15 Explorations The Media Fit the Battle of Jericho The Western world is living through its own past and the pasts of many forgotten cultures. We think we are watching the rushes of recently shot film as we let the dreaming historical eye of the projector god entertain us. Print merely permitted a fixed stereoptic vision of the past. Its imagery- flow was much greater than writing or speech permitted. But it was very far from the simultaneity that came first with the telegraph, and which now characterizes all phases of our culture. The telegraph gave us the global snap-shot which knocked out the walls between capitals and cultures, and created “open diplomacy”, or diplomacy without walls. Olivier’s Richard III movie gives as a single experience the specialist knowledge of many historians of English art and society. It would take one person many years to assemble the details of the past that are there made available to the six-year-old and the professor alike. The simultaneous convergence of many kinds of specialist knowledge results in knocking out all specialist walls. It knocks out the walls between historical and biological categories equally. The child can enter the past as easily as the trained archeologist. History is abandoned to the Bridey Murphys. We can now move into any past on the same terms at least as the cab- driver possesses the present. The upshot of the minute and exact reproduction of a phase of the English past is that it is as vulgarly familiar as the urban features of our own present. This is not to point a moral. The same state of affairs resulting from simultaneity of communication appears in our cities. Cities were always a means of achieving some degree of simultaneity of association and awareness among men. What the family and the tribe had done in this respect for a few, the city did for many. Our technology now removes all city walls and pretexts. The oral and acoustic space of tribal cultures had never met a visual reconstruction of the past. All experience and all past lives were now. Pre- literate man knew only simultaneity. The walls between men, and between arts and sciences, were built on the written or visually arrested word. With the return to simultaneity we enter the tribal and acoustic world once more. Globally.