The Civilization of Illiteracy

The spectacular but unsettling reality of faster cycles of change, breakdown of traditional values and institutions, and many other symptoms of technological innovation-what makes these necessary is the subject of this thought-provoking book. All the good intentions of educators, scholars, politicians, and policymakers will fail if they do not recognize why literacy as a dominant framework of human activity is no longer adequate. The current dynamics of human activity is without precedent. It is not the result of technology, but of deeper forces of change. The answer to the failure of many seemingly eternal institutions-government, family, education-is not improvement in the traditional sense, but a fundamentally new perspective. The digital paradigm underlying the new civilization provides a basis for this perspective. But it will be misapplied unless understood within the broader framework of the driving forces behind human activity.