Essential McLuhan 290 In America the press moulded public opinion and created a new base for politics. The press was a means of mobilizing public opinion and made national road systems. The press became in large measure a substitute for the book. But the press page is not the book page. The press creates new mental habits. With telegraph only vernacular walls remain. All other cultural walls collapse under the impact of its instantaneous flash. With the wire-photo the vernacular walls are undermined. The telegraph translates writing into sound. The electrification of writing was almost as big a step back towards the acoustic world as those steps since taken by telephone, radio, TV. The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The movie and TV: classroom without walls. Before print the community at large was the centre of education. Today, information-flow and educational impact outside the classroom is so far in excess of anything occurring inside the classroom that we must reconsider the educational process itself. The classroom is now a place of detention, not attention. Attention is elsewhere. It is now obvious that as all languages are mass media, so the new media are new languages. To unscramble our Babel we must teach these languages and their grammars on their own terms. This is something quite different from the educational use of audio-visual aids or of closed-circuit TV. Culture Without Literacy The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today. The perfection of the means of communi-cation has given this average power-complex of the human being an enormous extension of expression. The telephone, the teleprinter and the wireless made it possible for orders from the highest levels to be given direct to the lowest levels, where, on account of the absolute authority behind them, they were carried out uncritically; or brought it about that numerous offices and command centres were directly connected with the supreme leadership from which they received their sinister orders without any intermediary; or resulted in a widespread surveillance of the citizen, or in a high degree of secrecy surrounding criminal happenings. To the