Decline of literacy is usually reported in terms of symptoms, explains Professor Nadin. Yet he himself, a Romanian-born computer scientist, electrical engineer, philosopher, semiotician, etc., immigrating from a culture of rigidly structured literacy into a land of new technologies, perceived people as living with immediacy rather than for permanency. As we hurtle onward, abandoning the Slowness that Milan Kundera, in his novel of that title, sees as enhancing pleasure, Nadin reminds us that literacy is a late acquisition in human culture, and dispensable. Acknowledgment of change allows us to make the best of it. Inexorably, the illiterate flourish while educational systems worldwide are in turmoil.
Faster living means a glut of information from many sources, their credibility hard to sort.
In short, Nadin's compass is global, respectful of antiquity, preparing for whatever future comes hurtling toward us. The paper was about Francesca Mazzucato's novel called, in the original Italian, Hot Line, whose protagonist-narrator earns her livelihood doing telephone sex. Once conditions making literacy necessary are overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoes corresponding changes. All I can say is, this helps explain the novel, which, unlike Nicholson Baker's Vox or Spike Lee's film Girl 6, is an unhappy tale. And when human sexuality is no longer profoundly subjective, deeply individual, then it cannot be an integrating factor in personal destiny.