Lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales come to mind: "Now isn't it a marvel of God's grace/that an illiterate fellow can outpace/the wisdom of a heap of learned men?" How a manciple (probably equivalent to a Residence Life Administrator and Cafeteria Head combined) would perform today is worth another tale. Education, as a product of the civilization of literacy, has problems understanding that literacy corresponds to a development in which written language was the medium for the spoken. Nevertheless, it did learn that today we can store the spoken in non-written form, sometimes more efficiently, and without the heavy investment required to maintain literacy. As an industry, with the special status of a not-for-profit organization, education in the USA competes in the market for its share, and for high returns. Endowments qualify many universities as large businesses that are buffered from the reality of economics.
With or without the aid of philanthropy, learning has to free itself from its subordination to literacy and restrictive literate structures, as it previously freed itself from its subordination to the church, in whose bosom it was nurtured. Obviously, if this new awareness manifests itself only in mailing out videotapes instead of printed college catalogues, then we may ask whether it is educators, or only marketers, who understand the current dynamics. The same should be asked when some professors put their courses on tape, in the belief that canned knowledge is easier for the student to absorb. On-line classes break with the mold, but they are not yet the answer, at least as long as they do not belong to a broader vision reflected in different priorities and appropriate content.
There is nothing intrinsically bad about involving media in education, but the problem is not the medium for storage and delivery. Media labs that are covered by dust because they convey the same useless information as the classes they were supposed to enhance only prove that a fundamental change is necessary. Fundamental, for instance, is the skewed notion that knowledge is transferred from professors-who know more-to students-who know less. Actually, we face a reality never before experienced: students know more than their teachers, in some disciplines. In addition, knowledge still appropriate to a subject a short time ago-call it history, politics, or economics, and think about classes in Soviet and East European studies- has been rendered useless. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry underwent spectacular renewal. This created situations in which what the textbooks taught was immediately contradicted by reality.
Should education compete with the news media? Should it become an Internet address for unlimited and unstructured browsing? Should education give up any sense of foundation? Or should universities periodically refresh their genetic make-up in order to maintain contact with the most recent theories, the most recent research techniques, the most recent discoveries? These are more than enough questions for a pen still writing one word at a time, or for a mouth answering questions as they pile up. Without posing these questions-to which some answers will be attempted at the conclusion of this book-no solution can be expected. The willingness of educators and everyone affected by education to formulate them, and many more, would bear witness to a concern that cannot be addressed by some miraculous, all-encompassing formula. The good news is that in many parts of the world this is happening. Finally!
The equation of a compromise
As the scale of humankind changed, and the efficiency of human practical experience corresponding to the scale ascertained itself as the new rationality, the practical experience of self-constitution had to adjust to new circumstances of existence and activity. There is no magic borderline. But there is a definite discontinuity between what constituted the relatively stable underlying structure of literacy and what constitutes the fast-changing underlying structure of the pragmatic framework. Because in our own self-constitution literacy is only one among many media for achieving the efficiency that the new scale requires, we come to realize, even if public discourse does not exactly reflect it, that we cannot afford literacy the way we have until now. And even if we could, we should not. People recognize, even if only reluctantly, that the literacy machine, for some reason still called education, endows the new generation with a skill of limited significance. The resulting perspective is continuously contradicted by the ever new and ever renewing human experiences through which we become who we are. Education based on the paradigm of literacy is, as we have seen, a luxury which a society, rich or poor, cannot afford. Conditions of human life and praxis require, instead of a skill and perspective for the whole of life, a series. Skill and perspective need to be understood together. Their application will probably be limited in time, and not necessarily directly connected to those succeeding them.
Nobody seriously disputes the relevance of studying language, but very few see language and language-based disciplines as the prerequisite for the less than life-long series of different jobs students of today will have. Although colleges maintain a core curriculum that preserves the role of language and the humanities, the shift towards the languages of mathematics-a discipline that has diversified spectacularly-and of visual representation is so obvious that one can only wonder why the voices of mathematicians are not heard over those of the Modern Language Association. Mathematics prepares for fields from technical to managerial, from scientific to philosophic, and from design to legal. The realization that calculus is first of all a language, and that the goal of education is fluency in it, corresponds to an awareness that musicians had for the longest time with respect to musical scores, but the champions of literacy always refused to accept. The same holds true for the disciplines of visualization: drawing, computer graphics, design. In today's education, the visual needs to be studied at least as much as language-dependent subjects.
Against the background of deeper changes, education is focusing on its on redefinition. The major change is from a container model of education-the child being the empty container who needs to be filled with language, history, math, and not much more-to a heuristic education. Our pragmatics is one of process, as the pragmatics of education finally should be. Education needs to be conducive to interaction and to the formation of criteria for choices from among many options. But change does not come easily. Still using the impertinence of literacy, some educators call the container model "teaching students to think." They do not realize that students think whether we teach them to or not! Students of all ages are aware of change, and familiar with modes of interaction, among themselves and with technology, closer to their condition than to that of their teachers. The majority of the new businesses on the Internet are instigated by students and supported by their inventiveness and dedication. They have became agents of change in spite of all the shortcomings of education. And students have become educators themselves, offering environments for conveying their own experience.
To be a child
No one can declare better ways of teaching without considering the real child. In a world of choice and free movement, children are more likely to come from families that will consist of a single parent. Many children will come from environments where discrimination, poverty, prejudice, and violence have an overpowering influence. Such an environment is significant for a society dedicated to democratic ideals. We have to face the fact that childrearing and education are being transferred from family to institutions meant to produce the educated person. With the best of motives, society has created factories for processing children. These socio-educational entities are accepted quite obligingly by the majority of the people freed from a responsibility affecting their own lives. "Everything will be fine, as long as the education of the new generation basically repeats the education of the parents," sums up the expectations regarding these institutions.
Although we know that, generally speaking, cycles (of production, design, and evaluation) are getting shorter, we maintain children in education well past the time they even fit in classroom chairs. One needs to see those adults forced to be students, full of energy, frustrated that their patience, not their creative potential, is put to the test. Dropping out of high school or college is not indicative of a student's immaturity. Society's tendency to decide what is best for the next generation has determined that only one type of education will ensure productive adults. Society refuses to consider humans in the variety of their potential. From the Projection of Education Statistics to the Year 2006, we learn that the total private and public elementary and secondary school enrollment in the USA will increase from 49.8 million in 1994 to 54.6 million. Of the 49.8 million in 1994, only 2.5 million graduated high school, and by the year 2006 the number will not exceed 3 million. Students themselves seem to be more aware of the excessively long cycle of education than do the experts who define its methods, contents, and goals. This creates a basis for conflict that no one should underestimate.
Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probably rewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. The pressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instincts to explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in an instant. The distance between paradise (support and choice without worry) and hell (the specter of disease, addiction, abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorter than prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels, the Internet, thousands of music titles (on CD, video, and radio stations), the lure of sports, drugs, sex, and the hundreds of fashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used to organize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Juliet was proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece, you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to the most recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer.
The problem is that drugs, AIDS, millions of attractions, the need to find one's way in a world less settled and less patient, do not fit in the neat scheme of literacy. The language of genetics and the language of personality constitution are better articulated through means other than books. Heroes, teachers, parents, priests, and activists are no longer icons, even if they are portrayed to be better than they were in reality. Bart Simpson, the underachiever, "mediocre and proud of it," is a model for everyone who is told that what really counts is to feel good, period.
Still, some young people go to school or college full of enthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guarantee self-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period of time and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close to what they will face. They might learn how to spell and how to add. But they soon discover that in real life skills other than spelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointment is there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bring no result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy and competence for experiences which literacy does not support, and often inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society is willing and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, as it seems that it feels it must, the investment would be in imposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the new generation, until the time comes when it can escape society's pressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between the interests of the institution of education (with tens of thousands of teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmatic framework that few in academia understand.
One of the elements of this equation is the practical need to extend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis. But unless this education reflects the variety of literacies that the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone to everything results in the lowest general level of education. The variety of practical experiences of self-constitution requires that we find ways to coordinate access to education by properly and responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investing responsibility in their development. Continuous education needs to be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part of the reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmatic framework is acknowledged.
To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics, business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians of policy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, all this will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we would like to be considered as individuals, each with our own dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference in the new pragmatic context.
Who are we kidding?
Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason to our own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it to new circumstances of working, thinking, feeling, and exploring. In view of the inefficiency built into our system of education, we try to compromise by adding the dimension characteristic of the current status of human experience of multiple partial literacies. The result is the transformation of education into a packaging industry of human beings: you choose the line along which you want to be processed; we make sure that you get the literacy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope with so-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a more subtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, or the tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety. Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediates between their goals and the rather scary reality of the marketplace. This mediation differs according to the level of education, and is influenced by political and social decision making.
As an industry for processing the new generation, education acts according to parameters resulting from its opportunistic search for a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledges the narrow domains of expertise which labor division brought about, and reproduces the structure of current human experience in its own structure. Through vast financial support, from states, private sources, and tradition- based organizations, education is artificially removed from the reality of expected efficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly, the gap between the literate language of the university and the languages of current human practice widens. The tenure system only adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of a professor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrong with our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedom necessary for exercising their profession.
Behind the testing model that drives much of current education is the expectation of effective ranking of students. This model takes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy (aptitude vs. achievement) that makes students react to questions, but does not really engage them or encourage creative contributions. The result is illustrative of the relation between what we do and how we evaluate what we do. An expectation was set, and the process of education was skewed to generate good test results. This effectively eliminates teaching and learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid they will not measure up and demand to be taught by the book. Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, by students and administration, from trying better approaches. Good students are frustrated in their attempts to define their own passion and to pursue it to their definition of success. Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback of stupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy than for their well-being. Standardized tests dominated by multiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but also affect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the new pragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-is counteracted through the experience of testing, and the teaching geared to multiple-choice instruments.
The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of the human being is reflected in education's language and organization, and in the limiting assumptions about its function and methods. Education has become a self-serving organization with a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd and Flores call them, and motivational elements not very different from the state, the military, and the legal system. Like the organizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interaction with sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by the same self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead of reflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, it tends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longer periods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledged creativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, and nanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takes away the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk.
The lowest quality of education is at the undergraduate level in universities, where either graduate assistants or even machines substitute for professors too busy funding their research, or actually no longer attuned to teaching. This situation exists exactly because we are not yet able to develop strategies of education adapted to new circumstances of human work and to the efficiency requirements which we ourselves made necessary. The "network of recurrent conversations," to use Winograd's terminology again, or the "language game" that Wittgenstein attributed to each profession, hides behind the front of literacy and thus burdens education. Once accreditation introduces the language game of politics, education distances itself even more from its fundamental mission. Accreditation agencies translate concerns about the quality of education into requirements, such as the evaluation of colleges and universities based on scores on exit tests taken by students. These are supposed to reflect academic achievement. In other cases, such scores are used for assessing financial support. The paradox is that what negatively affects the quality of education becomes the measure of reward. Test results are often used in politicians' arguments about improved education, as well as a marketing tool. In fact, to prepare students for performance makes performance a goal in itself. Thus it should come as no surprise that the most popular book on college campuses-today's education factories-is a guide to cheating.
Many times comparisons are made between students in the USA and in Japan or in Western European countries. In many ways these comparisons are against the pervasive dynamics of integration that we experience. Still, there are things to consider-for instance, that Japanese students spend almost the same amount of time watching TV as American students do, and that they are not involved in household tasks. Noticeable differences are in reading. The Japanese spend double the number of hours that American students do in reading. Japanese students spend more time on schoolwork (the same 2-to-1 ratio), but much less on entertainment. Should Japan be considered a model? If we see that Japanese students rank among the best in science subjects, the answer seems to be positive. But if we project the same against the entire development of students, their exceptional creative achievements, the answer becomes a little more guarded. With all its limitations, the USA is still more attuned to pragmatic requirements. This is probably due more to the country's inherent dynamics than to its educational institutions. Largely unregulated, capable of adaptive moves, subject to innovation, the USA is potentially a better network for educational possibilities.
What caused the criticism in these pages of evaluation is the indecisiveness that the USA shows-the program for school reform for the year 2000 is an example of this attitude-and the difficulty it has in realizing the price of the compromise it keeps supporting. Once Japanese businesses started buying American campuses, the price of the compromise became clear. Universities in the USA were saved from bankruptcy. Japanese schools, whose structured programs and lack of understanding of the new pragmatics made for headlines, were able to evade their own rigid system of education, reputed for being late in acknowledging the dynamics of change. Abruptly, the Americanization of world education-study driven by multiple-choice tests with a dualistic structure-was short-changed by a Japanization movement. But in the closer look suggested above, it is evident that the Japanese are extricating themselves from drastic literacy requirements that end up hampering necessary accommodations in the traditional Japanese system of values. Although caution is called for, especially in approaching a subject foreign to our direct experience and understanding, the trend expressed is telling in its many consequences.
What about alternatives?
A legitimate question to be expected from any sensible reader refers to alternatives. Let us first notice that, due to the new pragmatic framework, we are more and more in the situation to disseminate every and any type of information to any imaginable destination. The interconnectivity of business and of markets creates the global economy. In contrast, our school and college systems, as separate from real life, and conceived physically outside our universe of existence, are probably as anachronistic as the castles and palaces we associate with the power and function of nobility; or as anachronistic as the high stacks of steel mills we associate with industry, and the cities we associate with social life. Some alumni might be nostalgic for the Gothic structures of their university days. The physical reference to a time "when education meant something" is clear-as is the memory of the campus, yet another good reason to look at the homecoming party in anticipation of the football game, or in celebration of a good time (win or lose).
To make explicit the shift from a symbolism of education, coordinated with the function of intellectual accomplishment, to a stage when debunking this symbolism, still alive in and outside Ivy League universities, is an urgent political and practical goal is only the beginning. There is no justification for maintaining outmoded structures and attitudes, and investing in walls and campuses and feudal university domains. As one of the successful entrepreneurs of this time put it, "anything that has to do with brick and mortar and its DISPLAY is-to use some poetic license-dead." The focus has to be on the dynamics of individual self-constitution, and on the pragmatic horizons of everyone's future.
Fixing and maintaining schools in the USA, as well as in almost any country in the world, would cost more than building them from scratch. The advantage of giving up structures inappropriate to the new requirements of education is that, finally, at least we would create environments for interaction, taking full advantage of the progress made in technologies of communication and interactive learning. There is no need to idealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their current stage. But if the future will continue to be defined more by commerce expectations than by educational needs, no one should be surprised that their educational potential will come to fruition late.
Humans do not develop at the same pace, and in the same direction. Each of us is so different that the main function of education should be not to minimize differences through literacy and literacy-based strategies that support a false sense of democracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This will provide the foundation for an education that allows each student to develop according to possibilities evinced through the relations, language-based or not, that people enter into. The content of education, understood as process, should be the experience, and the associated means of creating and understanding it. Instead of a dominant language, with built-in experiences more and more alien to the vast majority of students, the ability to cope with many sign systems, with many languages, to articulate them, adapt them to the circumstance, and share them as much as the circumstance requires, should become the goal. Some would counter, "This was attempted with courses labeled modern math and resulted in no one's understanding it, or even simple math." There is some truth in this. The mathematically gifted had no problem in learning the new math. Students who were under the influence of literate reasoning had problems. What we need to do is to keep the mind open, allow for as much accumulation as necessary, and for discarding, if new experiences demand an open mind and freedom from previous assumptions. Some students will settle (in math or in other subjects) for predominantly visual signs, others for sounds, some for words, for rhythm, for any of the forms through which human intelligence comes to expression. Interactive multimedia are only some of the many media available. Other possibilities are yet to emerge. The Internet is in the same situation. A framework for individual selection, for tapping into learning resources and using them to the degree desired and acknowledged as necessary by praxis, would be the way to go. Not only literacy, in the accepted sense, but mathematical literacy, biological, chemical, or engineering literacy, and visual thinking and expression should be given equal consideration. Cross-pollination among disciplines traditionally kept in isolation will definitely enhance creativity by doing away with the obsessive channeling practiced nowadays.
Education needs to shift from the atomistic view that isolates subjects from the whole of reality to a holistic perspective. This will acknowledge types of mediation as effective means of increasing the efficiency of work, the requirements of integration, and the distributed nature of practical experiences in the world today. Collaborative effort needs to be brought to the forefront of the educational experience. We can define communities of interest, focused on some body of experience (which can be incorporated in an artifact, a book, a work of art, or someone's expertise). Education should provide means for sharing experiences. A variety of different interests can be brought into focus through sharing and collaborative learning. There are many dimensions to such an approach: the knowledge sought, the experience of the variety of perspectives and uses, the awareness of interaction, the skills for intercommunication, and more. Implicit is the high expectation of sharing, while at the same time maintaining motivations for individual achievement and individual reward. This becomes critical at a time when it becomes more and more evident that resources are finite, while expectations still grow exponentially. The change from a standardized model, focused on the quick fix that leads to results (no matter how high a cost), to the collaborative model of individuality and distinction re-establishes an ethical framework, which is urgently needed. Competition is not excluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given system results in students who cut pages from books so that their colleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment of reciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from such an objective?
In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed to literacy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." In an interesting negative of what people think education accomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "We professed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to be ashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off the target. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic context is different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerance requires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration of what is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace, means a different state of affairs at a time when many local conflicts affect the world. As far as family, sex, and the culture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to the failure of education. Indeed, education failed to understand all the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failed to understand sexual relations. Faced with the painful reality of the degradation of sexual relations, education resorted to the desperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of what was gloriously celebrated as sex education. The flawless drivers never heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned with energy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline and affordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead of understanding that education needs to be decentralized, distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication and interaction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who are active against energy waste might be well ahead of their educational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover, education should be seen in the broader context of the other changes coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: the status of family, religion, law, and government.
While education is related to the civic status of the individual, the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous education that corresponds to changes in human experience unfolding under even more complex circumstances. It might well happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require more, much more, than literacy.
Language and the Visual
Photography, film, and television have changed the world more than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how film and television have changed established reading habits, writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language. Patterns of publishing and distribution of information, including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still in its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis. Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama, even correspondence) has changed.
In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold surpassed that of television sets. In many countries, most children watch television and films before they learn to read. In a few countries, children play computer games before ever opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home, movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult generations by demands connected to their professions, their health, their hobbies, and by advertisement. After image-recording and playing equipment became widely available, the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes, laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also able to produce a video archive for family, school, community, or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which images can be pumped from practically any location into schools, homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone with access to the printing presses of the digital world can print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting because we are not only at the receiving end.
The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is not the impact of visual technology and computers on reading patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At the core of the development described so far 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. We would certainly fail to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors' offices.
New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that result in the need for alternatives to language 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.
So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new structures of work and communication, even less the unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh look at necessary developments.
Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization of literacy: advertisement, theatrical and para-theatrical performance, and television drama. They carry with them efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry, happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality, and global networks. Within such experiences, a different dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on homogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate in the practical requirement to extend the human being's experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics of global economy.
How many words in a look?
In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R. Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan: "One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one. Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized through their own experience how powerful images could be, although they did not compare them to words.
Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images. However, it does not prevent human beings from associating images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they are generated together with an object or action (like the word calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the abstract rules of generating statements, or even our understanding of such language signs.
Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish, 赤 (aka) in Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and красный in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished, although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be associated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can trigger new associations, or become a convention. Once language translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red, redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and integrated in the symbolism of a community.
Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing, relate to the structure of language, and are culturally significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of the image and transform it into an illustration.
Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool and supports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly synthetic character and make for good composite tools. Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a message, or a course of action, imply the participation of images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language describes; images constitute. Language requires a context for understanding, in which classes of distribution are defined. Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of any image, the equivalent of a distributional class for a language simply does not exist.
To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its components. The method of an image is an experience, not a grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature. Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or creating a context for new experiences.
For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limited universe of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes, the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond this changing universe of existence. Language resulted from the need to surpass the limitations of space and time, to generate choices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstract image of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry from one world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Each alphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in the meanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practical motivations.
Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written language back to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether the Sumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavic alphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstract phonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encode rules of recognition; they are related to anthropologic experience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. The mysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of letters and combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry, etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstract nature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality of language. The concreteness of pictorial representation, along with the encoded elements (what is the experience behind a letter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanished for the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part of the broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking through experiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levels at which the image of each letter constituted expressive levels significant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabetic literacy is as relevant to writing as much as a good description of the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and the use of automobiles.
The current use of images results from the new exigencies of human praxis and developments in visualization technology. In previous chapters, some of these conditions were mentioned: 1.
the global scale of our activity and existence; 2.
the diversity made possible by the practical experiences corresponding to this globality; 3.
the dynamics of ever faster, increasingly mediated, human interaction; 4.
the need to optimize human interaction in order to achieve high levels of efficiency; 5.
the need to overcome the arcane stereotypes of language; 6.
the non-linear, non-sequential, open nature of human experiences brought to the fore through the new scale of humankind.
The list is open-ended. The more our command of images improves, the more arguments in favor of their use. None of these arguments should be construed as a blank and non-critical endorsement of images. We know that we cannot pursue theoretic work exclusively with images, or that the meta-level (language about language) cannot be reached with images. Images are factual, situational, and unstable. They also convey a false sense of democracy. Moreover, they materialize the shift from a positivist conception of facts, dominating a literacy-based determinism, to a relativist conception of chaotic functioning, embodied, for instance, by the market or by the new means and methods of human interaction. However, until we learn all there is to know about the potential of images in areas other than art, architecture, and design, chances are that we shall not understand their participation in thinking and in other traditionally non-image-based forms of human praxis.
Images are very powerful agents for activities involving human emotions and instincts. They shy away from literal truth, insofar as the logic of images is different from the logic inhabiting human experiences of self-constitution in language. Imagery has a protean character. Images not only represent; they actually shape, form, and constitute subjects. Cognitive processes of association are better supported visually than in language. Through images, people are effectively encultured, i.e., given the identity which they cannot experience at the abstract level of acculturation through language. The world of avatars, dynamic graphic representations of a person in the virtual universe of networks, is one of concreteness. The individuals literally remake themselves as visual entities that can enter a dialogue with others.
Within a given culture, images relate to each other. In the multitude of cultures within which people identify themselves, images translate from one experience to another. Against the background of globality, the experience of images is one of simultaneous distinctions and integration. Distinctions carry the identifiers of the encultured human beings constituted in new practical experiences. Integration is probably best exemplified by the metaphor of the global village of teleconnections and tele-viewing, of Internet and World Wide Web interactions.
The characteristics of images given here so far need to be related to the perspective of changes brought about by imaging technologies. Otherwise, we could hardly come to understand how images constitute languages that make literacy useless, or better yet, that result in the need for complementary partial literacies.
The mechanical eye and the electronic eye
The photo camera and the associated technology of photo processing are products of the civilization of literacy in anticipation of the civilization of illiteracy. The metaphor of the eye, manifest in the optics of the lens and the mechanics of the camera, could not entirely support new human perceptions of reality without the participation of literacy. Camera use implied the shared background of literacy and literacy-based space representations. The entire discussion of the possibilities and limitations of photography-a discussion begun shortly after the first photographic images were produced, and still going on in our day-is an exercise in analytical practice.
Some looked at photography as writing with light; others as mechanical drawing. They doubted whether there was room for creativity in its use, but never questioned its documentary quality: shorthand for descriptions difficult, but still possible, in writing. The wider the framework of practical experiences involving the camera, the more interesting the testimony of photography proved. This applies to photography in journalism and science, as well as in personal and family life. With photography, images started to substitute for words, and literacy progressively gave way to imagery in a variety of new human experiences related to space, movement, and aspects of life otherwise not visible.
Testimony of the invisible, made available to many people through the photographic camera, was much stronger, richer, and more authentic than the words one could write about the same. Early photographs of the Paris sewer system-the latter a subject of many stories, but literally out of sight-exemplify this function. Before the camera, only drawing could capture the visible without changing it into words or obscure diagrams. Drawing was an interpreted representation, not only in the sense of selection-what to draw-but also in defining a perspective and endowing the image with some emotional quality. The camera had a long way to go before the same interpretive quality was achieved, and even then, in view of the mediating technology, it was quite difficult to define what was added to what was photographed, and why.
Today's cameras-from the disposables to the fully automated-encapsulate everything we have to know to operate them. There is no need to be aware of the eye metaphor-which is undergoing change with the advent of electronic photography-and even less of what diaphragm, exposure time, and distance are. The experience leading to photography and the practical experience of automated photography are uncoupled. To take a picture is no longer a matter of expertise, but a reflex gesture accompanying travel, family or community events, and discrete moments of relative significance. Thus photographic images took over linguistic descriptions and became our diaries. As confusing as this might sound, a camera turns into an extension of our eyes (actually, only one), easier to use than language, and probably more accurate. In some way, a camera is a compressed language all set for the generation of visual sentences. If scientific use of photography were not available, a great deal of effort would be necessary to verbally describe what images from outer space, from the powerful electronic microscope, or from under the earth and under water, reveal to us. In Leonardo da Vinci's time, the only alternative was drawing, and a very rich imagination!
The camera has a built-in space concept, probably more explicit than language has. This concept is asserted and embodied in the geometry of the lens and is reflected in some of the characteristics of photographic images. They are, mainly, two- dimensional reductions of our three-dimensional universe of experience, also influenced by light, film emulsion, type of processing, technology and materials used for printing, but primarily by physical properties of the lens used. Once our spatial concept improved and progress in lens processing was made, we were able to change the lens, to make it more adaptive (wide angle, zoom) to functions related to visual experiences. We were also able to introduce an element of time control that helped to capture dynamic events.
Another important change was brought about by Polaroid's concept of almost instant delivery of prints. It is with this concept-compressing two stages of photographic representation into one and, in initial developments, giving up the possibility of making copies-that we reached a new phase in the relation between literacy and photography. As we know, the traditional camera came with the implicit machine-focused conversation: What can I do with it? The Polaroid concept changed this to a different query: What can it do for me? This change of emphasis corresponds to a different experience with the medium and is accompanied by the liberation of photography from some of the constraints of the system of literacy. "What can I do?" concerns photographic knowledge and the selection made by photographers, persons who constitute their identity in a new practical experience. "What can it do?" refers to knowledge embodied in the hardware. The advertisement succinctly describes the change: "Hold the picture in your hand while you still hold the memory in your heart." As opposed to a written record, an instant image is meant for a short time, almost as a fast substitute for writing.
A more significant change occurs when photography goes electronic, and in particular, digital. Both elements already discussed-the significance of the smallest changes in the input on the result, and the quality aspect of digital vs. analog-are reflected in digital photography. I insist on this because of the new condition of the image it entails and our relation to the realm of the visual. Language found its medium in writing, and printing made writing the object of literacy. Images could not be used with the same ease as writing, and could not be transmitted the way the voice is. When we found ways to have voice travel at speeds faster than that of sound, by electromagnetic waves used in telephone or radio transmission, we consolidated the function of language, but at the same time freed language of some of the limitations of literacy. Digital photography accomplishes the same for images.
A written report from any place in the world might take longer to produce, though not to transmit, than the image representing the event reported. Connected to a network, an electronic camera sends images from the event to the page prepared for printing. The understanding of the image, whose printing involved a digital component (the raster) long before the computer was invented, requires a much lower social investment than literacy. The complexity is transferred from capturing the image to transmitting and viewing it. Films are used to generate an electronic simile of our photographic shots. At the friendly automated image shop, we get colorful prints and the shiny CD-ROM from which each image can be recalled on a video screen or further processed on our computers.
From the image as testimony, as literacy destined it to be, to the image as pretext for new experiences-medium of visual relativity and questionable morality- everything, and more, is possible. Images can mediate in fast developing situations- transactions, exchange of information, conflicts-better than words can. They are free of the extra burden words bear and allow for global and detailed local interpretation. Electronic processing of digital photography supports comparison, as well as manipulation, of images in view of unprecedented human experiences requiring such functions. The metaphor of the one-eye, which the photographic camera embodies, led to a flat world. Cyclopes see everything flat. Unfortunately, but by no accident, this metaphor was taken over in computer graphics. Images on the computer screen are held together by the conventions of monocular vision. Digital photography can be networked and endowed with dynamic qualities. But what makes digital photography more and more a breakthrough, in respect to its incipient literate phase, is that we can build 3D cameras, that is, technical beasts with two eyes (and if need be, with more). This leads to practical experiences in a pragmatic framework no longer limited to sequences or to reductionist strategies of representation.
Who is afraid of a locomotive?
The image of a locomotive moving in the direction of the spectators made them scream and run away when moving pictures were first shown to the public. Movement enhanced the realism of the image, captured on film to the extent of blurring the borderline between reality and the newly established convention of cinematographic expression. In the movies of the silent era, the literacy-based realism of the image- actually an illustration of the script-successfully compensated for the impossibility of providing the sound of dialogue. The experience of literacy and that of writing movement onto film were tightly coupled. Short scenes, designed with close attention to visual details, could be understood without the presence of the word, because of the shared background of language. The convention of cinematography is based on sharing the extended white page on which the projection of moving images takes place. Humor was the preferred structure, since the mechanical reproduction of movement had, due to rudimentary technology and lack of sound, a comic quality in itself. Later, music was inserted, then dialogue. Everyone was looking forward to the day when image and sound would be synchronized, when color movies would become possible.
It adds to the arguments thus far advanced that cinematographic human experience, an experience dominantly visual, revealed the role of language as a synchronizing device, while the mechanics of cameras and projectors took care of the optical illusion. Cinematography also suggested that this role could be exercised by other means of expression and communication as well. Language is related to body movement, and often participates in the rhythmic patterns of this movement. Before language, other rhythmic devices better adapted to the unsettled self-constitutive practical experience of the Homo Hominis were used to synchronize the effort of several beings involved in the endeavor of survival. Although there is no relation between the experience of cinematography and that of primitive beings on the move after migrating herds of animals, it is worth pointing out the underlying structure of synchronicity. The means involved in achieving this synchronicity are characteristic of the various stages in human evolution. At a very small scale of existence, such as autarchic existence, the means were very simple, and very few. At the scale that makes the writing of movement possible, these means had become complex, but were dominated by literacy. With cinematography, a new strategy of synchronization was arrived at. In many ways, the story of how films became what they are today is also the story of a conflict between literacy and image-based strategies of synchronization.
The intermediary phases are well known: the film accompanied by music ("Don't kill the pianist"), recorded sound, sound integrated in the movie, stereophonic sound. Their significance is also known: emulate the rhythm of filmed movement, provide a dramatic background, integrate the realism of dialogue and other real sounds in the realism of action, expand the means of expression in order to synthesize new realities. Some of the conventions of the emerging film are cultural accomplishments, probably comparable to the convention of ideographic writing. They belong, nevertheless, to a pragmatic context based on the characteristics of literacy. They ensue also from an activity that will result in higher and higher levels of human productivity and efficiency. Each film is a mold for the many copies to be shown to millions of spectators. The personal touch of handwriting is obfuscated by the neutral camera-a mechanical device, after all. That the same story can be told in many different ways does not change the fact that, once told, it addresses enormous numbers of potential viewers, no longer required to master literacy in order to understand the film's content. The experience of filmmaking is industrially defined. It also bears witness to the many components of human interaction, opening a window on experiences irreducible to words; and it points to the possibility of going beyond literacy, and even beyond the first layers of the visible-that is, to appropriate the imaginary in the self-constitution of the human being.
Some of the changes sketched above occurred when cinematography, after its phase of theater on film, started to compress language, and to search for its own expressive potential. Compression of language means the use of images to diminish the quantity of words necessary to constitute a viable filmic expression, as well as the effort to summarize literature. Indeed, in view of the limitations of the medium, especially during its imitative phase, it could not support scripts based on literary works that exceeded film's own complexity. Cinematography had also to deal with the limited span of its viewers' attention, their lack of any previous exposure to moving images, and the conditions for viewing a film. When, later on, filmmakers compressed entire books into 90 to 120 minutes, we entered a phase of human experience characterized by substituting written with non- or para-linguistic means.
The generations since the beginning of cinematography learned the new filmic convention while still involved in practical experiences characteristic of literacy. Conventions of film, as a medium with its own characteristics, started to be experienced relatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis in the process of freeing itself from the constraints of literacy. Films are an appropriate medium for integration of the visual, the aural, and motion. People can record on film some of their most intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record to fast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience of filming is an experience with space and time in their interrelationship. But as opposed to the space and time projected in language, and uniformly shared by a literate community, space and time on film can be varied, and made extremely personal. Within the convention of film, we can uncouple ourselves from the physical limitations of our universe of existence, from social or cultural commitments, and generate a new frame for action. The love affair between Hollywood and emerging technologies for creating the impossible in the virtual space of digital synthesis testifies to this. But we cannot, after all, transcend the limitations of the underlying structure on which cinematography is based. Generated near the height of the civilization of literacy, cinematography represents the borderline between practical experiences corresponding to the scale for which literacy was optimal, and the new scale for which both literacy and film are only partially adequate. It is even doubtful that the film medium will survive as an alternative to the new media because it is, for all practical purposes, inefficient.
Cinematography influenced our experience with language, while simultaneously pointing to the limits of this experience. A film is not a visually illustrated text, or a transcription of a play. Rather, it is a mapping from a universe of sentences and meanings assigned to a text, to a more complex universe, one of consecutive images forming (or not) a new coherent entity. In the process, language performs sometimes as language (dialogue among characters), other times as a pre-text for the visual cinematographic text.
Before film, we moved only in the universe of our natural, physical existence, on the theatrical stage, or in the universe of our imagination, in our dreams. The synchronizing function of language made this movement (such as working, going from one place to another, from one person to another) socially relevant. Our movement in language descriptions (do this, go there, meet so-and-so) is an abstraction. Our movement recorded on film is the re-concretized abstraction. This explains the role of filmed images for teaching people how to carry out certain operations, for educating, or for indoctrinating them, or for acquainting them with things and actions never experienced directly. It also explains why, once efficiency criteria become important, film no longer addresses the individual, or small groups; rather, it addresses audiences at the only scale at which it can still be economically justified. The industry called Hollywood (and its various copies around the world) is based on an equation of efficiency that keys in the globality of the world, of illiteracy, and of the distribution network already in place. On an investment in a film of over $100 million, five continents of viewers are needed, and this is still no guarantee of breaking even. It is not at all clear whether Dreamworks, the offspring of the affair between Hollywood and the computer industry, will eventually create its own distribution channels on the global digital network.
The temptation to ask whether the language of moving images made literacy superfluous, or whether illiteracy created the need for film, and the risk of falling prey to a simplifying cause-and-effect explanation should not prevent us from acknowledging that there are many relations among the factors involved. Nevertheless, the key element is the underlying structure. Books embody the characteristics of language and trigger experiences within the confines of these characteristics. When faced with practical requirements and challenges resulting from a new scale of existence, the human being constitutes alternatives better adapted to a dynamics of change for which books and the experience they entail are only partially appropriate.
Books in which even literate people sometimes got lost, or for which we do not have time or patience, are interpreted for us, condensed in the movie. The fact is that more than a generation has now had access to established works of fiction and drama, as well as scientific, historic, or geographic accounts only through films. A price was paid-there is no equivalent between the book and film-and is being paid, but this is not the issue here. What is the issue is the advent of cinematography in the framework in which literacy ceased to support experiences other than those based on its structure.
Films are mediating expressions better adapted than language to a more segmented reality of social existence. They are also adapted to the dynamics of change and to the global nature of human existence. They prepared us for electronic media, but not before generating those strange books (or are they?) that transcribe films for a market so obsessed with success that it will buy the rudimentary transcription together with the paraphernalia derived from the stage design and from the costumes used by the characters. We can find substitutes for coal or oil or tin, but seemingly not for success and stars. As a result, everything they touch or are associated with enters the circuit of our own practical existence. An American journalist ended his commentary occasioned by Greta Garbo's death: "Today they no longer make legends, but celebrities."
Being here and there at the same time
Four generations old (or maybe five), but already the medium of choice-this statement does not define television, but probably captures its social significance. It can be said from the outset that while cinematography is at the borderline between the civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy, television definitely embodies the conflict between the two. In fact, television irreversibly tipped the balance in favor of the visual. The invention of television took place in the context of the change in scale of humankind. Primarily, television occasions the transition from the universe of mechanics and chemistry, implicit in film making and viewing, to that of electricity, in particular electronics, and, more recently, digital technology.
Television, as a product of this change in the structure and nature of human theoretic and practical experience, results from the perceived pragmatic need to capture and transmit dynamic images. Electricity was already the medium for capturing and transmitting sound at the speed of electrons along telephone networks. And since images and actions are influenced by the light we view them in, it followed that light is what we actually wanted to record and transmit. This is television. Cumbersome and still owing a lot to mechanics, television started as a news medium, allowing for almost instantaneous connection between the source of information and the audience. It was initially mostly illustrative. Today, it is constitutive, in the sense that it not only records news, it makes news. It constitutes a generalized mass-medium supporting entertainment and ritual (political, religious, military).
Literacy corresponds to the experiences of human self-definition in the world of classical physics and chemistry. It is based on the same underlying structure, and projects characteristics of this experience. Electricity and electronics correspond to very fast processes (practically instantaneous), high leverage of human action, diversity, more varied mediating elements, and feedback. The film camera has the main characteristics of literacy. It can be compared to the printing press. But the comparison is only partially adequate since it writes movements to film, and lets us read them together on the shared white page called the screen. Between recording the movement and viewing it, time is used for processing and duplication.
Television is structurally different, capturing movement and everything else belonging to what we call reality, in order to make it immediately available to the viewer. Electronic mediation is much more elaborate, has many more layers than cinematography, and as a result is much more efficient. Film mapped from the selected world of movement, in a studio, on the street, or in a laboratory, to a limited viewership: public in a movie theater. It requested that people share the screen on which its images were projected. Television maps from many cameras to the entire world, and all can simultaneously partake in its images. Television is distributed and introduces simultaneity in that several events from several locations can be broadcast on the TV screen. By comparison, cinematography is centralized. Filming is limited to the location where it is being carried on. Cinematography is intrinsically sequential in that it follows the narrative structure and constitutes a closed entity. Once edited for showing, the film cannot be interrupted to insert anything new.
There are still many who see the two as closely related, and others who see the use of television only as a carrier (of film, for instance). They ignore the defining fact that film and television, despite some commonalties, belong to practical experiences impossible to reconcile. In fact, while film passed the climax of its attraction, television became the most pervasive medium. Due to the use of television in education, corporate communication, sports, artistic and other performances, such as space exploration and war, television impacts upon social interaction without being an interactive medium. A televised event can address audiences close to the world's entire population. When recording images for television became possible, television supported continued human experiences of decentralization, which previous communication technologies could not provide. The video camera and the video cassette recorder, especially in its digital version, make each of us own not only the receivers of the language of images and sounds, but also emitters, the sources, the private Hollywood studios. That is, they make us live the language of TV, and substitute it for literacy. Interactive TV will undoubtedly contribute even more in this direction.
It is already the case that instead of writing a letter, some people make a video and send it to family and authorities, and to TV stations interested in viewer feedback and news stories. The massive deployment of troops in the Desert Storm operation made clear how the shift from literate to illiterate communication integrates video communication. Together with the telephone, television and video dominated communication patterns of the people involved. Subsequent troop deployments confirmed the pattern of illiterate communication.
Among the many networks through which the foundation of our existence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinct role. Many consider it more important than libraries, probably for the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urban clusters or in remote locations, people are physically connected through multi- channeled communication networks, and even through interactive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entry to our home for downloading classical programs as well as pornography and superstition. The full utilization of the electronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highway through which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, and senders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willing to interact with these messages, is still more a goal than a reality. With computer- supported visual communication integrating digital television, we will dispose of the entire infrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the age of Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of the artificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in its modem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes for transporting digital information and supporting interaction, the cable system already contributes to the transformation of the nature of many human practical experiences. These can be experiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching, even work.
There is a negative side to all this development, and a need to face consequences that over time can accumulate beyond what we already know and understand. Children growing up with TV miss the experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famous childhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, a limited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire for instant gratification, and a lack of basic common sense appreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction. Games developed around video technology train children to behave like laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow up accepting the politics of telegenic competition, a poor substitute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focused on brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices or cereals. Addressed en masse, such viewers gel in the mass image of polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makes possible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual is unquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with them previous determinations and constraints, or they correspond to a new stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. The degree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form of visual expression, communication, or interaction can be ascertained only in how individuals constitute themselves through practical activities coherently integrating the visual. There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment of our individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or a TV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in the interconnected world of our time.
Television implies a great deal of language, but such language frees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do not need to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be in command of a limited part of spoken language in order to understand a TV show, even to actively participate in it-from going on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, or interactive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up a presence on the network.
Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language and attitudes representing a background of shared expressions, gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the low end, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds, constituted on the underlying structure of literacy, have become untenable under the new pragmatic circumstances. Due to its characteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapid change typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations within the new scale of humankind. There are many varied implications to this: it makes each of us more passive, more and more subject to manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (or freeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (to others, art, literature, etc.). Nobody should underestimate any of these and many other factors discussed by media ecologists and sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically, consider TV only from the perspective and expectations of literacy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structural changes that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have to consider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise we will miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience of understanding the new choices presented to us, and even the new possibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on 500 channels and after video-on-demand!
Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, with intrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it was used to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up, again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer to things and actions, and because they require a relatively smaller background of shared knowledge, images are more accessible, although less challenging. But where words and text can obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediately related to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks in the visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power of an image can be exploited probably much more than the power of the word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, since the transfer of social and political functions from literacy (books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies and rituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especially television, requires that we understand the consequences of this transfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away from exercising the right to elect their representatives in the civilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes us elect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen to the highest (and least useful) posts in the government. Conditions that require the multitude of languages that we use, the layers of mediation, the tendency to decentralization, to name a few, resulted in the increased influence of the visual, as well as in some of the choices mentioned so far.