Part 42 (2/2)
In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical experiences, we can search for artistic events A play by Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where the boundary between reality and fiction starts The play will feature the actors of one's choosing The viewer can even intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and deliver a character's lines Sports events and games can be viewed in the saues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the co, in this new sense,of political events that seem as alien as almost all theitself is redefined, becooes beyond watching the news and political events on TV, beyond the ie political machine All these can happen as a private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others, physically present or not To see the world differently can lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint How does a recent irant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the people of the country he has landed in? What do hus look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person negotiates thecars and people in a hurry The eame has been played ords and theatrics in many schools But once a person assuht gained is no longer based on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of self-constitution as handicapped People can learntheir conditions and limitations And, hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond empty expressions of sympathy
That all these sen systee the nature of individual practical experiences and of social life cannot be e we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt, sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually produced The active badge can be attached to a sih the plans for a new building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains The diary of space discovery is at least as i in a real factory, research facility, or at home Before another tree is cut, before another riverbed isdevelopment is constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out what changes of iht result
It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of command, control, and evaluation Unexpected situations can be turned into learning experiences Where individuals sometimes fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks associated with the unpredictability of huh a local area network of wall-mounted sensors that collect inforned to process the e that are most of the time wasted People could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive processes associated with it They can derive knowledge frohts and actions Ubiquity and unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical care, for the support of child develop elderly population With the advent of optical co devices, chances will increase for a co of our relation to data, infor, and interhuman relationshi+ps
Individuals will ascertain their characteristicstheir role in the socio-political network of human interaction
Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for the elderly? When is ical survival becoless? These people exercise poithin the set of inherited values that originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated with literacy This does not need to be so, especially in view of the many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above
Our relation to life and death, to universality, perion and science, and last but not least to all the people who e Once individuality is redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systeenerality that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself will be redefined
Literacy is not all it's uues, is not a panacea George Steiner pointed out that scientists, who ”have been tempted to assert that their own methods and vision are now at the center of civilization, that the ancient prie is over” This is not an issue of criteria based on empirical verification, or the recent tradition of collaborative achieveotise of efficiency in our world of increased population, limited resources, and the domination of nature This framework is critical to the human effort to assess its own possibilities and articulate its goals Let us accept Steiner's idea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-that sciences ”have added little to our knowledge or governance of human possibility” Let us further accept that ”there is deht into the matter of man in Hoy of statistics” This, if it were true, would only ht is less important to the practical experience of human self-constitution than literacy-based humanities would like us to believe
Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand the episteenetics impairs or surpasses what Proust knew of the spell or burden of lineage” All this says is that in Steiner's practical experience of self-constitution, a pragenetics proves ue with this But from the particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer that consequences for a broader number of people, the enetics, are not connected to its discoveries We ument that ”each tiht blade, we experience more of the sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pass than it is the business or ambition of physics to impart” After all the rhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, the physics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universe proves to be no less , than any example from the arts, literature, or philosophy that Steiner or anyone else can produce Science only has different e It challenges hunition and sentiment, and awareness of self and others, of space and tinated once the potential of literacy was exhausted The very possibility of writing as significantly as the writers of the past did di is less and less appropriate to the new experiences of self-constitution in the civilization of illiteracy
The arguo on and on, until and unless we settle on a rather si connected to human identity-art, work, science, politics, sex, family-is established in the act of human self-constitution and cannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our hunificant insofar as it contributes to the h, Beethoven, and the anonynificant insofar as hurates each or every one of the their biological constitution into the world- we all breathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive the world-hu oneself can be as si food, water, and shelter, or as co, orabout one's condition If in this practical experience one has to integrate a stick or a stone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, or to project the individual in a sculpture or nificance of the stick or stone or the noise is determatic context of the self-constitutive nificance of literacy-based practical experiences History, even in its coenetic shape, is an example Literacy made quite a number of practical experiences possible: education, mass media, political activism, industrial manufacture This does not imply that these domains are forever wed to literacy A few contexts, such as crafts, predated literacy Infororithed fromatics that ascertained literacy But they are also relatively independent of it
Steiner was correct in stating that ”we must countenance the possibility that the study and transnificance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique” His assertion needs to be extended froo beyond literacy does not coic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacy and tradition Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the hu loses a fundamental dimension The sophistry is easy to catch, however The conclusion ie is identical to literacy As we know, this is not the case Orality, of more consequence in our day than the es that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreu enunciated in ancient times and furthered in various criticise that were lost once it started to be taain, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view: ”we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable
There are uage, but on other coies, such as the icon or the musical note” He correctly describes how mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and Newton, beca no syllable of each other's language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech coy
Chereat number of other practical experiences of hues Indeed, the medium in which experiences take place is not a passive coree 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 dynae and awareness of its many components The cuneifor 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 the the may well explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal fro, or the phonetic subtleties at hen ns now in use
The historic articulation of the Torah, its s, in different alphabets and different prage of the New Testa after the Enlighten, are funda earned a living byae of sacred objects displayed during certain cerehttype that Gutenberg invented, yet another , which type ian their lives as talis 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 e machines The linear function, replicated in the use of the lever, was generalized in eneralized in literacy, the language inated in a context of the limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical experiences e 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 co Sih 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
Prager 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 dualismatics of non-linear relations, of a different dynaurations, and of ies facilitates emancipation fromatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralish massive distribution of tasks, and non- hierarchic for, this pragnificant is the role mediation plays in the process As a specific form of human experience,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 perfor effective synthesis In order to realize what all thisinvolved in the conception, design, ration of coement to sophisticated silobal
The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to new concepts of coe number of creative professionals fron, operating systen, product design, and communication The scale of the effort is totally different fro 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
Soht have looked at the first personal computers as a scaled- down version of the ood representation In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this linear model does not work, and it does not explain ho experiences come about Chances are that the reat number of households reach a perforht have been co structure of the pragital 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 doital 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 , or its initive energy that is transported through networks
bu from the civilization of literacy differ in their condition froe Infinitely more chances open continuously, but the risks associated with thees