If computers are the future, why are computer users permanently illiterate?

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/3/5.html

by robenkleene • 4 months ago

15 1 4 months ago

_wire_• 4 months ago

Marshall McLuhan was interested about this in the late 60s and his observation was that electronic media can obviate literacy as the phonetic alphabet, and so literacy, was a technology, not an essential human trait. Language is media, not the contents of the media.

Video retrieves a tribal interaction by bending space and time allowing tribal modalities to manifest at distance.

McLuhan observed in his "Understanding Media" the "Tetrad", 4 laws that guide the uniquely human modalities to media:

1. Enhancement / extension

2. Obsolescence

3. Reversal

4. Retrieval / return

The phonetic alphabet enhanced the continuum of the visual by temporal regimentation, linear thinking and compartmentalization. Corresponding social status structures and modes of participation evolved to high levels of identity and status.

Literacy has been obsolesced by electronic media, which creates a highly connected, free-flowing, always-on, instantaneous mode of involvement. This is returning to previous unstructured tribal arrangements of status and participation.

While literacy enhanced bodily presence and evolved a strong sense of self and identity, electronics are reversing this as the participants are disembodied by the medium. An example is the new reluctance to talk by telephone because of the medium's awkward intensity of vocal cues minus any a sense of the bodily existence of the counterpart as a total person.

More generally, telepresences reverse to isolation and loneliness as one's body and identity becomes ghostly. This may lead to a retrieval or return to an importance of direct social interactions.

(Note that the m Tetrad stands on the figure/ground dichotomy of Gestalt psychology.)

Engaging the topic at hand via the tetrad:

The computer has obsolesced television, but is also retrieving it as we think about the internet as domains or channels, but with an infinite selector. When you have so many channels you need a new way to find and select them. The idea of television "programming" is merging with computer programming through AI.

Notice that the traditional (ouch) art of computer programming is becoming obscured by AI even as more people than ever create programs: the term program has become a euphemism for wish fulfillment, which a more rigorously postured "developer" will term "prompt engineering". The status of this euphemism is supported by the common notion that writing programs is the job of instructing the computer to perform a task (complete one's wishes). As the medium of AI is a sea change in technology for describing tasks, it is obsolescing programming as a literate art of mathematical formalisms for converting algorithms and data-structures into code for a CPU.

If computers are the future, why are computer users permanently illiterate?

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