10 Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another? Why have the effects of media, whether speech, writing, photography or radio, been overlooked by social observers through the past 3500 years of the Western world? The answer to that question, we shall see, is in the power of the media themselves to impose their own assumptions upon our modes of perception. Our media have always constituted the parameters and the framework for the objectives of our Western world. But the assumptions and parameters projected by the structures of the media on and through our sensibilities have long constituted the overall patterns of private and group association in the West. The same structuring of the forms of human association by various media is also true of the non- Western world, and of the lives of pre-literate and archaic man as well. The difference is that in the West our media technologies from script to print, and from Gutenberg to Marconi, have been highly specialized. Specialism creates not stability and equilibrium, but change and trauma, as one segment of experience usurps and overlays the others in aggressive, brawling sequence and cycle. All that ends now in the electronic age, whose media substitute all-at- once-ness for one-thing-at-a-timeness. The movement of information at approximately the speed of light has become by far the largest industry of the world. The consumption of this information has become correspondingly the largest consumer function in the world. The globe has become on one hand a community of learning, and at the same time, with regard to the tightness of its interrelationships, the globe has become a tiny village. Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete, but a threat to continued existence and to sanity. In these circumstances understanding media must mean the understanding of the effects of media. The objectives of new media have tended, fatally, to be set in terms of the parameters and frames of older media. All media testing has been done within the parameters of older media—especially of speech and print. Today in top-management study and planning, assumptions and objectives are recognized to be distinct entities. Let me quote from a Westinghouse “Long Range Planning” brief of August 3, 1960: