Essential McLuhan 130 were Africans taken out of the teaching profession and trained for this business. But even when trained to follow film the native of Ghana cannot accept a film about Nigerians. He cannot generalize his experience from film to film, such is the depth of involvement in particular experiences. This empathic involvement, natural to the oral society and the audile-tactile man, is cracked by the phonetic alphabet which abstracts the visual component from the sensory complex. This leads to one further point of Wilson’s. He explained the relevance of Chaplin’s technique in making films for native audiences. The story was in the gestures, and the gestures were complex and precise. Wilson noted the inability of Africans to follow complex narratives but also their subtlety in dramatization: One thing we were ignorant of at this time, and something we ought to have known a lot more about is that those African audiences are very good at roleplaying. Part of a child’s education in a pre-literate society is role-playing; he’s got to learn to play the role of elders in certain given situations. One thing fortunately we did discover was that the cartoon went down very well. This puzzled us until we found out that puppetry is quite a common pastime. But there is more to this point than Wilson supposes. Had TV been available he would have been amazed to discover how much more readily the Africans took to it than they did to film. For with film you are the camera and the non-literate man cannot use his eyes like a camera. But with TV you are the screen. And TV is two-dimensional and sculptural in its tactile contours. TV is not a narrative medium, is not so much visual as audile-tactile. That is why it is empathic, and why the optimal mode of TV image is the cartoon. For the cartoon appeals to natives as it does to our children, because it is a world in which the visual component is so small that the viewer has as much to do as in a crossword puzzle.8 More important still, with the bounding line of a cartoon, as with a cave painting, we tend to be in an area of the interplay of the senses, and hence of strongly haptic or tactile character. That is to say, the art of the draughtsman and the celator alike is a strongly tactile and tangible art. And even Euclidean geometry is by modern standards very tactile. 8 For more data on the new space orientation in TV-viewing, see H.M.McLuhan, “Inside the Five Sense Sensorium,” Canadian Architect, June, 1961, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 49–54. This is a matter discussed by William Ivins, Jr., in Art and Geometry: A Study in Space Intuitions. He explains the unverbalized assumptions of Greek space awareness: “The Greeks never mentioned among the axioms