The Medium Is the Message
We are no more
prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to
cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in
individual isolation. We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our
literate and mechanical culture.
Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the
nonliterate with the semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is
the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new
patterns of information. Wyndham Lewis made this a theme of his group of novels called The
Human Age. The first of these, The Childermass, is concerned precisely with accelerated
media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents. In our own world as we become more
aware of the effects of technology on psychic formation and manifestation, we are losing all
annaabi.ee 
