Is it natural that one medium should appropriate 179 Now it is imperative that whenever there is a change so that actual developments do not coincide with your assumptions, you must change your assumptions and you must change any plans that were based on the assumption that has now turned out to be erroneous…. It is absolutely imperative that you must know what your assumptions are, and that you must recognize that things are not going to develop in the future in accordance with your assumptions…. Now, the primary difference between an assumption and an objective is that an assumption pertains to things that are beyond your control, and an objective pertains to things that are achieved through your own effort. What the writer of this brief does not know is that assumptions can also come within the range of prediction and control just as soon as it is recognized that the new media of communication in any age, as they penetrate and transform the older media, are the source of new assumptions and consequently the causes of change in our objectives. The study of media constituents and content can never reveal these dynamics of media effects. Media study has lagged behind all other fields in this century, even behind economics, as the following quotation from W.W.Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1960, page 90) will show: The argument of this book has been that once man conceived of his physical environment as subject to knowable, consistent laws, he began to manipulate it to his economic advantage; and once it was demonstrated that growth was possible, the consequences of growth and modernization, notably its military consequences, unhinged one traditional society after another, pushed it into the treacherous period of preconditions, from which many, but not all of the world’s societies have now emerged into self-sustained growth through the take-off mechanism…. Media study has not begun to approach the awareness of this “take-off mechanism” of social change involved in the shaping and speeding of information for eye and for ear and for touch and kinetics. Our project set out to bring media study within the range of the expanding awareness here indicated by Rostow in economics. My assumptions, then, were: (a) that nothing had yet been done to bring understanding to the effects of media in patterning human association,