The medium, or process, of our timeelectric tech- nologyis reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re- evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changingyou, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your gov- ernment, your relation to “the others.“ And theyre changing dramatically. Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab- sorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involve- ment. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the work- ings of media. The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technologymechanization. Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions. Our “Age of 30-million toy trucks were bought in the U.S. in 1966. Anxiety“ is, in great part, the result of trying to do todays job with yesterdays tools-with yester- days concepts. Youth instinctively understands the present en- vironment-the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new en- vironments created by electric informational media. 10 “ In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reason- ings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.“ A. N. Whitehead, “Adventures in Ideas.“ Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categoriesfor probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the “serious“ student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humora perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaning- ful than platitudes lying between two covers. “The Medium is the Massage“ is a look-around to see whats happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations. Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on “substance.“ The dramatic and rapid changes of “substance“ elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, un- changeable point of viewthe witless repetitive response to the unperceived. you How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been. ? Are you aware of the fact.? I have here be- fore me Electrical information de- vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to- tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the communitys need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions the patterns of mechanistic technolo- giesare very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bankthat one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mis- takes.“ We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be pro- grammed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that aM of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? Whats that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing? 12 your family The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric mediamovies, Telstar, flight- far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the worlds a sage. 14 your neighborhood Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time“ and “space“ and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has re- constituted dialogue on a global scale. Its