Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital

My late, lamented colleague Vernon Dibble once told me this rule of thumb: if a title comprises three words or phrases in a series, and their order makes no difference, then the lecture or article will be nonsense. (Vernon used a stronger word than "nonsense," actually.) I hope to make some sense in this essay, although the three terms of my title could as well come in any sequence.' In fact, the five sections of the essay might themselves be rearranged. They represent five pieces of what I take to be a Big Picture, so big that to fill it all in would require a fat volume which I do not plan to write. So I ask the courteous reader to bear with my somewhat fragmentary method, here, and with an argument that cannot be decisive, only suggestive. It may help if I indicate where I am heading. I claim that exhortations about the need for "computer literacy" have much in common with longer-standing debates about literacy itself; that both kinds of discussion usually rest on a serious misconception of technology and its roles in history; and that we can best understand the issues that trouble us by situating them within the evolution of our present economic and social system-a very recent historical process, going back little more than a hundred years. The whole discussion presumes that questions of literacy and technology are inextricable from political questions of domination and equality. 1. History The earliest citations for the word "literacy" in the OED come from the 1880s. The word "illiteracy," in the common modern sense, appears only a bit earlier. (Before that, it referred to lack of cultivation, or to ignorance.) The adjectives "literate" and "illiterate" have a much longer history; but again, before the late nineteenth-century they had a global, qualitative meaning-well-read and civilized, or the reverse-rather than indicating a line that divided those who could read and write from those who could not.