The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 33

Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structure within which non- linear connections are possible-shows how far this a.s.sumption extends. A structure and core of characters are given. The reading involves the determination of events through determination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior of characters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literary work conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing: The reader defines the attributes of the characters, inserts herself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts.

Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs stand behind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how they work. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite series of co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and s.p.a.ce coordinates, names and characteristics of partic.i.p.ants in the literary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics of self-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and such about Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collective behavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow for the const.i.tution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction, with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind a suicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or the existence of yet unknown universes.

This extreme case of the literature of personal language-of languages as they are formed in the practice of creative co-writing-was antic.i.p.ated in the various forms of fantastic literature. Voyages (antic.i.p.ated in Homer's epics), explorations of future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for the writing of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge Luis Borges const.i.tuted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes of quotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities.

There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate this kind of writing, although at some level of reading the literate allusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his or her fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to have read Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because the const.i.tution of Borges' universe takes place at a different level of human practice, and in a context of disconnected forms of praxis.

Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as a strategy of literary expression. The many specialized languages of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative studies, phenomenological a.n.a.lysis, structuralism, semiotic interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages, are duplicated in the specialized language of creative post-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal of preparation for some of those works, or at least the a.s.sumed shared understanding of the particular language. The writings of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casual reading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of the language, moreover of the language code, as part of the practical experience it facilitates, does not come from studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. The epistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we know what we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in this new stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book (I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes the language of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book for quite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H.

Ga.s.s. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience the emergence of micro-readers.h.i.+p attracted to non-standard writing. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standard practical experience of writing is met by a non-standard experience of reading books, and other media (including CD-ROM) that address a small number of people.

The effort to recycle (art or literature) is part of the same co-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) and readers whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integrated in the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives, etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt to counteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literate expectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary work and using it in its entirety means to almost transform the language sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles a painting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image, between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history and interpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection not dissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. The convention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like an image and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams of different parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, a spotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifies the tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similar developments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Ga.s.s masterfully wrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions; he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules for their behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways antic.i.p.ated this type of writing, which comes from visual experiences and from the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphonic composers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover the expression of jealousy between those interacting in the systematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those in the domain of ideograms. j.a.panese writers of concrete poetry seem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort to recycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for the reader, and to compress (action, description, a.n.a.lysis) corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to the shorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presented with pieces already known, or with easily understandable images that summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, as writers always expected their readers to do, if one can see-this seems to be the temptation.

The end of the great novel

The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument in literacy. Despite the technology for writing, such as word processing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive, collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not only impossible, but irrelevant. Expectations a.s.sociated with the great novel are expectations of unity, h.o.m.ogeneity, universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the great novels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extreme segmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms of change and of human experiences, the continuous decline of the ideal embodied in literacy, education included, are arguments against the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompa.s.sing language, which the practical experience of writing such a novel implies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilization of partial languages, with their corresponding creative, non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain of expression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum, various literary works could talk to each other (as their authors can and do), they would soon conclude that the shared background is so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and some political statements (more circ.u.mstantial than substantial), little else could be said.

Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is a consubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience, the change affects the self-const.i.tution of the writer, and subsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care of spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of a.s.sociation, as embodied in our practice with interface language-the language mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction, become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape, to be listened to while driving to work. The age of the electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand- held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the on-line dictionary. And this is not all!

Language used to be the medium for bridging between generations in the framework of h.o.m.ogeneous practical experiences. Edmund Carpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization of literacy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, best embodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principle for all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projection of our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end (at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a form of memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say, "Even as written ma.n.u.script, the book served as a model for both machine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought that divided experience into specialized units and organized these serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, a.s.sembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation, and word-processing define a context for the practical experience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright, screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction with word-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing that testifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven by a.s.sociation. Word-processing is cognitively a different effort from writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should be surprised that what is written with the new media cannot be the same as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrusted by hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people, via network interaction, is a practical experience above and beyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy.

The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age of complementary expression (text and drawing). n.o.body really understood how far the genre would go, or how many literacy-based conventions would be undone in the process.

Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory of those who grew up with the names of characters from books. The influence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative of the strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When cla.s.sics of literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-strip form, and when comic strips were united under the cover of books, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics of the strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspond to those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy.

Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book?

As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might as well, since writing does not necessarily have to take a book format. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can take forms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books should not be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such as digital books, electronic publications distributed on networks and stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet, keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at a distance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a subst.i.tute as it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidate everyone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied a generation ago are known to the students of this time mainly through television and movie adaptations. The majority of today's children's books are released together with their video simuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not with literary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing the book. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much and preserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper).

Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiency whether we can afford transforming our forests into books, which humankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able to afford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmatics that they have lost their relevance.

Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy, societies subsidize literary practical experiences which are only peripherally relevant to human experience. A large number of grants go to writers who will probably never be read; many more to contests (themselves anch.o.r.ed in the obsession with hierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in the labyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminars of marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications that barely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. From the perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants is the right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will not save more of the literacy-based literature than highly specialized contemporary society perceives as necessary in respect to efficiency requirements facing the world at the current scale. In labor division, the literate writer and reader const.i.tute their systematic domain of interaction.

The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words on paper or dots on an electronic page of a portable reading device) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from the printed word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one among many literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is, for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of the graffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. Keith Haring, their best known representative, covered every available square inch-horror vacui-with expressions that const.i.tuted a new systematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a new s.p.a.ce for his own self-const.i.tution as a different type of artist.

Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate the victory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destiny relies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up some of their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in order to preserve the structure within which literacy is possible and necessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of cars and an insatiable appet.i.te for travel. It affects our ways of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing, interpreting, and acting-our entire aesthetic experience.

Libraries, Books, Readers

Carlyle believed that "The true university is a collection of books." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of the civilization of literacy, a description of their current condition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept the possibility that the civilization of literacy will continue in some form, or in more than one, that will extend the experience of the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Or the civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new form that responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing the International Publishers a.s.sociation Congress in June, 1988, George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" that led to the establishment of book culture. The technology of printing, paper production, and advances in typography that are a.s.sociated with the "private owners.h.i.+p of s.p.a.ce, of silence, and of books themselves" are among factors affecting the process.

Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlying formal quality of a medium that had to compete with vivid images, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns of behavior established within practical experiences different from those of book culture.

Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood that the new technology of printing could be, and should be, more than the mere continuation of the tradition of ma.n.u.scripts. The artifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly his contribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius applied aesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sized books we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hard cover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood used to protect ma.n.u.scripts and early printed texts. The understanding of aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to define better layouts and a new typography. His concern with portability (a quality obsessing contemporary computer designers), with readability (of no less interest to computer display experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make him the real saint of the order of the book.

The book also entails conventions of intellectual owners.h.i.+p. In their effort to stop the dissemination of heretical books through print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right of printing to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585, copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright for authors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion of property, different from the notion of owners.h.i.+p of land, animals, and buildings, especially in view of the desire, implicit in literacy, to literally spread the word. Now that desktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print on demand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property and owners.h.i.+p need to be redefined. Our understanding of books and the people who read them, too, needs to be redefined as well.

Today, books can be stored on media other than sheets of paper, on which words are printed and which are bound between hard or soft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entire contents of the Library of Congress. This means, among other things, that works of incredible significance cost five cents per book printed digitally. Another result is that the notion of intellectual owners.h.i.+p becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book is not the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. The new pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely a medium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity.

For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printing presses are able to efficiently provide runs for very precisely defined segments of the population just waiting for the Great American Novel that is custom written and produced for one reader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child,"

screams an advertis.e.m.e.nt. It promises "Hard cover, full color ill.u.s.tration, exciting stories with positive image building storylines." All that must be provided is the child's name, age, city of residence, and the names of three friends or relatives.

The rest is permutation (and an order form). Grandma did a better job with her photo and keepsake alb.u.m, but the framework of mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in all imaginable quant.i.ties and qualities; the technologies of typesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all in place.

Nowadays, there is enough private s.p.a.ce. The wash of noise is not a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books published at more affordable prices than today. Some books reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient ent.i.ty, but a medium for possible interaction.

At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means through which an author can address many readers.

The fine balance of factors involved in the publis.h.i.+ng and success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The general trend in publis.h.i.+ng can be described as more and more t.i.tles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good ma.n.u.script (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays, scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business, many mediating elements determine the destiny of a ma.n.u.script.

Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market processes of valuation.

These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages, depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages convey contents frequently contradict the culturally acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization based on books. More and more books end up as collections of images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered together with a tape ca.s.sette or compact disk, to be heard rather than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind.

Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books.

Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for Charles d.i.c.kens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.

Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the transition that defines the ident.i.ty and role of the writer and reader in the new pragmatic context.

Why don't people read books?

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman, answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a context: The group that still reads is able to pa.s.s the benefits of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books.

In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction, cannot be dismissed.

The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are reference publications. The home contains an increasing number of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video ca.s.sette recorders, and computers. The shelf s.p.a.ce for books is being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library, people consecrate s.p.a.ce in their homes for media centers that consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.

Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books are written for such purposes. Required reading for cla.s.ses, according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts, youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge (information is probably a better word) is needed for a cla.s.s or for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a world brought to life by words.

All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation, extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.

How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place equal to that of the cheap, ma.s.s- produced pulp literature and even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein Kampf was such a book in n.a.z.i Germany, and still is for n.a.z.i revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially the young. n.o.body could argue against even trivial factual errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious, ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic expectations and on the practice of human-based values.

Champions of literacy point to the cla.s.sics of history and enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much s.p.a.ce do they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes?

In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude that from all the books stored in homes and places of public access, the majority should probably have never been written, never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were only repet.i.tive of what had been said and thought previously, they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness and deceit are consecrated through the a.s.sociations that the printed word entails.

Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and use books less and less for their practical experiences. t.i.tles make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry, television, and publis.h.i.+ng houses is very adept at squeezing the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply manufactured books.

Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles, high cost of publis.h.i.+ng and marketing, low transparency, rapid acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge related to practical experiences. First among the factors affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change.

Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics, and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel, even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence agencies.

Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies render obsolete facts a.s.sociated with past observations published as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected pages and articles already subst.i.tute for the book on the desks of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year.

The book will appear in a new edition, either because the information has been updated or because the publisher wants to make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.

The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the book necessary was relatively h.o.m.ogeneous. Heterogeneity entails a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the experience, as a repository medium. Even in this doc.u.mentary or historic function, books capture less than what other media, better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could.

For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be realized, much less recorded. What is available is the acc.u.mulated human experience with alternate media, not necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to instances of parallelism and distributed activities.

Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions to questions related to non-sequential connections.

In addition to these major factors, there is the broader background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience, especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be a.s.sumed as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed world. There are the visually impaired and physically handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.

The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally different human practical experience of self-const.i.tution. In line with the s.h.i.+ft from manufacturing to service, books perform mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by a database), amus.e.m.e.nt, and filling time. Even if the great novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might be that literature today is pa.s.sionless, or it might be that the seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered, the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent.

The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy, the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation within the continuum of writing.

The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to self-const.i.tution: all our senses-including common sense-repet.i.tion and memory. Some of these avenues are more efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to persecution and violence, even ma.s.s destruction. On the individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for developing other skills essential to his or her physical and mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its dominant position in our lives.

Topos uranikos distributed

This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The underlying structure of human practical experiences through which average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the n.o.bel prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other professionals), const.i.tute themselves is characterized by a new type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux.

Whereas many functions a.s.sociated with human experiences can be rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to harmonize the relation between human experience and the functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore value altogether.