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It is this trend toward more and more power with less and less hardware that is characteristic of the electric age of information.
The Russians had only to adapt their traditions of Eastern icon and image-building to the new electric media in order to be aggressively effective in the modern world of information.
With instant electric technology, the globe itself can never again be more than a village, and the very nature of city as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like a fading shot in a movie.
The future of work consists of learning a living in the automation age.
For electricity not only gives primacy to process, whether in making or in learning, but it makes independent the source of energy from the location of the process.
Any subject taken in depth at once relates to others subjects.
Automation is not an extension of the mechanical principles of fragmentation and separation of operations. It is rather the invasion of the mechanical world by the instantaneous character of electricity. That is why those involved in automation insist that it is a way of thinking, as much as it is a way of doing.
Such is also the character of “mass media.” They are an indication, not of the size of their audiences, but of the fact that everybody becomes involved in them at the same time.
Automation affects not just production, but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation circuit, quite as much as the reader of the mosaic telegraph press makes his own news, or just is his own news.
Energy and production now tend to fuse with information and learning. Marketing and consumption tend to become one with learning, enlightenment, and the intake of information.
Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness, so that computers seem to “think.”
But a conscious computer would still be one that was an extension of our consciousness, as a telescope is an extension of our eyes, or as a ventriloquist’s dummy is an extension of the ventriloquist.
As for technological acceleration, it now approaches the speed of light.
With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communications.
As anything becomes more complex, it becomes less specialized. Man is more complex and less specialized than a dinosaur.
Total interdependence is the starting fact.
