into the fixed postures of mechanical writing and printing, the 
iconic forms of the electric age are as opaque, or even as 
invisible, as hormones to the unaided eye. It is the artist’s job 
to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit 
attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and 
experiment with new means of arranging experience, even 
though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed 
in their old perceptual attitudes. The most that can be done by 
the prose commentator is to capture the media in as many 
characteristic and revealing postures as he can manage to 
discover. Let us examine a series of these postures of the 
telegraph, as this new medium encounters other media like the 
book and the newspaper.

     By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old, 
compelled several major American newspapers to form a