dangers of comprehension.

     The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and 
paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogeneous 
and uniform space. Thus the real potential of the Roman 
technology was not realized until printing had given road and 
wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. 
Yet the speed-up of the electronic age is as disrupting for 
literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes 
were for tribal villagers. Our speed-up today is not a slow 
explosion outward from centre to margins but an instant 
implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our 
specialist and fragmented civilization of centre-margin 
structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous 
reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. 
This is the new world of the global village. The village, as