The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin

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Title: The Civilization of Illiteracy

Author: Mihai Nadin

Release Date: January, 2000 [eBook #2481] [Most recently updated: September 13, 2013]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIVILIZATION OF ILLITERACY***

The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin
(C) Mihai Nadin 1997

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Foreward

Introduction
Literacy in a Changing World
Thinking about alternatives
Progressing towards illiteracy?

Book One The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow Contrasting characters Choose a letter and click Keeping up with faster living Loaded literacy Man proposes, man disposes Beyond the commitment to literacy A moving target The wise fox "Between us the rift" Malthus revisited Captives to literacy

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy
For the love of trade
"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"
The rear-view mirror syndrome

Book Two From Signs to Language Semeion revisited The first record is a whip Scale and threshold Signs and tools

From Orality to Writing
Individual and collective memory
Cultural memory
Frames of existence
The alienation of immediacy

Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand
Language?
A feedback called confirmation
Primitive orality and incipient writing
Assumptions
Taking literacy for granted
To understand understanding
Words about images

The Functioning of Language
Expression, communication, signification
The idea machine
Writing and the expression of ideas
Future and past
Knowing and understanding
Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous
Making thoughts visible
Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

Language and Logic
Logics behind the logic
A plurality of intellectual structures
The logics of actions
Sampling
Memetic optimism

Book Three Language as Mediating Mechanism The power of insertion Myth as mediating pre-text Differentiation and coordination Integration and coordination revisited Life after literacy

Literacy, Language and Market
Preliminaries
Products 'R' Us
The language of the market
The language of products
Transaction and literacy
Whose market? Whose freedom?
New markets, new languages
Literacy and the transient
Market, advertisement, literacy

Language and Work
Inside and outside the world
We are what we do
Literacy and the machine
The disposable human being
Scale of work, scale of language
Innate heuristics
The realm of alternatives
Mediation of mediation

Literacy and Education
"Know the best"
Ideal vs. real
Relevance
Temples of knowledge
Coherence and connection
Plenty of questions
The equation of a compromise
To be a child
Who are we kidding?
What about alternatives?

Book Four Language and the Visual How many words in a look? The mechanical eye and the electronic eye Who is afraid of a locomotive? Being here and there at the same time Visualization

Unbounded Sexuality
Seeking good sex
Beyond immediacy
The land of sexual ubiquity
The literate invention of the woman
Ahead to the past
Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS
Sex and creativity
Equal access to erotic mediocrity

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future
Togetherness
The quest for permanency
What breaks down when family fails?
The homosexual family
To want a child
Children in the illiterate family
A new individuality
Discontinuity
How advanced the past. How primitive the future

A God for Each of Us
But who made God?
The plurality of religious experiences
The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?
Challenging permanency and universality
Religion and efficiency
Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy
Secular religion

A Mouthful of Microwave Diet
Food and expectations
Fishing in a videolake
Language and nourishment
Sequence and configuration revisited
On cooks, pots, and spoons
The identity of food
The language of expectations
Coping with the right to affluence
From self-nourishment to being fed
Run and feed the hungry
No truffles (yet) in the coop
We are what we eat

The Professional Winner
Sport and self-constitution
Language and physical performance
The illiterate champion
Gentlemen, place your bets!
The message is the sneaker

Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers
Rationality, reason, and the scale of things
A lost balance
Thinking about thinking
Quo vadis science?
Discovery and explanation
Time and space: freed hostages
Coherence and diversity
Computational science
Explaining ourselves away
The efficiency of science
Exploring the virtual
Quo vadis philosophy?
The language of wisdom
In scientific disguise
Who needs philosophy? And what for?

Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes
Making and perceiving
Art and language
Impatience and autarchy
The copy is better than the original
A nose by any other name
Crying wolf started early
Meta-literature
Writing as co-writing
The end of the great novel

Libraries, Books, Readers
Why don't people read books?
Topos uranikos distributed

The Sense of Design
Drawing the future
Breakaway
Convergence and divergence
The new designer
Designing the virtual

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning
The commercial democracy of permissiveness
How did we get here?
Political tongues
Can literacy lead politics to failure?
Crabs learned how to whistle
A world of worlds
Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents
Rhetoric and politics
Judging justice
The programmed parliament
A battle to be won

"Theirs not to reason why"
The first war of the civilization of illiteracy
War as practical experience
The institution of the military
From the literate to the