Illiteracy, says the Indian linguist and educationalist Chander Daswani, is a stigma. This is not the whole story, but it says a lot about writing and society, indeed, about literate society. If it is appropriate to speak of written language and the literate mind, it is certainly no less so to speak of the literate society. We are living in a literate society, which is to say in a modern society. For universal literacy is a recent accomplishment brought about by general education. As late as a century ago, large sections of the most advanced countries could not read or write. In former times, literacy used to be a specialized skill mastered only by a small elite of professionals. Writing was always associated with power and social distinction, as the French philosopher and media theoretician Roland Barthes pointed out.