The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin (C) Mihai Nadin 1997 The book's cover succinctly depicts the subject To see the book cover, and to read more details about the book (reviews, opinions, forum, etc.) Go to http://www.nadin.ws/publications/books The author, who made this book available to you as a copyrighted Gutenberg Project Etext, would like readers to let him know at nadin@utdallas.edu that they read the book or parts of it. 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