Mumford explains in The City in History , had achieved a social 
and institutional extension of all human faculties. Speed-up 
and city aggregates only served to separate these from one 
another in more specialist forms. The electronic age cannot 
sustain the very low gear of a centre-margin structure such as 
we associate with the past two thousand years of the Western 
world. Nor is this a question of values. If we understood our 
older media, such as roads and the written word, and if we 
valued their human effects sufficiently, we could reduce or even 
eliminate the electronic factor from our lives. Is there an 
instance of any culture that understood the technology that 
sustained its structure and was prepared to keep it that way? 
If so, that would be an instance of values or reasoned 
preference. The values or preferences that arise from the mere 
automatic operation of this or that technology in our social 
lives are not capable of being perpetuated.