Essential McLuhan 194 I wasn’t born yet so it was Cousin Gowan who was there and big enough to see and remember and tell me afterward when I was big enough for it to make sense. The oral tradition of the South is a world in which past and present concert in a babble of chat and memories and observation and complicated kinship relations. An oral world keeps multiple blood relationships in easy acoustic focus in the same way as a pre-literate people have no trouble in managing complex word formations and inflections. James W.Hart in The Popular Book notes that: Sharing the heritage of England’s established religious beliefs, the Southerners were not embroiled in doctrinal dispute which made New Englanders import and print books…. As one of the Southern colonists said, they were more inclinable to read men by business and conversation than to dive into books. The author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn stays in the heart of this oral world as much as the author of Pogo. The new art or science which the electronic or post- mechanical age has to invent concerns the alchemy of social change. 14 We can no longer tolerate the irresponsibility of social trial and error. When information moves instantly to all parts of the globe it is chemically explosive. Any chain-reaction which occurs rapidly is explosive, whether in personal or social life. President Sukarno of Indonesia spoke to the tycoons of Hollywood describing them as revolutionaries. They may have been shocked. But people who are as specialized as they are can’t avoid shocks. New ideas and new attitudes are disruptive. Today the normal movements of information have the effect of armed invasion on some culture or group. Earlier ages entertained themselves with speculation on the historical effect of Cleopatra’s nose. We teeter hysterically on the consequences of rumor about President Eisenhower’s viscera. It is the normal aspect of our information-flow which is revolutionary now. The new media normalize that state of revolution which is war. Two hundred years ago it was idea and theory which disrupted the old regimes. Now it is just the packaged information which we call entertainment which transforms living conditions and basic attitudes. It is the ordinary flow of news and pictures from every quarter of the globe which