our central nervous system, that aboriginal mass medium, the 
vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two most intimate 
and potent of human technologies could not possibly have 
failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human 
experience. So it proved with Hitler, the somnambulist. But does 
the detribalized and literate West imagine that it has earned 
immunity to the tribal magic of radio as a permanent 
possession? Our teenagers in the 1950s began to manifest 
many of the tribal stigmata. The adolescent, as opposed to the 
teenager, can now be classified as a phenomenon of literacy. Is 
it not significant that the adolescent was indigenous only to 
those areas of England and America where literacy had invested 
even food with abstract visual values? Europe never had 
adolescents. It had chaperones. Now, to the teenager, radio 
gives privacy, and at the same time it provides the tight tribal 
bond of the world of the common market, of song, and of