When Media Make War Against Each Other,

As A Culture Moves From Orality To Writing To Printing To Televising, Its Ideas Of Truth Move With It.

Printing Links The Present With Forever. It Carries Personal Identity Into Realms Unknown.

The Line-by-line, Sequential, Continuous Form Of The Printed Page Slowly Began To Lose Its Resonance As A Metaphor Of How Knowledge Was To Be Acquired And How The World Was To Be Understood. "knowing" The Facts Took On A New Meaning, For It Did Not Imply That One Understood Implications, Background, Or Connections. Telegraphic Discourse Permitted No Time For Historical Perspectives And Gave No Priority To The Qualitative. To The Telegraph, Intelligence Meant Knowing Of Lots Of Things, Not Knowing About Them.

My Argument Is Limited To Saying That A Major New Medium Changes The Structure Of Discourse; It Does So By Encouraging Certain Uses Of The Intellect, By Favoring Certain Definitions Of Intelligence And Wisdom, And By Demanding A Certain Kind Of Content - In A Phrase, By Creating New Forms Of Truth-telling.

The Shock Of Twentieth-century Technology Numbed Our Brains And We Are Just Beginning To Notice The Spiritual And Social Debris That Our Technology Has Strewn About Us.