Even
agriculture, probably the longest standing form of practical
experience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and adds
industrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highly
specialized, efficient activity. We share resources and even
more in the globality of the life support system (the ecology);
in the globality of communication, transportation, and
technology; and, last but not least, in the globality of the
market. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not any
recent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, from
local to national to global, but the new circumstances of human
experience, whose long-lasting effect is the altered
individual.
Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology that
ensures levels of efficiency and security for which the living
being is not well adapted to provide, many types of work are
simultaneously freed from the constraints of language, of
literacy in particular. There is no need to teach machines
spelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. There
is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and
the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient,
stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious,
political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whether
interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are
of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new
languages are appropriately adapted to each other.
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