stepping up the visual component in experience until it filled the 
field of attention. Psychologists define hypnosis as the filling of 
the field of attention by one sense only. At such a moment “the 
garden” dies. That is, the garden indicates the interplay of all 
the senses in haptic harmony. With the instressed concern with 
one sense only, the mechanical principle of abstraction and 
repetition emerges into explicit form. Technology is explicitness, 
as Lyman Bryson said. And explicitness means the spelling out 
of one thing at a time, one sense at a time, one mental or 
physical operation at a time. Since the object of the present 
book is to discern the origins and modes of the Gutenberg 
configuration of events, it will be well to consider the effects of 
the alphabet on native populations today. For as they are  in 
relation to the phonetic alphabet, so we once were .