disappears, and electric automation brings about a withdrawal 
of the work force from industry. Instead of being automated 
themselves—fragmented in task and function—as had been the 
tendency under mechanization, men in the electric age move 
increasingly to involvement in diverse jobs simultaneously, and 
to the work of learning, and to the programming of computers.

     This revolutionary logic inherent in the electric age was 
made fairly clear in the early electric forms of telegraph and 
telephone that inspired the “talking machine.” These new forms 
that did so much to recover the vocal, auditory, and mimetic 
world that had been repressed by the printed word, also 
inspired the strange new rhythms of “the jazz age,” the various 
forms of syncopation and symbolist discontinuity that, like 
relativity and quantum physics, heralded the end of the 
Gutenberg era with its smooth, uniform lines of type and