and so do all the people with whom we interact. Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts we ourselves generated further affect the pragmatic self-constitution of our identity.

The literate experience of language enhanced our cognitive capabilities. Consequently, literacy became larger than life. Much is covered by the practice of literacy: tradition, culture, thoughts and feelings, human expression through literature, the constitution of political, scientific, and artistic programs, ethics, the practical experience of law. In this book, I use a broad definition of literacy that reflects the many facets it has acquired over time. Those readers who think I stretch the term literacy too far should keep in mind all that literacy comprises in our culture. In contrast, illiteracy, no matter what its cause or what other attributes an individual labeled illiterate has, is seen as something harmful and shameful, to be avoided at any price. Without an understanding that encompasses our values and ways of thinking, we cannot perceive how a civilization can progress to illiteracy. Many people are willing to be part of post- literate society, but by no means are they willing to be labeled members of a civilization qualified as illiterate.

By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of effective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean a civilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did until around the turn of the century, and still does. This domination takes place through imposition of its rules, which prevent practical experiences of human self-constitution in domains where literacy has exhausted its potential or is impotent. In describing the post-literate, I know that any metaphor will do as long as it does not call undue attention to itself. What counts is not the provocativeness but that we lift our gaze, determined to see, not just to look for the comforting familiar.

This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacies, each with its own characteristics and rules of functioning. Some of such partial literacies are based on configurational modes of expression, as in the written languages of Japan, China, or Korea; on visual forms of communication; or on synesthetic communication involving a combination of our senses. Some are numerical and rely on a different notation system than that of literacy. The civilization of illiteracy comprises experiences of thinking and working above and beyond language, as mathematicians from different countries communicating perfectly through mathematical formulae demonstrate. Or as we experience in activities where the visual, digitally processed, supports a human pragmatics of increased efficiency. Even in its primitive, but extremely dynamic, deployment, the Internet embodies the directions and possibilities of such a civilization. This brings us back to literacy's reason for being: pragmatics expressed in methods for increasing efficiency, of ensuring a desired outcome, be this in regard to a list of merchandise, a deed, instructions on how to make something or to carry out an act, a description of a place, poetry and drama, philosophy, the recording and dissemination of history and abstract ideas, mythology, stories and novels, laws, and customs. Some of these products of literacy are simply no longer necessary. That new methods and technologies of a digital nature effectively constitute an alternative to literacy cannot be overemphasized.

I started this book convinced that the price we pay for the human tendency to efficiency-that is, our striving for more and more at an ever cheaper price-is literacy and the values connected to it as represented by tradition, books, art, family, philosophy, ethics, among many others. We are confronted with the increased speed and shorter durations of human interactions. A growing number and a variety of mediating elements in human praxis challenge our understanding of what we do. Fragmentation and interconnectedness of the world, the new technology of synchronization, the dynamics of life forms or of artificial constructs elude the domain of literacy as they constitute a new pragmatic framework. This becomes apparent when we compare the fundamental characteristics of language to the characteristics of the many new sign systems complementing or replacing it. Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds to the stage of linear growth of humankind. Matched by the linear increase of the means of subsistence and production required for the survival and development of the species, this stage reached its implicit potential. The new stage corresponds to distributed, non-sequential forms of human activity, nonlinear dependencies. Reflecting the exponential growth of humankind (population, expectations, needs, and desires), this new stage is one of alternative resources, mainly cognitive in nature, compensating for what was perceived as limited natural means for supporting humankind. It is a system of a different scale, suggestively represented by our concerns with globality and higher levels of complexity. Therefore, humans can no longer develop within the limitations of an intrinsically centralized, linear, hierarchic, proportional model of contingencies that connect existence to production and consumption, and to the life-support system. Alternatives that affect the nature of life, work, and social interaction emerge through practical experiences of a fundamentally new condition.

Literacy and the means of human self-constitution based on it reached their full potential decades ago. The new means, which are not as universal (i.e., as encompassing) as language, open possibilities for exponential growth, resulting from their connectivity and improved involvement of cognitive resources. As long as the world was composed of small units (tribes, communities, cities, counties), language, despite differences in structure and use, occupied a central place. It had a unifying character and exercised a homogenizing function within each viable political unit. The world has entered the phase of global interdependencies. Many local languages and their literacies of relative, restricted significance emerge as instruments of optimization. What takes precedence today is interconnectivity at many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared. Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to the entire world, not only to where they happen to live and work.

The encompassing system of culture broke into subsystems, not just into the "two cultures" of science and literacy that C.P. Snow discussed in 1959, hoping idealistically that a third culture could unite and harmonize them. Market mechanisms, representative of the competitive nature of human beings, are in the process of emancipating themselves from literacy. Where literate norms and regulations still in place prevent this emancipation-as is the case with government activity and bureaucracies, the military, and legal institutions-the price is expressed in lower efficiency and painful stagnation. Some European countries, more productive in impeding the work of the forces of renewal, pay dearly for their inability to understand the need for structural changes. United or not in a Europe of broader market opportunities, member countries will have to free themselves from the rigid constraints of a pragmatic framework that no longer supports their viability. Conflicts are not solved; solutions are a long time in coming.

One more remark before ending this introduction. It seems that those who run the scholarly publishing industry are unable to accept that someone can have an idea that does not originate from a quotation. In keeping with literacy's reliance on authority, I have acknowledged in the references the works that have some bearing on the ideas presented in this book. Few, very few indeed, are mentioned in the body of the text. The line of argument deserves