when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and 
repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any 
other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, 
will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much 
greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to 
restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took 
place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now 
tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist 
technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology 
retribalizes. The process of upset resulting from a new 
distribution of skills is accompanied by much culture lag in 
which people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they 
were old ones, and come up with ideas of “population 
explosion” in an age of implosion. Newton, in an age of clocks, 
managed to present the physical universe in the image of a 
clock.