The Medium Is the Message
parable of Western man in the electric age, and is only incidentally related to Europe or the
Orient. The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of
perception and organization of existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as
Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this conflict by understanding the
media that extend us and raise these wars within and without us.
Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on tribal man is the theme of a book by the
psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (World Health
Organization, Geneva, 195 3) . Much of his material appeared in an article in Psychiatry
magazine, November, 1959: "The Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word." Again, it is
electric speed that has revealed the lines of force operating from Western technology in the
remotest areas of bush, savannah, and desert
annaabi.ee 
