The Civilization of Illiteracy

From the opening

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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

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