Essential McLuhan 338 thermostat in effect encourage a private thermostat for individual manipulation. The age of the mass audience is thus far more individualistic than the preceding age of the public. It is this paradoxical dynamic that confuses every issue about “conformity,” “separatism” and “integration” today. Profoundly contradictory actions and directions prevail in all these situations. This is not surprising in an age of circuitry succeeding the age of the wheel. The feedback loop plays all sorts of tricks to confound the single-plane and one-way direction of thought and action as they had been constituted in the pre-electric age of the machine. Applying the foregoing to the Negro question, one could say that the agrarian South has long tended to regard the Negro as environment. As such, the Negro is a challenge, a threat, a burden. The very phrase “white supremacy” quite as much as the phrase “white trash,” registers this environmental attitude. The environment is the enemy that must be subdued. To the rural man, the conquest of nature is an increasing challenge. It is the Southerner who contributed the cowboy to the frontier. The Virginian, the archetypal cowboy, as it were, confronts the environment as a hostile, natural force. To man on the frontier, other men are environmental and hostile. By contrast, to the townsmen, men appear not as environmental but as content of the urban environment. Parallel to the Negro question is the problem of French Canada. The English Canadians have been the environment of French Canada since the railway and Confederation. However, since the telegraph and radio and television, French Canada and English Canada alike have become the content of this new technology. Electric technology is totally environmental for all human communities today. Hence the great confusion arising from the transformation of environments into antienvironments, as it were. All the earlier groupings that had constituted separate environments before electricity have now become antienvironments or the content of the new technology. Awareness of the old unconscious environments therefore becomes increasingly acute. The content of any new environment is just as unperceived as that of the old one had been initially. As a merely automatic sequence, the succession of environments and the dramatics accompanying them tend to be rather tiresome, if only because the audience is very prone to participate in the dramatics with an enthusiasm proportionate to its lack of awareness. In the electric age all former environments whatever become antienvironments. As such the old environments are transformed into areas of self-awareness and self-assertion, guaranteeing a very lively interplay of forces. The visual sense, alone of our senses, creates the forms of space and time that are uniform, continuous and connected. Euclidean space is the prerogative of visual and literate man. With the advent of electric circuitry and the instant movement of information, Euclidean space recedes and the non-Euclidean geometries emerge. Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician, was perfectly aware of this change in our world when he