commitment demanded by the TV form. Even teachers on TV 
seem to be endowed by the student audiences with a 
charismatic or mystic character that much exceeds the feelings 
developed in the classroom or lecture hall. In the course of 
many studies of audience reactions to TV teaching, there 
recurs this puzzling fact. The viewers feel that the teacher has 
a dimension almost of sacredness. This feeling does not have 
its basis in concepts or ideas, but seems to creep in uninvited 
and unexplained. It baffles both the students and the analysts 
of their reactions. Surely, there could be no more telling touch 
to tip us off to the character of TV. This is not so much a 
visual as a tactual-auditory medium that involves all of our 
senses in depth interplay. For people long accustomed to the 
merely visual experience of the typographic and photographic 
varieties, it would seem to be the synesthesia , or tactual depth 
of TV experience, that dislocates them from their usual