. . . many students of the media assume that it is 
the content of media, whether of the sung word, 
spoken word, the written word, that really 
matters. It is this sort of assumption that has 
tended to divert attention away from the forms 
and parameters of the media themselves. The 
sensory modalities of the media as such have not 
been studied. The very idea of “content” which 
obsesses us, on the other hand is unknown to 
nonliterate societies. Our western divisions 
between form and content occur with literacy and 
because of literacy. Literacy is itself a work of 
intense visual stress in a culture. When men begin 
to translate the speech complex into a visual code