Introduction 7 met by the theories of complexity and chaos. Socially and politically we find it difficult to make sense of paradox: how can everything under the law, for example, be both true and not true at the same time? The law in practice is increasingly circumstantial and relative to media perceptions. In electric culture we live with the paradox of Simplicio: “only any arbitrary or haphazard odd notion, true or false, unverifiable by experience” (Colie). McLuhan showed that paradox, like metaphor, establishes the ratios of a truth, for truth cannot be just one thing, nor can reality, under electric conditions. In the information age we should remember Korzybski’s notion of a “world of words and a world of not words.” Paradox and ambiguity must exist if the interplay between these two worlds is to be balanced humanely. The map is not the territory; the story, not the event; the image, not the thing. The form of presentation may be everything. V School, with its lessons, too often ignores this fact. After they escape the Chinese boxes of our education theories, should Yuppie generations unwilling to tolerate rising thresholds of ambiguity surprise us? Paradox should serve as an integrating, ecologizing necessity rather than an annoyance to those who prefer clarity to wonder. Considering the radical changes brought about by new media, McLuhan set out to discover what the medium actually does to change the mindscape of the user: “the medium is the message.” That is, media affect us physically. Sitting for hours in front of a TV set, a cathode ray stimulator, produces a unique and characteristic mental state. It is a state that actually reverses the evolutionary alertness by which we have so far survived extinction. As for message content, if you say “I love you” in person, over the phone, or by billboard, it is likely the medium that most shapes the response you get back. He gave us a way of breaking into the control-room of life’s reality studio. Like a series of Yogic steps to self-awareness, McLuhan’s insights can free one from single-minded obsessions with the trivial manipulations of contents. Making humanity whole again seems the objective of all our global aspirations, but the backlash is real and vociferous. A pernicious tribalism is developing worldwide as peoples struggle to forge their identities against the global corporate sameness. McLuhan arranges his materials in broad patterns of interplaying parts, thus engaging us in larger thought patterns—almost the difference between prose and poetry—which enable us to encounter our own conceptual shortcomings in attempting to expand our perceptual awareness. To move beyond simple facts requires deep involvement in the process of communication; content takes care of itself. McLuhan has been the subject of a rare act of cultural cannibalism, ingested piecemeal by many who couldn’t take him whole. Everywhere glints of his insights shine from the works of others, often unattributed. Borges, in his “Approach to al-Mutasim, or the Game of Shifting Mirrors,” has a man trace a soul in the impression it has made on others. It is a serious game in which a greater reality is revealed through fragmented reflections. The physical process of seeing becomes a metaphor for vision. We see because objects reflect light, but it is the light we really seek to see.