very clear as we move through the sixteenth and later 
centuries. But today, as electricity creates conditions of 
extreme interdependence on a global scale, we move swiftly 
again into an auditory world of simultaneous events and over-
all awareness. Yet the habits of literacy persist in our speech, 
our sensibilities, and in our arrangement of the spaces and 
times of our daily lives. Short of some catastrophe, literacy and 
visual bias could bear up for a long time against electricity and 
“unified field” awareness. And the same is true the other way 
around. Germans and the Japanese, while far-advanced in 
literate and analytic technology, retained the core of auditory 
tribal unity and total togetherness. The advent of radio, and 
electricity generally, was not only for them but for all tribal 
cultures a most intense experience. Long-literate cultures have 
naturally more resistance to the auditory dynamic of the total 
electric field culture of our time.