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06859_Field_TCUM T424.txt
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1996-04-10
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age, as it belonged to the prehistoric cultures. All primitive
societies are implosive, like the spoken word. But “technology is
explicitness,” as Lyman Bryson has said; and explicitness, or
specialist extension of functions, is centralism and explosion of
functions, and not implosion, contraction or simultaneity.
An airline executive who is much aware of the implosive
character of world aviation asked a corresponding executive of
each airline in the world to send him a pebble from outside his
office. His idea was to build a little cairn of pebbles from all
parts of the world. When asked, “So what?” he said that in one
spot one could touch every part of the world because of
aviation. In effect, he had hit upon the mosaic or iconic
principle of simultaneous touch and interplay that is inherent in
the implosive speed of the airplane. The same principle of
implosive mosaic is even more characteristic of electric