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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