Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.

Nothing is inevitable if we are willing to contemplate what is happening.

Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or 'rational' space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine.

The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.

Today, the mass audience (the successor to the "public") can be used as a creative, participating force. It is, instead, merely given packages of passive entertainment. Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions.

Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course, the photograph does both.

Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.