higher apes to grasp and let go, with the strategy of the stock 
market speculators. It is all capsulated in the popular variant 
on Robert Browning: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or 
what’s a metaphor.” All media are active metaphors in their 
power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word 
was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his 
environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind 
of information retrieval that can range over the total 
environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex 
systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience 
into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of 
explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense 
experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked 
and retrieved at any instant.

     In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more