“pseudoevent,” a label applied to the new media, in general, 
because of their power to give new patterns to our lives by 
acceleration of older patterns. It is necessary to reflect that 
this same insidious power was once felt in the old  media, 
including languages. All media exist to invest our lives with 
artificial perception and arbitrary values.

     All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns 
of personal and political interdependence change with any 
acceleration of information. Some feel keenly that speed-up has 
impoverished the world they knew by changing its forms of 
human interassociation. There is nothing new or strange in a 
parochial preference for those pseudoevents that happened to 
enter into the composition of society just before the electric 
revolution of this century. The student of media soon comes to 
expect the new media of any period whatever to be classed as