Laws of media 361 the left brain inhibiting the right across the corpus callosum is still not clear.” If the right brain cannot even handle consonants they must have had their genesis in the left brain: this adds point to the mystery of what it was that urged the Greeks to invent them in the first place. 4 Joseph E.Bogen. “Some Educational Implications of Hemispheric Specialization,” 138. Bogen observes further: “What distinguished hemispheric speculation is not so much certain kinds of material (e.g. words for the left, faces for the right) but the way in which the material is processed. In other words, hemispheric differences are more usefully considered in terms of process specificity rather than material specificity.” among all the senses would seem to relate mainly to the right hemisphere. That Trotter, in “The Other Hemisphere,” selects a Third World or non- literate society for observation and illustration points to the fact that societies that have not developed the use of the phonetic alphabet tend to adopt the same Third World posture. While the Third World is mainly oral/aural, even when it cultivates some non-phonetic form of writing such as Sanskrit, the First World (Western) countries tend to be visual (left hemisphere), even when most of their population is declining into a semi-literate state via the information environment of electronic technologies. Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users. Herbert Krugman performed brain-wave studies, comparing the response of subjects to print and television. One subject was reading a book as the TV came on. As soon as she looked up, her brain waves slowed significantly. In less than two minutes, she was in a predominantly alpha state—relaxed, passive, unfocused. Her brain-wave response to three different types of TV content was basically the same, even though she told Krugman she “liked” one, “disliked” another, and “was bored by” the third. As a result of a series of such experiments, Krugman argues that this predominantly alpha state is characteristic of how people respond to TV— any TV. He recently remarked, “the ability of respondents to show high right brain response to even familiar logos, their right brain response to stories even before the idea content has been added to them, the predominantly right brain response to TV, and perhaps even to what we call print advertising—all suggests that in contrast to teaching, the unique power of the electronic media is to shape the content of people’s imagery, and in that particular way determine their behavior and their views.”5 Krugman’s investigations were, he admitted, initially undertaken to disprove that “the medium is the message.” His quantitative results point to the massive and subliminal erosion of our culture through right- hemisphere indoctrination by TV in all its forms, including VCRs, video games, computer monitors, and wordprocessors. In a wider sense, all electric media, as a new ground, give salience only to the right