The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 43

Walking along a road is less risky than riding a horse, bicycling, or driving a car. Flying puts the farthest point from us on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved in flight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in our endeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that provided by hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each new step in the direction of their increased partic.i.p.ation in our praxis, we take a chance.

There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex and daring projects to successful or failed attempts to build new cities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived under cognitive a.s.sumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved in our time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a major scam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of the pragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at no moment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much more than the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of a network application.

We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences of const.i.tuting the post-literate languages of science, art, and the humanities than we have learned during the entire history of humankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed- integrate knowledge acc.u.mulated in a great variety of experiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally and emotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the very fabric of the human being involved in these practical experiences are reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction, refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhuman commitments that result from the practice of unprecedented means of expression, communication, and signification.

During the process, we have reached some of our most critical limitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To use Steiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" between many groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasingly vulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages of humankind than all that we believed we acc.u.mulated through the humanities. The new means are changing politics and economic activity, but first of all they are changing the nature of human transactions. And they are changing our sense of future.

Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away just because the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understood from a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means in question are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emerging structures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done in previous societies, is simply not possible. It is not for the love of the Internet that this const.i.tutes a non-regulated domain of human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, the Internet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving, drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunity for transparency afforded by systems that replace the domination of literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused.

The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from its implicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but not its global behavior. For instance, the integration required by parallelism and the ma.s.sive distribution of tasks cannot take place successfully if the network of interactions is mined by gates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic control mechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if a person's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permission to partic.i.p.ate in the self-const.i.tution of the whole human being. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes, arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human ent.i.ty involved in an experience that integrates everyone's partic.i.p.ation. It is an intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it to be, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individual realization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broader system, but not its essential part.

The authenticity of each and every act of our self-making contributes to the integrity of the overall process-our ascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and a definite alienation from the overall of the system's goals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part of the picture described. Complemented by a sense of empowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of new forms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can be more humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories of industrial society-commuters rus.h.i.+ng from home to job to shopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who will be watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort, ent.i.tled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know and caring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effort will not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is of interest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, but foremost to learn about those instances when we are less faithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords.

It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacy educates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, as feedback mechanisms under our own control become the means of optimization, the burden is s.h.i.+fted from Big Brother, bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual.

It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework for action in at least some of the basic activities affected by the change brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. The reason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literate education is not appropriate, but this observation remains a critical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has to translate into positive att.i.tudes, and into real attempts to meet the challenge of present and shape the future in full awareness of forces at work.

The University of Doubt

Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences, a.s.sumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was to turn out standardized products, education a.s.sumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy.

In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high efficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common denominator, based on the industrial model of standardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds of students, education has not only to acknowledge differences in apt.i.tudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result of leveling.

During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education will have to be redefined, methods of education rethought, and content rea.s.sessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamic notion of education, has to crystallize as we work towards educational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic, the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmatic context, education ought to become an environment for interaction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of the past deserves to be committed to inferences for the present, and, to the extent possible, for the future.

Some of the suggestions to be made in the coming lines might sound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purpose is to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculous solutions. The path from present to future is the path of human practical experiences of self-const.i.tution. To achieve goals corresponding to the requirements and expectations of the civilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give up the reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalized education became the norm. Education has to recognize its students as the individuals they are, not as some abstract or theoretic ent.i.ty. Basic education should be centered around the major forms of expression and communication: language, visual, aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systems need to be explored as students familiarize themselves with each of them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms of acculturation should be geared towards using these elements, not dispensing instructions and a.s.signing exercises. Each student will discover from within how to apply these systems. Most important, students will share their experiences among themselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is not proven so by the pragmatic instance.

Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process of heuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for further investigation. These programs require many languages: literate inquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. By virtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enter the process, they bear the experience of their respective languages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify one approach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented.

Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions of authentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction, those involved in the process share in the experience through which they const.i.tute themselves at many levels. One is to provide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting the variety of people.

Interactive learning

Education has to become a living process. It should involve access to all kinds of information sources, not only to those stored in literate formats. These resources have their specific epistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is different from a database. To access a book is different from accessing a multimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practice of knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. All these differences will become clear through use, not through mere a.s.sertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be the dissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In this model of education, cla.s.ses are groups of people pursuing connected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, even less bureaucratic units. A cla.s.s is an expression of interest, not the product of statistical distribution based on birth and zoning. The physical environment of the cla.s.s is the world, and not the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles and interactions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but the means to make this happen are progressively becoming available.

Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers of interactive education after the initial phase of acculturation.

Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though, these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge stored in a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to various human practical experiences, examples, and evaluation procedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselves to making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginable formats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligent agents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance of those in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requests are articulated in voice command: "I would like to know ...." Or the requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Such interactive education centers are simultaneously libraries of knowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testing grounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machine that const.i.tutes their nucleus alters as the individual involved in the interaction changes.

As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Students should be able to teach their neural network partners subjects of interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases, the neural networks, themselves networked with others, will become partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and higher complexity. The fact that students interact not based on their address and school district, not based on h.o.m.ogeneity criteria of age or cultural background, but on shared interests and different perspectives gives this type of education a broader social significance: There is nothing we do that does not affect the world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam will not affect the understanding of what this means, as one practical endeavor of global consequential nature can.

In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, and results are compared. Questions are widely circulated. What students appropriate in the process are ways of thinking, procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods for ascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators, aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden of administrative work, no longer rehash the past but design interactive environments for students to learn in. Teachers involve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolve as knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating the discipline of one dominant language, they leave open choices for short and long-term commitments, their own included.

Not having to force themselves to think in an imposed language, students are freed from the constraints of a.s.signed tasks. They are challenged by the responsibility to make their own choices and carry them through. In the process, differences among students will become apparent, but so will the ability to understand how being different, in a context of cooperative interactions, is an a.s.set and not a liability. Motivation is seeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easily integrate in a framework of practical experiences that are no longer mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery.

Footing the bill

Instead of an education financed by the always controversial redistribution of social resources, interactive learning will be supported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company, for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged in bureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair a.s.sumption. Freed from the costs a.s.sociated with buildings and high administrative overhead, education should take place in the environment of interactions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. As extensions of industries and services, of inst.i.tutions and individual operations, education would cease to be training for a hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for which it is const.i.tuted, education points to the precise reward and fulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after the student has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them.

Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends on their future performance, students can be better motivated. Will business cooperate? As things stand now, business is in the paradoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of an education that has many of the same characteristics as outmoded ways of doing business.

Once students reach a level of confidence that ent.i.tles them to attempt to continue on their own or to a.s.sociate with the company, the alumni of such educational experiences have better control over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path of their choosing. There will be a.n.a.lytically oriented and synthetically oriented individuals, many embracing the experience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some will follow cognitive inclinations to induction, to making observations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow the path of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how they apply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e., applying knowledge about a representative sample in order to infer for a broader collection of facts or processes.

No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long as human integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and human interaction supported in the many possible forms it can a.s.sume.

Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bring individual direction into focus. As it is practiced today, education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and the development of skills appropriate to understanding that you can cheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting the outcome. In the current system of education, integrity appears as something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on a project of common interest introduces elements of reciprocal responsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affects everyone's future, education is no longer a matter of grades, but of successful collaboration in pursuing a goal.

In order to accomplish these goals-obviously in a greater number of manifestations than the ones just described-we need to free education from its many inherited a.s.sumptions. Progress can no longer be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can we continue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect in domains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristic of distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nor dualism can be cultivated in the educational environment because the dynamics of a.s.sociation and interaction is based on patterns of changing roles within a universe focused on optimal parameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of success vs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away with through methods that worked in the Industrial age but which fail in the new pragmatic context.

Unless and until one discovers through practical experience the need for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediate object of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual.

Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, nor respected more by those who were forced to learn how to spell their names, learn dates by heart, or learn t.i.tles of works, fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of art and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion, ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a natural ent.i.ty, is broken in. Tension will always be part of education, but instead of rewarding those more adept at acculturation, education should integrate complementary moments.

No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from a remote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending human integration in the world of practical experiences around the clock. But as education frees itself from the industrial model-factory-like buildings, cla.s.ses that correspond to s.h.i.+fts, holidays and vacation time-it should also let students make choices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead of physical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperative creativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, and the accidental.

If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that is because it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were to open interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be to little avail. Students will bring with them att.i.tudes rooted in traditional expectations. There is more consensus in our world for what is right with the current system of education than for what can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleus of self-organization, such as on-line cla.s.ses on subjects pertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for future development. In our time, when the need for qualified people surges in one field or another-computational genetics, nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publis.h.i.+ng-the model I presented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system to process students and to deliver them, at no cost to the corporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptable strategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to the study of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest in training and post-academic life-long learning.

To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics, drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the wrong question. It a.s.sumes that someone knows, well in advance of the changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture and how future human practical experiences will unfold. The ingredients change, the proportions change, and the context changes first of all.

As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing or singing as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary, education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It has to encourage self-definition in and through skills best suited to practical experiences of self-const.i.tution in a world that has escaped the cycle of repet.i.tion, and pursues goals unrelated to previous experiences. Instead of doing away with or rationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality, education will have to allow the individual to pursue a search path that integrates them. Students should be able to define goals where intuition, and even irrationality and the subconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from the constraints and limitations of the paradigm of problem solving, and engaged in generating alternatives.

A wake-up call

All this relies heavily on the maturity of the student and the ability of educators to design environments that stimulate responsibility and self-discipline. The broad-stroke educational project sketched up to here will have to address the precise concerns connected to how and when education actually starts, what the role of the family should be-if the family remains a valid ent.i.ty-and how variety and multiplicity will be addressed.

In today's words and expectations, even in today's prejudices, education is of national interest in one main respect: to equip students with skills so they can contribute to the national coffers in the future. But the arena of economic viability is the global economy, not an economy defined by national boundaries.

The trans-national marketplace is the real arena of compet.i.tion.

Re-engineering, far from being finished, made it quite clear that for the sake of efficiency, productive activities are relocated without any consideration for patriotism or national pride, never mind human solidarity and ethics.

In today's world, and to some extent in the model described so far, the unfolding of the individual through cultivation of the mind and spirit is somehow lost in the process of inculcating facts. It is its own reward to enjoy subtleties, or to generate them, to partake in art, or be part of it, to challenge the mind, or indulge in the rich world of emotions. Prepared for work that is usually different from what educators, economists, and politicians antic.i.p.ate, people face the reality of work that becomes more and more fragmented and mediated. On the a.s.sembly line, or in the "a.n.a.lysis of symbols" (to use Robert Reich's term), work is, in the final a.n.a.lysis, a job, not a vocation.

Physicians, professors, businessmen, carpenters, and burger flippers perform a job that can be automated to some degree.

Depriving work of its highest but often neglected motivation-the unfolding of individual abilities, becoming an ident.i.ty in the act- negates this motivation. Replaced by external rationale-the substance of commercial democracy-the decline of inner motivation leads to lack of interest, reduced commitment, and declining creativity. Education that processes humans for jobs promises access to abundance, but not to self-fulfillment. The decline of family, and new patterns of s.e.xuality and reproduction, tell us that expectations, sublime on their own merit, of improved family involvement will be the exception, not the rule. Accordingly, the challenge is to understand the nature of change and to suggest alternatives, instead of hoping that, miraculously or by divine intervention of the almighty dollar (or yen, franc, mark, pound, or combinations thereof), families will again become what literacy intended they should be. If the challenge is not faced, education will only become a better machine for processing each new generation.

Many scholars of education have set forth various plans for saving education. They do not ignore the new pragmatic requirements. They are unaware of them. Therefore, their recommendations can be cla.s.sified as more of the same. The sense of globality will not result from taking rhymes from Mother Goose (with its implicit reference and culturally determined rhythm) and adding to them the Mother Goose of other countries.

The Victorian and post-Victorian vision transferred upon children, the expectation of "everything will be fine if you just do as you're told," reflects past ideals handed down through the moralizing fiction of the Industrial Age.

The most ubiquitous presence in modern society is the television set. It replaced the book long ago. Notwithstanding, TV is a pa.s.sive medium, of low informative impact, but of high informative ability. Digital television, which extends the presence of computers, will make a difference, whether it is implemented in high resolution or not. Television in digitally scalable formats is an active medium, and interactivity is its characteristic. Education centers will integrate digital television, and open ways to involve individuals regardless of age, background and interests. We can all learn that there are several ways of seeing things, that the physics of time and music report on different aspects of temporal characteristics of our experience in the world. The movement of a robot, though different from the elegant dance of a ballerina, can benefit from a sense and experience of ch.o.r.eography, considered by many incompatible with engineering. The new media of interaction that are embodied in educational centers should be less obsessed with conveying information, and more with allowing human understanding of instances of change.

But these are only examples. What I have in mind is the creation of an environment for exploration in which knowledge of aesthetic aspects is learned parallel to scientific knowledge.

The formats are not those of cla.s.ses in the theory or history of art, or of similar art oriented subjects. As exploration takes place, aesthetic considerations are pursued as a means of optimizing the effort. It is quite clear that as cla.s.ses dynamically take shape, they will integrate people of different ages and different backgrounds. Taking place in the public domain of networked resources, this education will benefit from a sense of creative compet.i.tion. At each moment in time, projects will be accessible, and feedback can be provided. This ensures not only high performance from a scientific or technological viewpoint, but also aesthetic relevance.

The literacy-based educational establishment will probably dismiss the proposals set forth as pie-in-the-sky, as futuristic at best. Its representatives will claim that the problem at hand needs solutions, not a futuristic model based on some illusory self- organizing nuclei supported by the economy.

They will argue that the suggested model of education is less credible than perfecting a practice that at least has some history and achievements to report. The public, no matter how critical of education, will ask: Is it permissible, indeed responsible, to a.s.sume that a new philosophy of education will generate new student att.i.tudes, especially in view of the reality of metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students from carrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences in discovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocrity makes the school system appear hopelessly d.a.m.ned? Self-motivation is described as though teenage pregnancy and cla.s.ses where students bring their babies are the concern of underpaid teachers but not of visionaries. More questions in the same vein are in the air. To propose an a.n.a.logy, selling water in the desert is not as simple as it sounds.

We can, indeed, dream of educational tools hooked up to the terminals at the Kennedy s.p.a.ce Center, or to the supercomputers of the European Center for Research of the Future. We can dream of using digital television for exploring the unknown, and of on-line education in a world where everyone envisions high accomplishments through the use of resources that until now were open to very few. But unless society gives up the expectation of a h.o.m.ogeneous, obligatory education that forces individuals who want-or do not want-to prepare themselves for a life of practical experiences into the same mold, education will not produce the desired results. Good intentions, based on social, ethnic, or racial criteria, on love of children, and humanistic ideals, will not help either. While all over the world real spending per student in public education and private inst.i.tutions increased well above the levels of inflation, fewer students do homework, and very few study beyond the daily a.s.signment. This is true not only in the USA but also in countries with high admission standards for college, such as France, Germany, and j.a.pan.

Translated into the language of our considerations, all this means that education cannot be changed independent of change in society. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connections to the rest of the pragmatic context are through students, teachers, parents, political inst.i.tutions, economic realities, racial att.i.tudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in our commercial democracy. In today's education, parochial considerations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucratic rules of acc.u.mulated imbecility literally annihilate the changes for a better future of millions of students. What appears as the cultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than the attempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost its usefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions of students to drive daily to schools that can no longer be maintained, or to pa.s.s tests when standards are continuously lowered in order to somehow justify them.

Consumption and interaction

In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity, not only students need education, but practically everyone, and probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting in a cla.s.s dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing.

Nothing can help generations that are more different and more antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience of education emanc.i.p.ated from hierarchies, freed of authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of the human being throughout one's entire life.

Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills, and education ought to provide a context for their integration in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of messages will change television as well.

The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and interactive networking are very different from those of people educated as literate. These characteristics will be further reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked world. Where reading about history, or another country, is marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than we already face. Television is not the panacea for such conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge.

Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its ma.s.s communication industrial society status, and reached the condition of individual interaction.