Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method of
coping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts to
creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be
translated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes is
right; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale of
human activity and the limits of our self-constitution require.
Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, many
others ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacy
and the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by our
practical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus of
the transformation we experience may foster its own forms of
fresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilized
society, language acted as the currency of cultural
transactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue to
drive the market and technology, will they eventually become
subservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, if
language in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pace
with the exponential growth of information, will it undergo a
restructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will we
generate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing,
before information is delivered to human beings? All these
questions relate to work, as the experience from which human
identities result together with the products bearing their mark.
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