Our general topic in this series of essays is information technology and what my colleague David Marcey has characterized as "proximity learning." He coined the term in response to the writings of Massey and Zemsky (1995) and other education theorists who have advocated "distance learning" as a cost-effective and efficient use of information technology to minimize the need for what Marcey has termed the "intensive"--and expensive--"student-faculty interactions that occur in a physically tangible community of learning in college and university settings." Under the rubric of "proximity learning," Marcey and the rest of my colleagues think of a series of innovative modes of employing information technology to facilitate learning within those "physically tangible" communities of learning which, expensive as they are, represent one of the happiest and most valuable legacies of traditional liberal arts instruction.

My own central focus here is upon a particular mode of "proximity learning," one traditionally seen as preceding and undergirding collegiate instruction--instruction in the humanities and social sciences, certainly, and to a lesser degree, instruction in the natural sciences and the arts as well. My focus is a reconfiguration of the intimate relation between reader and text.

Let me begin, if I may, with an observation. Texts are, in a sense, intrinsically linear. We read sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. What texts seek to convey, though, is not linear, or is not linear in quite the same sense. Texts seek by a sequence of words to convey a mode of understanding. They move sequentially (in mindtime) to evoke patterns (in mindspace), to evoke by one-channel processes multivalent, multi-leveled states of mind. Such states of mind may, and often do, include or presuppose a series of more or less linear arguments, but ordinarily will include them as constitutive parts of larger and more complicated patterns, and often employ them in at least partly affective or ironized ways which to greater or lesser degree compromise and complicate even such seeming linearity as they bear by virtue of being explicit and sequential arguments. I would thus maintain that what texts seek to convey is, to coin a phrase, more nearly "reticular" than linear: more like a net or web than like a line--even a line of argument.

The text, phrase by phrase and word by word, seeks to weave the web in the mind of reader. The web itself, though, is not linear. It is reticular. Were there a medium that could transmit the web in its full "reticularity"--at least in potential, all at once--then such a medium would not only stand in closer structural accord with what it conveyed, with its message than does, say, a book; it might also allow for easier and fuller learning, for better communication, if only because those on the receiving end of the transmission or communication--readers in traditional terms--would not have to reconstitute the message piece by piece, bit by bit, phrase by phrase, as a reactive webmakers in their own right. Or even if they did have to reconstitute the message bit by bit, they could, perhaps, do so not in the order chosen by the "transmitter" or text-maker, but in an order an order of their own choosing, suited to their own cognitive styles.

That, I will argue, is what information technology can begin to do. And it can do more than even that. I think that by providing alternative modes of information retrieval relying upon digitized oral presentations of information which is now "stored" in print--by relying upon what would be, in effect, electronic oral libraries--information technology could in large measure free us from the social necessity of seeking to attain universal literacy. And freedom from that necessity would be, I think, a very good thing, because, despite really vast expenditures of effort and expense, we have not in this area yet been able to achieve our goals.

This would be most dispiriting were universal literacy an essential goal for us in its own right. Fortunately, though, that is not the case: we value universal literacy as a means, not an end. The end is social equality and equal access to knowledge, both for the purpose of social advancement and empowerment and for the purpose of contemplative and intellectual joy. None of these last, in an electronic world, need depend directly on literacy. And so--or so I hope and imagine--we may soon be able to abandon our costly search for universal literacy in favor of other more productive and attainable goals.

It is in this sense, perhaps more than any other, that the transition from print-based to electronic media is not to be feared but to be welcomed. A quarter century as a teacher of English has unavoidably suggested to me that, however rewarding the process, neither reading nor writing is easy to learn--or for that matter, easy to teach. What I would like to explore in the pages to follow is why reading and writing are so hard, and why electronic media may help us, if not so much in overcoming those difficulties, then perhaps in showing us how to get past them by offering us the prospect of learning at least a substantial part of what we need to know in easier and more natural ways than ordinarily lie open to us at present.

My attention was first directed to these questions by the Pew Summer Institute of 1995 at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, which provided me with the opportunity to become acquainted with hypertext markup language (HTML) and more broadly with the possibilities of posting multimedia projects and presentations on the Internet. Some of these possibilities were later brought to fruition by students affiliated with Kenyon's Integrated Program in Humane Studies, in which I have been privileged to work to since 1992. This past year, indeed, I worked as one of three instructors in the introductory IPHS seminar, one requirement of which was the production--most often in groups of two or three--of a multimedia project making use of the "Authorware" program.

These projects varied considerably in sophistication, but in their very diversity they suggested that electronic media might provide the paradigm for a mode of learning in some respects at least very different from that which has been normative in the West during the age of print, but much in accord with that which had held sway, in one sense or another, for centuries, if not millennia before. Work with my students in conjunction with my colleague Michael Brint suggested to me that multimedia specifically, and information technology in general, might offer the hope of a way out of what has been in some respects a cultural nightmare--the dependence of culture upon print media.

My fundamental claim in this regard is that computers--or more precisely, Mac-based or Windows-based information technology systems--are in several significant senses more user-friendly than books. They are, in just those senses, easier to use than books, because they work, in general, more in accord with the way we are biologically primed to learn than do books. A corollary follows: people who are worried that computers will in some sense replace books and that data-banks, or Internet access, will finally replace not only libraries, but museums and concert halls as well, are worried about a state of affairs which, should it transpire, would in most senses, if not all, be a good thing rather than a bad.

It would be a good thing precisely because reading is so difficult and because, on just that account, a culture based upon reading necessarily excludes from full participation a substantial proportion of its members. Reading is, indeed, unnatural, not in the sense that no one can do it--many of us read very well indeed--but in the sense that no one can do it without training, and many people, perhaps most people, do it badly even after training. Things that we do naturally, by contrast--things like walking and talking, for instance--virtually everyone does well as long as health allows, and virtually everyone does without formal training before what we term "school age."

Hence, if computers call, as they do, upon more natural learning channels, and upon a wider array of channels than those called upon by print, called upon by books, then education will very likely be an easier, more enjoyable, and more successful process, and perhaps (let us dream for a moment) the vast differential between educated and uneducated or ill-educated will shrink, with social benefits following in train.

Hunter-gatherer culture does not require formal education, and to the best of my knowledge, hunter-gatherer societies do not have an undereducated underclass. One of our own cultural ideals has been, for the last two centuries at least, the attainment of the same sort of near-universal cultural competence seemingly enjoyed by, say, the Inuit or the San. That, as I take it, is what the ideal of universal education is about. But we have been to some considerable degree thwarted by the intrinsic difficulty of reading. Learning to read, it appears, is less like learning to walk than it is like learning to walk a tightrope. The case with Windows-based and Mac-based computer programs seems fundamentally different. Such programs may be at least initially difficult to master for those long anchored in a print-based world, and confirmed technophobes may not even attempt to learn how to use them. But with children the case stands otherwise. They take to the Mac/Windows environment easily, and in many computerized homes, they soon find themselves instructing their parents. Children self-teach computer literacy, given the chance. Few children, by contrast, teach themselves how to read. This is no accident. Software interfaces are designed with ever-increasing success for user-friendliness. The conventions of print transmission have historically been governed by different imperatives.

But let me reiterate, for a moment, with a view toward clarifying the situation at issue here. The cultural importance of print media, coupled with a growing commitment to the notions of political equality and democracy, issued during the nineteenth century in the ideal of universal education--which meant above all, universal literacy. Nothing like this had ever been attempted. Literacy, however valuable, and however central to the functioning of a given society, had always been, up until that time, to greater or lesser extent the attainment of a particular social group. In such situations literacy was a concomitant of political and economic power, and in that sense of great social importance, but there was no cultural expectation that the attainment of literacy should be universal, any more than that any other socially useful but difficult skill should be universal. The position of the literate in such cultures was rather like that of the engineer in our own. Society depended in all sorts of ways upon the knowledge commanded by the guild of scribes and scholars, and the guild enjoyed the rewards of its knowledge. It was no more to be expected, though, that everyone could read and write, than it is now expected that everyone can do calculus--indeed, probably less to be expected.

The ideal of universal education--and universal literacy--has changed all that, however, and the ubiquity and familiarity of the efforts we have undertaken in service of that end have, I think, to some degree blinded us both to their extensiveness and their poor success. We spend more tax dollars on education than on health care, defense, or anything else. In every town and township, in every neighborhood and barrio across the United States, we have built schools and hired teachers and forced every child between the ages of six and sixteen to attend--six months or more per year by day count, six hours or more per day. Ten years of training, enforced by law, for every single one of us. And to what effect?

A vast cultural apparatus has been erected to achieve the aim of universal literacy, and it has in large part failed. Our success, to put it mildly, is disappointing in virtue of the effort expended. To be sure, if by "literacy" we mean something like testably reading at what is designated as the "sixth-grade level," then our efforts succeed reasonably well. Not as well as we might wish, no doubt, but well enough. If, though, by "literacy" we mean something more like the universal attainment of a state in which the process of decoding print media is utterly unconscious and no impediment to understanding--in which print media become "transparent" in the sense which speech is "transparent"--then we of course do far worse.

There is every reason to believe that literacy at this level is rare--perhaps three to four percent of the population, perhaps less. It is not universal even among professional academics. Evidence, I suspect, is to be found in the number of people who read regularly and extensively for pleasure--and reading becomes a pleasure, I would argue, almost precisely to the degree that the process of reading is transparent.

Simply put--reading is hard and unnatural. Few of us ever learn to read easily in any language. Listening, by contrast, is easy and natural. Watching is easy and natural. And here lies our great social hope. For computers, too, are easy to the degree that operating with them depends upon listening and watching instead of reading, and as that degree increases, using computers will become easier still.

In the age of print, I would argue, what we are evolved to do, and what our culture, our surroundings, reward our being able to do, have fallen seriously out of phase. We are all hard-wired to speak and to listen--that has long been, if not an evolutionary requirement, then a powerful enough Darwinian advantage to have been selected for so hard as to make its attainment very nearly a species-wide universal. Up until very recently, though, there has been no such selection pressure acting in favor of the varied capacities which go to make up a proficient reader or writer. Hence proficient readers and writers remain rare.

One result, it might be argued, has been to increase social inequalities, disproportionately rewarding a very unevenly distributed set of attributes. The capabilities which allow some of us to read with real ease, were apparently of little evolutionary importance until very recent times and hence are very unevenly distributed. In our present environment, however-- or more to the point, perhaps, in the environment of our immediate past--what had heretofore been peripheral factors of no very great or very obvious differential survival value have suddenly and unanticipatedly became of great, if not central, importance in encouraging the welfare, social and Darwinian alike, of those who can read easily and well. And that, manifestly, has not been and is not everybody--not even everybody who stands in a socioeconomic position in which literacy is encouraged and expected. The educational world is full of socially privileged students with what we have come to term "learning disabilities" of one sort or another, and a very large proportion of these fall under the rubric of what used to be termed "dyslexia."

The advent of computers goes a far way toward changing this situation, which encourages social stratification, simply because what has heretofore been the most efficient means of information storage and conveyance is a means which is only marginally accessible to us and only marginally in tune with our innate cognitive capacities. Because we think of print as very much a low-tech medium, we do not think of ourselves, as participants in a print culture, as enslaved to the dictates of technological convenience. But we are enslaved to those dictates, and to a degree far surpassing that to which we are ensnared by--or are likely to be ensnared by--digital technology precisely because digital technology, by virtue of its very complexity, can be made to work so very much more easily in accord with our long-evolved cognitive systems. Print is, or has been, the cheapest and most efficient information storage medium available. It is not the easiest to use. It takes, let us consider one final time, on average ten to twelve years of training to learn to use it, and even so most use it badly at something far below peak efficiency. We are wired by nature to process (among other things) visual images, body language, facial expression, music, rhythm, and speech. The great advantage of digital technology is that it can present information to us, making use of electronic storage capacities, in ways that we are equipped by nature to process--an "ergonomics of the mind," if you will. As Nicholas Negroponte puts it in his influential Being Digital, computers offer at least in potential an "interface" drawing upon "many different and concurrent channels of communication," and "from a number of different sensory devices," so that "one channel of communication" can provide information unavailable to us in the others (98).

Such potentialities in view, it is possible to imagine scenarios in which, a generation or so hence, no more of us will have to know how to read easily than now know how easily to read Latin. Icons and voice-overs could do the rest. Were it so, it would, I think be a blessing. For all kinds of reasons.