organic social bond by its technological use in telegraph and 
telephone, radio, and other forms. The simultaneity of electric 
communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, 
makes each of us present and accessible to every other person 
in the world. To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at 
once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, 
experience. Actively, we are more likely to have this awareness 
when reading the newspaper or watching a TV show.

     One way to grasp the change from the mechanical to the 
electric age is by noticing the difference between the layout of 
a literary and a telegraph press, say between the London Times  
and the Daily Express , or between The New York Times  and the 
New York Daily News . It is the difference between columns 
representing points of view, and a mosaic of unrelated scraps 
in a field unified by a dateline. Whatever else there is, there can