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07138_Field_TCUM T703.txt
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our central nervous system, that aboriginal mass medium, the
vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two most intimate
and potent of human technologies could not possibly have
failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human
experience. So it proved with Hitler, the somnambulist. But does
the detribalized and literate West imagine that it has earned
immunity to the tribal magic of radio as a permanent
possession? Our teenagers in the 1950s began to manifest
many of the tribal stigmata. The adolescent, as opposed to the
teenager, can now be classified as a phenomenon of literacy. Is
it not significant that the adolescent was indigenous only to
those areas of England and America where literacy had invested
even food with abstract visual values? Europe never had
adolescents. It had chaperones. Now, to the teenager, radio
gives privacy, and at the same time it provides the tight tribal
bond of the world of the common market, of song, and of