typographic literacy had not only produced the Cartesian 
outlook but also the special traits of American psychology and 
politics. By his method of interplay among divergent perceptual 
modes, de Tocqueville was able to react to his world, not in 
sections but as a whole, and as to an open field.  And such is 
the method which A. P. Usher notes has been absent from the 
study of cultural history and change. De Tocqueville had 
employed a procedure such as J. Z. Young describes (p. 77): “It 
may be that a great part of the secret of the brain’s powers is 
the enormous opportunity provided for interaction between the 
effects of stimulating each part of the receiving fields. It is this 
provision of interacting-places or mixing-places that allows us 
to react to the world as a whole  to much greater degree than 
other animals can do.” But our technologies are by no means 
uniformly favorable to this organic function of interplay and of 
interdependence. To investigate this question with respect to