the guise of literacy, we do not question implicit assumptions and expectations of literacy. For instance, the belief that command of language enhances cognitive skills, although we know that cognitive processes are not exactly reducible to language, is accepted without hesitation.

...the broader context of the changes in the status of literacy is the pragmatic framework of our existence. It is not only that the use of language has diminished or its quality decreased. Rather, it is the acknowledgment of a very complex reality, of a biologically and culturally modified human being facing apparent choices difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize. Life is faster paced, not because biological rhythms abruptly changed, but because a new pragmatic framework, of higher efficiency, came about.

We are our language. Those who state that language follows life consider only one side of the coin. Life is also formed in practical experiences of language constitution. The influence goes both ways, but human existence is in the end dependent upon the pragmatic framework within which individuals project their own biological structure in the practical act through which they identify themselves.

Mediation, along with heuristics, is definitory of the human species.

The answer to the question regarding alternatives to literacy is that part of the mediating function of language has extended to specialized languages, and to sign systems other than verbal language, when those systems are better adapted to the complexities of heretofore unencountered challenges.

...if anyone wants to see practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy unfolding in their quasi-pure manner, one has only to look at the stock market and commodities exchanges and auctions conducted over the Internet.

A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed in literate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. We face these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimed or negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached to expectations÷of a certain standard of living, fringe benefits÷frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countries are undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage because outdated working relations have been codified in labor laws. Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types of workers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work in the market.

The specialization that increases market efficiency results in a growing number of literacies. These literacies bring to the market the productive potential of companies and their management value. They encode levels of expected productivity...within the context of progressive globalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded in programs designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition, the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market in the global economy insert other literacies, in this case, the literacy of machines endowed with search and heuristic capabilities not dependent on literacy.

From the design of the product, to the materials used and principles applied, almost nothing is meant to last beyond a cycle of optimal efficiency. It is not a moral decision, neither is it a devious plan. Different expectations are embodied in our products. Their life cycle reflects the dynamics of change corresponding to the new scale of human self-constitution, and the obsession with efficiency. Products become transient because the cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution are shorter.

 Book three, Chapter 3: Language and Work

What sometimes looks like excessive specialization in our day÷e.g., in medicine, physics, mathematics, electronics, computer science, transportation÷is the result of the propensity of each mediating element to engender a need for further mediations, which reflect expectations for efficiency. Simultaneously with the differentiation of work, language changed, becoming itself more differentiated.

...when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuity and avoid misleading translations in the language of the past. A car was the result of incremental progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but still conceptually close to our own practical experience with flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction. A nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences. The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of any previous pragmatic experience.

Language is constituted in human practical experiences. At the same time, it is constitutive, together with many other elements of human praxis: biological endowment, heuristics and logic, dialectic, training. This applies to the most primitive elements of language we can conceive of, as well as to todayâs productive languages.

...while verbal language may be innate (as Chomskyâs theory advances), the heuristic dimension characteristic of human self-constitution certainly is. The major effort is not to keep things the way they are, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure more than mere survival. This is known as progress.

Basic skills, as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become less and less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work. Under the guise of basic skills, young and less than young workers receive an education in reading and writing that has nothing to do with the emergent practical experiences of ever shorter cycles.

In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makes another distinction necessary. It replaces the world of the continuum by a world of discrete states. Probably this distinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift from the universe of continuous functions and monotonic behavior÷whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everything in between÷were not manifested in a different condition of human self-constitutive practical experience.

Language resulted in the context of diversification of practical human experiences. Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and the perspective of the whole into which variously mediated components usually come together. Languageâs mediating capabilities relied on space and time conventions built into language experience over a very long time and interiorized by literate societies.

Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion, thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and genetic codes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantly based on inductions from observed facts to theories explaining such facts. Theories require a medium of expression, and this is represented by new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms, chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in some pseudo-language.

There are instances when the speed of a process and the requirement of sequencing make direct human control not only impossible, but also undesirable. This mediation is then continued by sequences automatically generated by machines. Although the structure of all these new languages is inspired by the structure of natural language, they project experiences which are not possible in the universe of standard language.

Book three, Chapter 4: Literacy and Education

The paradigm of a once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over. Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the pertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linear progress of technology required only maintenance of skills and slight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past.

Literacy carried the ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education. In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of choices. Within this structure, education is the practical experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered around values expressed in language. Education based on literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced scale of humankind. Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methods advanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers, account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if at all) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerous literacies.

The issue is not the impact of visual technology and computers on reading patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. It is the fundamental shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among which the visual plays a dominant role.

New practical experiences confirm that the focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on advertisement, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web, but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.

The shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to the relative domination of the visual takes place under the influence of new tools, further mediations, and integration mechanisms required by self-constitutive practical experiences at the new human scale. The tools we need should allow us to continue exploring horizons at which literacy ceases to be effective, or even significant. The mediations required correspond to complexities for which new languages are structurally more adequate. The necessary integration is only partially achievable through literate means since many people active in the humanities and the sciences gave up the obsession of final explanations and accepted the model of infinite processes.

Technology did not make us aware of images, nor even open access to their digital processing, but intellectual praxis, motivated by its own need for efficiency. Visualization is not a matter of illustrating words, concepts, or intuitions. It is the attempt to create tools for generating images related to information and its use. A text on a computer screen is, in fact, an image, a visualization of the language generated.

The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodying the ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that of high performance is basically the same as the dynamics of change behind any other form of human projection. When winning became the aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount and started being measured and recorded. [...] The irony of this situation is that, in fact, black African-Americans are still entertainment providers in the USA. Regardless of how profitable professional sports are, the obsession with efficiency effectively consecrates an important segment of the population to entertaining the rest.

 Book four, Chapter 7: Science and Philosophy÷More Questions Than Answers

The dynamics of change in scientific and philosophic thinking is not independent of the underlying structure of the pragmatics that leads to the civilization of illiteracy. Both involve rationality, which connects human practical experiences to consistent inferences (sometimes seen as logical conclusion) and to the ability to predict events (in nature or society), even to influence and control them. Rationality is connected to efficiency insofar as it is applied in the selection of means appropriate to accomplishing goals; or it serves as an instrument for evaluation of the premises leading to a selected course of action. In short, rationality is goal oriented.

Extremely specialized human practical experiences are no longer predominantly experiences based on knowledge, but on constituting the person as information integrator..

Language is ambiguous, imprecise, and not neutral in respect to the phenomena observed and accounted for. For these and other reasons, researchers working within the informational paradigm needed to synthesize specialized languages designed in such ways to avoid ambiguity and make higher efficiency of automated processing possible.

Language preserves in its structure the experience that made it necessary; literacy does the same. This is why their sequentiality conflicts with subjects of configurational condition. This is also why linearity, inherent in the pragmatics that formed literacy, conflicts with the inherent non-linearity of the world.

Multi-valued logic, the logic of relations, fuzzy set theory, and computation in its algorithmic and non-algorithmic forms (based on neural networks) allow philosophers to free themselves from the various dualisms embedded in the language of philosophy. Significantly better answers to ontological, gnoseological, epistemological, and even historic questions have to reflect such and other cognitively relevant perspectives of knowledge. Philosophy undergoes a process of mathematization in order to gain access to science and improve its own efficiency. It has become logic-oriented, more computational. It has adopted genetic schemes for explaining variation and selection, extending to the current memetic conversations and methods.

 Book four, Chapter 11: Politics–There Was Never So Much Beginning

"We need literacy for democracy to survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with other requirements, mainly pragmatic. [...] The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system÷an event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can be÷makes for unexpected proof of this bookâs major thesis. The breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a structure that kept literacy as its major educational and instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of its ideological goals inside and outside the block.

Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics out of the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practical experiences, it entails expectations generated under different pragmatic circumstances. And it faces challenges÷the major challenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale of human experience÷for which its traditional means and its inherited structure are simply not adequate. [...] The majority of people look back to some prior political experience and interpret the past in the light of books they have read. They fail to realize that the complexity of todayâs human experience cannot be met by yesterdayâs solutions.

 Book four, Chapter 12: Theirs Not to Reason Why..."

The Gulf War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the rules on war÷or did away with them.