63 Ours is a brand­new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emo­ tions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington once remarked, "We haven't heard from Benj. Franklin in Paris this year. We should write him a letter." At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho­ logical responses. We have been left d­a­n­ g­l­i­n­g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us—they refer us only to the past, not to the present. Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantane­ ously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically­configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classifica­ tion to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block­by­block, step­by­step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co­ exist in a state of active interplay.