125 Even so imaginative a writer as Jules Verne failed Television completes the cycle of the human sen­ to envisage the speed with which electric tech­ sorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving nology would produce informational media. He eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized rashly predicted that television would be invented acoustic­visual metaphor that established the dy­ in the XXIXth Century. namics of Western civilization. Science­fiction writing today presents situations In television there occurs an extension of the sense that enable us to perceive the potential of new of active, exploratory touch which involves all the technologies. Formerly, the problem was to in­ senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight vent new forms of labor­saving. Today, the reverse alone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electric is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not to in­ phenomena, the visual is only one component in vent. We have to find the environments in which a complex interplay. Since, in the age of informa­ it will be possible to live with our new inventions. tion, most transactions are managed electrically, Big Business has learned to tap the s­f writer. the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses. Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened. This charge of the light brigade has heightened our general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of ex­ treme sensitivity. It was the funeral of President Kennedy that most strongly proved the power of television to invest an occasion with the character of corporate par­ ticipation. It involves an entire population in a ritual process. (By comparison, press, movies, and radio are mere packaging devices for consumers.) In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. This creates a sort of inward­ ness, a sort of reverse perspective which has much in common with Oriental art.