Explorations 289 Any change in any medium always causes modifications in all other media or languages within the same culture. Today in our simultaneous world such changes are felt as abrupt and drastic. They always were. But now we notice. Let’s now take a quick tour of the walls knocked over by media change. Writing was the break-through from sound to sight. But with the end of the acoustic wall came chronology, tick-tock time, architecture. Writing, the enclosure of speech and sound space, split off song and dance and music from speech. It split off harmonia from mimesis. Writing permitted the visual analysis of the dynamic logos that produced philology, logic, rhetoric, geometry, etc. Modern physics and mathematics, like modern art before them, gradually abandoned visual for acoustic or non-Euclidean space. With writing on paper came the road. The road and paper meant organization at a distance: armies, empires, and the end of city walls. But the manuscript was far from being the printed page. It was nearer to our photographic journalism. It had to be read slowly, aloud. The manuscript reader automatically found it easier to memorize all he read than refer again and again to this form. Until print, readers carried their lore at the tips of their tongues. With print from movable type (the first application of assembly-line method to a handicraft), came fast, silent reading. Print knocked down the monastic walls of social and corporate study. The Bible: religion without walls. But print isolated the scholar. It created the enterprising individual who, like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or Dr. Faustus, could over-run time and history and cultures and peoples. Print evoked the walls of the classroom. Print could channel so much information to the individual that had previously been in the mind and memory of the teacher alone, that it upset all existing educational procedures. It upset the monopoly of Latin by making possible multi-lingual study. It fostered the vernaculars and enlarged the walls between nations. It speeded up language, thereby setting new walls between speech and song, and song and instrumentation. Print led to spoken poetry and silently read poetry, thus changing the nature of verse entirely. Printed music entirely changed the structures of musical forms. In America print and book-culture became the dominant form from the beginning, setting walls between literature and art, and art and life, which were less obvious in Europe. In America print was a technological matrix of all subsequent invention. Its assembly-lines finally reached expression in Detroit and the motor-car: the home without walls.