Foreword
Introduction
Literacy in a Changing World
Thinking about alternatives
Progressing towards illiteracy?
Book One
1.The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Contrasting characters
Choose a letter and click
Keeping up with faster living
Loaded literacy
Man proposes, man disposes
Beyond the commitment to literacy
A moving target
The wise fox
"Between us the rift"
Malthus revisited
Captives to literacy
2. The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy
For the love of trade
"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"
The rear-view mirror syndrome
Book Two
1. From Signs to Language
Semeion revisited
The first record is a whip
Scale and threshold
Signs and tools
2. From Orality to Writing
Individual and collective memory
Cultural memory
Frames of existence
The alienation of immediacy
3. Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language?
A feedback called confirmation
Primitive orality and incipient writing
Assumptions
Taking literacy for granted
To understand understanding
Words about images
4. The Functioning of Language
Expression, communication, signification
The idea machine
Writing and the expression of ideas
Future and past
Knowing and understanding
Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous
Making thoughts visible
Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia
5. Language and Logic
Logics behind the logic
A plurality of intellectual structures
The logics of actions
Sampling
Memetic optimism
Book Three
1. Language as Mediating Mechanism
The power of insertion
Myth as mediating pre-text
Differentiation and coordination
Integration and coordination revisited
Life after literacy
2. Literacy, Language and Market
Preliminaries
Products ÎRâ Us
The language of the market
The language of products
Transaction and literacy
Whose market? Whose freedom?
New markets, new languages
Literacy and the transient
Market, advertisement, literacy
3. Language and Work
Inside and outside the world
We are what we do
Literacy and the machine
The disposable human being
Scale of work, scale of language
Innate heuristics
The realm of alternatives
Mediation of mediation
4. Literacy and Education
"Know the best"
Ideal vs. real
Relevance
Temples of knowledgeCoherence and connection
Plenty of questions
The equation of a compromise
To be a child
Who are we kidding?
What about alternatives?
Book Four
1. Language and the Visual
How many words in a look?
The mechanical eye and the electronic eye
Who is afraid of a locomotive?
Being here and there at the same time
Visualization
2. Unbounded Sexuality
Seeking good sex
Beyond immediacy
The land of sexual ubiquity
The literate invention of the woman
Ahead to the past
Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS
Sex and creativity
Equal access to erotic mediocrity
3, Family: Discovering the Primitive Future
Togetherness
The quest for permanency
What breaks down when family fails?
The homosexual family
To want a child
Children in the illiterate family
A new individuality
Discontinuity
How advanced the past. How primitive the future
4. A God for Each of Us
But who made God?
The plurality of religious experiences
The educated faithful÷a contradiction in terms?
Challenging permanency and universality
Religion and efficiency
Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy
Secular religion
5. A Mouthful of Microwave Diet
Food and expectations
Fishing in a videolake
Language and nourishment
Sequence and configuration revisited
On cooks, pots, and spoons
The identity of food
The language of expectations
Coping with the right to affluence
From self-nourishment to being fed
Run and feed the hungry
No truffles (yet) in the coop
We are what we eat
6. The Professional Winner
Sport and self-constitution
Language and physical performance
The illiterate champion
Gentlemen, place your bets!
The message is the sneaker
7. Science and Philosophy–More Questions Than Answers
Rationality, reason, and the scale of things
A lost balance
Thinking about thinking
Quo vadis science?
Discovery and explanation
Time and space: freed hostages
Coherence and diversity
Computational science
Explaining ourselves away
The efficiency of science
Exploring the virtual
Quo vadis philosophy?
The language of wisdom
In scientific disguise
Who needs philosophy? And what for?
8. Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes
Making and perceiving
Art and language
Impatience and autarchy
The copy is better than the original
A nose by any other name
Crying wolf started early
Meta-literature
Writing as co-writing
The end of the great novel
9. Libraries, Books, Readers
Why don't people read books?
Topos uranikos distributed
10. The Sense of Design
Drawing the future
Breakaway
Convergence and divergence
The new designer
Designing the virtual
11. Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning
The commercial democracy of permissiveness
How did we get here?
Political tongues
Can literacy lead politics to failure?
Crabs learned how to whistle
A world of worlds
Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents
Rhetoric and politics
Judging justice
The programmed parliament
A battle to be won
12. "Theirs not to reason why"
The first war of the civilization of illiteracy
War as practical experience
The institution of the military
From the literate to the illiterate war
The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited)
The look that kills
Book Five
1. The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web
Transcending literacy
Being in language
The wall behind the Wall
The message is the medium
From democracy to media-ocracy
Self-organization
The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?
From possibilities to choices
Coping with choice
Trade-off
Learning from the experience of interface
2. A Sense of the Future
Cognitive energy
Literacy is not all itâs made out to be
Networks of cognitive energy
The University of Doubt
Interactive learning
Footing the bill
A wake-up call
Consumption and interaction
Unexpected opportunities