Part 42 (1/2)

Natural language acco before the notion came into existence Literacy was to be the per 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 e and tasks can vary

The interface would account for the change and would accooals Even in their wildest dreanitive science and artificial intelligence, ith intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such a living interface Interfaces affect the nature of practical experiences in co As these become more complex, a breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up Instead of supporting better interactions, an interface can hae has perforroith each new human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks because the people constituted in language adapt In the intie li thee's expressive and comatics that made it possible and necessary exhausts its own potential for efficiency Literate language no longer enhances hu the scope of the experience to its own, and lirowth

Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of theuage is But these accomplishments are equal testimony to what occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain of oals that result in a forced unifor entity, it would have scaled up to the new scale of hu efficiency expectations, once the threshold was reached Successive forical, 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 co the fundamental differences between these two do sied Both start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and expand fron system on interactions to very rich multimedia environ 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 econoy, science, fashi+on, or, even better, art

The experience of literacy resulted in soe of interaction (interface) that disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to resuscitate The relation between the individual and coreeaker theit into atechniques 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 coement 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 coe 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 raraphy, and virtual space are such alternative nitive 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 nitive requirerounded in e, on account of the intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of e-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 enerations Enhanced by the new rae Everything ever written is scanned and stored for character recognition Ies are translated into short descriptions A se people co such ht be set on some elusive direction Even when machines will understand e ask the recognition functions in the operating systey capable of autos 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 bethat is possible and what is necessary Procedures that will associate the output to the many criteria by which huful that output is, are ical performance Until now, literacy has not proven to be the suitable instruether Individuals are fore and lead to the need for new languages If we cannot uncouple language and the huenetic endowuistic ability, ill continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and representation The issue is not language per se, but the claiht say exclusive, paradigm of human activity Neither science nor philosophy has produced an alternative to representation

There is e can lay claim to And there is much more to the dynarates it while extending far beyond it Skills needed to function in the physical world-skills which children and newborn anie The entire reals here This includes coordination and the very rich fors Advanced biological and cognitive research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various organisms survive without the benefits of representation Very personal hu 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 naic, and non-verbal coh their results only, they cause reactions ranging from doubt to ridicule The unusual and inexplicable perfor to this category An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it h he or she cannot add two and two Aat the box, the exact number of matches that fell out These are feats that are on record So sequences of phone nus of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication and division Researchers can only observe and record such accomplishments For other inexplicable pheno 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 phenoreat variety of experiences which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, e

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 coe reports about, re physicist Richard Feynman reported on a difference in machine and huuage 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 fundae and revolution, constitutive of a new frae, and of any other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of constituting neorlds These worlds do not necessarily extend the old one Teleco 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 co of e have learned in experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatory aspect of human self-constitution in an environoal 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 Atoentsubstances and devices, constitutes a new domain of practical experiences

Each of these examatic 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 dualis, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have exhausted their potential The atteainst ideals that do not originate froans firies 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 overcoe well beyond the power of matic framework of distributed practical experience and of cooperative, parallel hu self-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning ht 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 esianthe road froital foundation of the pragmatic framework But this does not e can be reduced to the victorious eneral

Having challenged the e and in its literate experience-we suggested that a n 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 hun processes The digital engine is, in final analysis, a sens

Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond co

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 fashi+on trends, no less than the new h networks, cooperative work, and distributive configurations are seh which difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and society are addressed More precisely, to interface means to advance , that has the sah not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the proponents of memetics would like us to believe

No ies are, and how fast the rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of hue

To ument is superfluous, and no stone of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned Our concern is not with the y of a probably insane Unabomber, for exa eration in raenetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or cooperative endeavors, what counts are the hunitive resources, in the fore and literacy, at work under circuy

It is i applications from which many will people benefit, but which many resent even before these applications become available They all becomatic framework of the civilization of literacy because they are based on structurally different nification We have all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to unharic to move A child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his condition as a handicap I patterns of behavior developed in the physical world in the rough draft of the simulated world People are helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported in acquiring skills in an environoals In japan, virtual reality helps people prepare for earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for fast response Interconnected virtual worlds support human interactions in the space of their scientific, poetic, or artistic interest, or co the hope, as naive as itneed be virtual Active badges T transmit data pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world

Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the ital traces, allows people and machines to remember You step into a rooed The co for you, and from whom It evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the information so you can see it fros you want to do at a certain time Details relevant to our continuous self-constitution through extremely co such interactions ues, and thinking out loud can be autoe and fro a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone keep track of us This is a new form of personal diary, protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or ht see, drawing, buildingdata The record can be co patterns of behavior of e,to one's wish At the end of the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be e-mailed to the writer One can review the events of a day or search for a certain ful