Technology is explicitness - when technology is new. That same technology, which once defined identity, even created individualism, can in time erode & dissolve identity until it merges once more with its environment.

President Kennedy's signature was done for him by a machine which so exactly reproduced the hand signing his name that experts cannot distinguish between his real signature & the mechanical ones. Malcolm Muggeridge tells how, in the excitement & distress of the Dallas tragedy, no one remembered to turn the machine off. So, the president went on signing "personalized" letters after he was dead.

Technology plucks a man from the engulfing web of society & environment, allows him to see himself in isolation, to examine himself in depth. Then slowly, inexorably, it swallows him, binding him to technology as tightly as society ever held him. Where once he knew himself through others, now he knows himself through images over which he generally exerts little control.

"One only knows that one exists," wrote Goethe, "if one rediscovers oneself in others."

Our fascination with the life & death of Marilyn Monroe derives, I think, from the fact that media stole her soul, took away all personal identity until the only private act left to her was suicide.

Knowledge of media alone is not sufficient protection from them. The moment Marshall McLuhan shifted from private media analyst to public media participant, he was converted into an image the media manipulated & exploited.

As long as the Yippies used media for their own ends, they were wild power loose in the land. When Abbie Hoffman announced the invention of a counterweapon to Mace, the network cameras assembled and two Yippies, male & female, sprayed each other from purple cans labeled Love, tore off their clothes & engaged in intercourse. Newsmen protested, "We can't use that." At this point, Hoffman was in command. But when David Frost said, "Abbie, we have to pause for a commercial," the Yippie revolution was over & Hoffman left for the Virgin Islands.

New media allow us to escape from old environments, but soon imprison us in new environments, namely themselves. For one brief moment we have a clear image of ourselves & our environment, both hitherto invisible because they were too close. They became visible by becoming obsolete.

The appearance of the telegraph & onset of the electronic age allowed Marx to see the structure of the past economic system & Freud to see the nature of literate individualism. Both viewed man & society as separable, in opposition. These were backward glances, the views of men dissatisfied with what they saw in the past, but with no awareness that new environments soon would surround them.