The medium, or process, of our time—electric tech-nology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns ofsocial interdependence and every aspect of ourpersonal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action,and every institution formerly taken for granted.Everything is changing—you, your family, yourneighborhood, your education, your job, your gov-ernment, your relation to "the others." And they'rechanging dramatically.

Societies have always been shaped more by thenature of the media by which men communicatethan by the content of the communication. Thealphabet, for instance, is a technology that is ab-sorbed by the very young child in a completelyunconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.Words and the meaning of words predispose thechild to think and act automatically in certain ways.The alphabet and print technology fostered andencouraged a fragmenting process, a process ofspecialism and of detachment. Electric technologyfosters and encourages unification and involve-ment. It is impossible to understand social andcultural changes without a knowledge of the work-ings of media.

The older training of observation has become quiteirrelevant in this new time, because it is based onpsychological responses and concepts conditionedby the former technology—mechanization.

Innumerable confusions and a profound feelingof despair invariably emerge in periods of greattechnological 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 todo today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester-day's concepts.

Youth instinctively understands the present en-vironment-the electric drama. It lives mythicallyand in depth. This is the reason for the greatalienation between generations. Wars, revolutions,civil uprisings are interfaces within the new en-vironments created by electric informational media.

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" In the study of ideas, it is necessary to rememberthat insistence on hard-headed clarity issues fromsentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking theperplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at allcosts is based on sheer superstition as to the modein which human intelligence functions. Our reason-ings grasp at straws for premises and float ongossamers for deductions."

—A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasingold categories—for probing around. When twoseemingly disparate elements are imaginativelypoised, put in apposition in new and unique ways,startling discoveries often result.

Learning, the educational process, has long beenassociated only with the glum. We speak of the"serious" student. Our time presents a uniqueopportunity for learning by means of humor—aperceptive or incisive joke can be more meaning-ful than platitudes lying between two covers.

"The Medium is the Massage" is a look-around tosee what's happening. It is a collide-oscope ofinterfaced situations.

Students of media are persistently attacked asevaders, idly concentrating on means or processesrather than on "substance." The dramatic and rapidchanges of "substance" elude these accusers.Survival is not possible if one approaches hisenvironment, the social drama, with a fixed, un-changeable point of view—the witless repetitiveresponse to the unperceived.

you

How much do you make? Have youever contemplated suicide? Are younow or have you ever been... ? Are youaware of the fact . . .? I have here be-fore me.... Electrical information de-vices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a veryserious dilemma between our claim toprivacy and the community's need toknow. The older, traditional ideas ofprivate, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technolo-gies—are very seriously threatened bynew methods of instantaneous electricinformation retrieval, by the electricallycomputerized dossier bank—that onebig gossip column that is unforgiving,unforgetful and from which there is noredemption, no erasure of early "mis-takes." We have already reached apoint where remedial control, born outof knowledge of media and their totaleffects on all of us, must be exerted.How shall the new environment be pro-grammed now that we have become soinvolved with each other, now that aMof us have become the unwitting workforce for social change? What's thatbuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

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your family

The family circle has widened. Theworldpool of information fathered byelectric media—movies, Telstar, flight-far surpasses any possible influencemom and dad can now bring to bear.Character no longer is shaped by onlytwo earnest, fumbling experts. Now allthe world's a sage.

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yourneighborhoodElectric circuitry has overthrown theregime of "time" and "space" and poursupon us instantly and continuously theconcerns of all other men. It has re-constituted dialogue on a global scale.Its message is Total Change, endingpsychic, social, economic, and politicalparochialism. The old civic, state, andnational groupings have become un-workable. Nothing can be further fromthe spirit of the new technology than"a place for everything and everythingin its place." You can't go home again.

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youreducationThere is a world of difference betweenthe modern home environment of inte-grated electric information and theclassroom. Today's television child isattuned to up-to-the-minute "adult"news—inflation, rioting, war, taxes,cr ime, bathing beaut ies —and isbewildered when he enters the nine-teenth-century environment that stillcharacterizes the educational estab-lishment where information is scarcebut ordered and structured by frag-mented, classified patterns, subjects,and schedules. It is naturally an en-vironment much like any factory set-upwith its inventories and assembly lines.The "child" was an invention of theseventeenth century; he did not existin, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, upuntil that time, been merged in theadult world and there was nothing thatcould be called childhood in our sense.Today's child is growing up absurd, be-cause he lives in two worlds, and neitherof them inclines him to grow up. Grow-ing up—that is our new work, and it istotal. Mere instruction will not suffice.

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your job

"When this circuit learns your job, whatare you going to do?"

"Jobs" represent a relatively recentpattern of work. From the fifteenthcentury to the twentieth century, thereis a steady progress of fragmentationof the stages of work that constitute"mechanization" and "specialism."These procedures cannot serve for sur-vival or sanity in this new time.Under conditions of electric circuitry,all the fragmented job patterns tend toblend once more into involving anddemanding roles or forms of work thatmore and more resemble teaching,learning, and "human" service, in theolder sense of dedicated loyalty.Unhappily, many well-intentioned politi-cal reform programs that aim at thealleviation of suffering caused by un-employment betray an ignorance of thetrue nature of media-influence.

"Come into my parlor," said the com-puter to the specialist.

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yourgovernment

Nose-counting, a cherished part of theeighteenth-century fragmentation proc-ess, has rapidly become a cumber-some and ineffectual form of socialassessment in an environment of in-stant electric speeds. The public, in thesense of a great consensus of separateand distinct viewpoints, is finished. To-day, the mass audience (the successorto the "public") can be used as a cre-ative, participating force. It is, instead,merely given packages of passive en-tertainment. Politics offers yesterday'sanswers to today's questions.A new form of "politics" is emerging,and in ways we haven't yet noticed.The living room has become a votingbooth. Participation via television inFreedom Marches, in war, revolution,pollution, and other events is changingeverything.

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"the others"

The shock of recognition! In an elec-tric information environment, minoritygroups can no longer be contained—ignored. Too many people know toomuch about each other. Our new en-vironment compels commitment andparticipation. We have become irrevo-cably involved with, and responsiblefor, each other.

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All media work us over completely. They are sopervasive in their personal, political, economic,aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and socialconsequences that they leave no part of us un-touched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is themassage. Any understanding of social and culturalchange is impossible without a knowledge of theway media work as environments.

Allmediaareextensionsofsomehumanfaculty—psychicorphysical.

the book

is an extension of the eye...

clothing, an extension of the skin...

electric circuitry,

an extension ofthecentralnervoussystem

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Media, by altering the environment, evoke in usunique ratios of sense perceptions. The extensionof any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.

Whentheseratioschange,

men change.

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Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time"has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live ina global village...a simultaneous happening. Weare back in acoustic space. We have begun againto structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo-tions from which a few centuries of literacydivorced us.We have had to shift our stress of attention fromaction to reaction. We must now know in advancethe consequences of any policy or action, sincethe results are experienced without delay. Becauseof electric speed, we can no longer wait and see.George Washington once remarked, "We haven'theard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. Weshould write him a letter."At the high speeds of electric communication,purely visual means of apprehending the world areno longer possible; they are just too slow to berelevant or effective.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with anenormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho-logical responses. We have been left d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughtsbetray us—they refer us only to the past, not tothe present.Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with oneanother. Information pours upon us, instantane-ously and continuously. As soon as information isacquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newerinformation. Our electrically-configured world hasforced us to move from the habit of data classifica-tion to the mode of pattern recognition. We can nolonger build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step,because instant communication insures that allfactors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.