At the level of technology of industrial society,
literacy-based human practical experiences of self-constitution
defined the scope and character of labor division,
specialization, integration, and coordination.
Life after literacy
The answer to the second question posed a few pages back is not
an exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests of
futurology.) This is why the question concerns circumstances
under which the dominant mediating function of language can be
assumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a moving
target because today the notion of literacy is a changing
representation of expectations and requirements. We know that
there is a before to literacy; and this before pertains to
mediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, we
can, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what its
characteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and the
need to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially,
complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure some
form of human integration.
What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, from
a certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself.
Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constituted
themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation
took place through the insertion of rather homogeneous objects,
such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing.
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