have men understood the psychic mechanisms involved in 
invention and technology. Today it is the instant speed of 
electric information that, for the first time, permits easy 
recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change 
and development. The entire world, past and present, now 
reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an enormously 
accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and 
with the understanding of causes. So, with the use of electricity 
in previously mechanized situations, men easily discover causal 
connections and patterns that were quite unobservable at the 
slower rates of mechanical change. If we play backward the 
long development of literacy and printing and their effects on 
social experience and organization, we can easily see how these 
forms brought about that high degree of social uniformity and 
homogeneity of society that is indispensable for mechanical 
industry. Play them backward, and we get just that shock of