James Reston wrote  in The New York Times  (July 7, 
1957):

          A health director . . . reported this week that a small 
     mouse, which presumably had been watching television, 
     attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat. . . . Both 
     mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here 
     as a reminder that things seem to be changing.

     After three thousand years of explosion, by means of 
fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is 
imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our 
bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric 
technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself 
in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as 
our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of