Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic 
implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of 
literate Western civilization. For tribal peoples, for those whose 
entire social existence is an extension of family life, radio will 
continue to be a violent experience. Highly literate societies, 
that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in 
business and politics, have managed to absorb and to 
neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those 
communities that have had only brief or superficial experience 
of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.

     To understand such effects, it is necessary to see literacy 
as typographic technology, applied not only to the rationalizing 
of the entire procedures of production and marketing, but to 
law and education and city planning, as well. The principles of 
continuity, uniformity, and repeatability derived from print