Post-Literacy

I'm taking a class called Writing in the Digital Age, so over the next couple months, many of my posts are going to be related to that reading, writing, literacy, and what they mean for us as a society.

To start, I'd like to discuss our latest assignment, which was to watch this video: http://youtu.be/l_b-v8e3urQ
and poke through the corresponding website: http://www.beyondliteracy.com/about-beyond-literacy/.

If you don't want to go digging through those yourself, basically it's exploring the idea of humanity moving beyond literacy, and what that would mean. So, what would happen if we moved past language as we know it and into something more efficient? Would post-literacy also mean post-human?


(photo from compthink.wordpress.com)

Honestly, I have trouble even wrapping my mind around the concept. Literacy is an enormous part of my life -- many things I do are literary in a traditional sense, with a pen and paper, and many more are literary in our digital age. I can't imagine anything "beyond" language, because my entire sense of self is wrapped up in language.

If we did move on to some sort of post-literate form of communication, I think there's a strong possibility we'd be post-human. That is, we would be a melding of human and machine, rather than just the people we are now. It's already something we can think about, with the way we can access the work and ideas of people long dead. They're no longer people in the sense of being able to interact, but we still think of those who are gone as people. They're post-human.

If we did move on to become post-human, we could facilitate a sort of hive-mind communication that could transmit a post-literate form of communication. The only thing I can wrap my mind around is the direct transmission of thoughts, images, and feelings -- which we just can't do. We would have to convert to machinery, in some form or fashion, to achieve this.

The whole idea is frightening in its scope and implications.