embrace. Such is also the character of “mass media.” They are 
an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact 
that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time. 
Thus commodity industries under automation share the same 
structural character of the entertainment industries in the 
degree that both approximate the condition of instant 
information. Automation affects not just production, but every 
phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer 
becomes producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as 
the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, 
or just is  his own news.

     But there is a component in the automation story that is 
as basic as tactility to the TV image. It is the fact that, in any 
automatic machine, or galaxy of machines and functions, the 
generation and transmission of power is quite separate from