"What difference is the electric technology making to our interest in content in what the medium actually says?"
Philosopher Marshall McLuhan in 1964 "One of the effects of switching over to circuitry from mechanical moving parts and wheels is an enormous increase in the amount of information that is moving. You cannot cope with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified patterns. You tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such complex data, moving at very high speeds. So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on - the need for pattern recognition. It's a need which the poets foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing experience. . . . we're living mythically now and we've continued to think in the old rational patterns of the older technologies but we are suddenly forced to live in such complex and compressed and high speed systems that we inevitably switch into mythic patterns."