**4. Orality, scripturality, and beyond**

But let's get back to our initial concern, the form of communication. If we consider its history we can distinguish one shift and a half—and possibly another full shift occurring today. The first and most important shift is the passage from orality to scripturality, from the word to the letter [6,7]. Besides the obvious effects of this transformation—from direct to indirect commu‐ nication, from immediate to mediated proof, from concretion to abstraction, etc., —Walter J. Ong and Jack Goody underscore its cognitive effects in the direction that, once again, the medium is the message. Literacy, as training to read linearly from one side to another and from above to below, transforms the perception and understanding of the world while restructuring our brains. Once we have learnt how to read, we live in another world than in the oral one, by forgetting the memory of the former world. Another shift occurred when Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing machine. Here too the consequences were of unexpected relevance. The dereliction of high literacy (Latin and Greek) in favor of the lingua franca homogenizes territories and, according to Anderson [8] builds the modern nationalist imaginary. Not to speak about the protestant schism, the democratization of knowledge, the formation of the public sphere, and, last but not least, the production of paper money. The whole process of secularization relies on this invention. In clear words, it is this invention that renders possible the modern positive-sum-society. Gutenberg was a genius handyman; he should have had the speculative intelligence of a Copernicus to draw conclusions about his invention. Both lived at the same time. We can only speculate about what would have happened if they had actually met.

Our intention in this short essay is to highlight the opportunity of a third revolution in the form of communication that we call the medial turn. By medial turn we understand the computerization of communication through electronic social networks and devices. The main differences between scriptural and medial communication are as follows:


The following four options should therefore be tested:

Parallel to the elaboration of knowledge society during the 17th century, this new paradigm of human transactions gives place to what we call "risk society" since Ulrich Beck in late

Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies (ICIS 2016) - Interdisciplinarity and Creativity

Another consequence of the positive-sum-society is individualization. Even if freedom of will and action is certainly the most important normative achievement of modernity, this constit‐ utive part of the individualization process has its dark side too. In a traditional zero-sumsociety, social ties are strong and give human beings a kind of ontological security they cannot afford anymore. Social ties are strong in the traditional world because everything in the "great chain of being" (Arthur O. Lovejoy), which forms its cosmos, is linked by relations of indebt‐ edness, especially among humans. And, the social logic of zero-sum-games is the imbalance of cost and benefits in every form of transaction. If (A) makes a profit (a+) on the costs of (B), (a+) and (b−) are equivalents under the condition that in a further transaction (A) has to carry the costs and (B) will profit on histurn—either as a reduced (A/B) or enlarged form of exchange (A/B/C….A). Under the condition of positive-sum-game, (a) and (b) are not in a relation of indebtedness, but of mutual profit, either in a reduced dual (a+) ⇒ (b+) or in collective form (a +) ⇒ (b+) ⇒ (c+), etc., like in Mandeville's fable of the bees (1704), where private vices contribute to public virtue. In such a situation, social (debt) bonds are replaced by the individual pursuit of profit, happiness or vice. This pursuit is moral insofar, as the individual advantage (a+) can be considered as the condition for (b+) or (c+). This is the exact definition of individuality. In other words, the price of freedom is not just loneliness, but also the ontological insecurity. In place of God, modern individualistic societies placed the ongoing process of Mandeville's

The two pillars of modernity, illimitation of goods and individualization, share obviously the same root; and insofar, the two dark sides of these pillars, the ecological collapse due to unlimited growth and social loneliness, are coming from the same origin. Unfortunately, this

But let's get back to our initial concern, the form of communication. If we consider its history we can distinguish one shift and a half—and possibly another full shift occurring today. The first and most important shift is the passage from orality to scripturality, from the word to the letter [6,7]. Besides the obvious effects of this transformation—from direct to indirect commu‐ nication, from immediate to mediated proof, from concretion to abstraction, etc., —Walter J. Ong and Jack Goody underscore its cognitive effects in the direction that, once again, the medium is the message. Literacy, as training to read linearly from one side to another and from above to below, transforms the perception and understanding of the world while restructuring our brains. Once we have learnt how to read, we live in another world than in the oral one, by forgetting the memory of the former world. Another shift occurred when Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing machine. Here too the consequences were of unexpected relevance. The dereliction of high literacy (Latin and Greek) in favor of the lingua franca homogenizes

modernity.

144

in the Knowledge Society

fable.

origin has hardly been unveiled.

**4. Orality, scripturality, and beyond**


These four hypotheses [9,10] are all true and productive but each one from another perspective. The main criterion to distinguish them is purely heuristic: which hypothesis generates more

questions? As a matter of fact, we can neglect the first one, which is based on the "end-ofhistory" assumption (Fukuyama's thesis). It is enough to say "nothing new under the sun," besides the pure quantitative effect of dematerialized communication. The second one is also heuristically poor. The only question of interest is what scripturality is missing, compared with mediality. Obviously, it is the ubiquity of communication and the shift from the stock to the flow of information, as underscored by Rifkin in The Age of Access [12]. As far as in the medial age we no more have to know what, but only to know where we get the information, the Google sphere offers us an effective relief. Due to this alleviation, we can communicate without any local and temporal restraints. The postmodern hypothesis is the most radical one and seems to be the richest, in heuristic (discriminant) terms. In his thesis of "singularity," Kurzweil [13] postulates a post- or trans-human age in which, through the "law" of Moore, machinery intelligence supersedes the human one. But this radical perspective that scenarizes an anthro‐ pological revolution, where only a small elite of super humans will remain consistent with machinery, while reducing the rest of humanity to "human waste" [14], is a kind of "end of history" too; it is the proper end of human history. So, its heuristic power should be at first eschewed for ethical reasons, but it could also be for epistemological reasons. Since the "context of discovery," according to Reichenbach [15], still engages human creativity (not to speak about the "context of justification), which always has its unpredictable and imaginary part, this anthropological revolution would exclude human nature from the whole process of discovery and opens the door to endless algorithms.

If the hidden agenda of modernity is the substitution of zero-sum-game by positive-sum-game structures in the medial society, the price to pay for all the synergetic effects of this sort of games is double: (1) on the one hand the algorithmic management of every form of scarce resources, and (2) on the other hand the reduction of human nature to a hybrid, as cynically emphasized by the new guru of world sociology, Latour [16]. Probably, the algorithmic management of scarce resources could not be worse than the actual agonizing muddlingthrough strategy of short-term thinking politicians. On the other hand, the reduction of humans to nothing more than cross-points in a universal network destroys their uniqueness (mere singularity!) in all living systems, to be the only species who is conscious of the con‐ sciousness of other humans and to be aware that the others know it as well.

The hardware of the medial age is now close to perfection. According to our McLuhanian assumption that, as the medium determines the message, the hardware will determine the software, the only specialist to be able to imagine what kind of software could be produced by that kind of hardware are the engineers. It is quite an understatement to say that they are not fully aware of this responsibility.
