Explorations 195 rearranges our intellectual and emotional lives without either struggle or acceptance on our part. Our present conceptions of what constitutes social cause, effect, and influence are quite unable to cope with this electronic simultaneity of conspicuous co-existence. We have to know in advance the effect, on all the cultures of the world, of any change whatever. This is necessity not ideal. It is also a possibility. There was never a critical situation created by human ingenuity which did not contain its own solution. The same technology which has made instantaneous information-flow a chemical danger to every culture in the world has also created the power of total re-construction and pre-construction of models of situations. For nearly a century we have employed reconstruction as historical method. Instead of a view of the past we simply re-create a model of it. This method began in detective fiction, and in symbolist poetry. Instead of a theory of a crime, the whole crime reconstructed. Instead of a poetic statement about an experience, the situation which is formula for that experience. In a movie like Richard III by Lawrence Olivier there is expert reconstruction of an Elizabethan play and also reconstruction of the visual and textural and political period about which the play is concerned. The historical expertise of dozens of scholars led to a working model which any school-child could enjoy equally with an adult. GEOGRAPHY AND TIME ARE NOW CAPSULATED. Our tendency has been to make possible the co-existence of all cultures and also of all pasts. But this means that we can also anticipate the effects of all our present actions and technology. What we must know in order to achieve this is the fact that the media of communication are not mere catalysts but have their own physics and chemistry which enter into every moment of social alchemy and change. THE PHYSICS OF TYPOGRAPHIC LINEALITY HAVE DOMINATED OUR PERCEPTION Previously Newtonian mechanics had been a closed system of perception. But we have moved swiftly beyond mechanization in this century, and mechanical metaphors are mostly irrelevant to the physics of our media and the demands which we should now make of our education. Why make the media of light fight on the side of darkened perception? If we can no longer tolerate trial and error in modern urban and economic life, neither is the fact of traditional time-lag in educational procedure a matter for banal and cynical observation. When all kinds of information flowed slowly in a society, educational irrelevance could be corrected by self-education and by individual brilliance. THAT WON’T WORK TODAY.