takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children 
had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents 
when they began grade one.”

   “The medium is the message“ means, in terms of the electronic 
age, that a totally new environment has been created. The 
“content” of this new environment is the old mechanized 
environment of the industrial age. The new environment 
reprocesses the old one as radically as TV is reprocessing the 
film. For the “content” of TV is the movie. TV is environmental 
and imperceptible, like all environments. We are aware only of 
the “content” or the old environment. When machine 
production was new, it gradually created an environment 
whose content was the old environment of agrarian life and 
the arts and crafts. This older environment was elevated to an 
art form by the new mechanical environment. The machine