Laws of media 379 Both the retrieval and reversal aspects of the tetrad involve metamorphosis. The tired cliché, movies, became available as an art form when TV replaced them as the entertainment surround. Likewise the entire planet has been retrieved as a programmable resource and art form (i.e., ecology) as a side-effect of the new satellite ground. Money obsolesces barter, but retrieves potlatch in the form of 4 Structuralism 57. Harold Innis, in The Bias of Communication and in Empire and Communications, made many historical observations on the differing Gestalt patterns and structures in human organization as they related to different means available for shaping situations. One of his most frequent illustrations of this principle concerned the types of bureaucracy that grew from the use of stone, on the one hand, and paper, on the other hand, as materials for writing. When stone or brick or clay are used as writing materials, the bureaucracy or human organization of interests and energies tends to take a priestly form dedicated to stability in time. When paper is available, the bureaucracy tends to become military, with a strong interest in the control of space. Innis was not only concerned with the study of changes in the outer patterns of human organization resulting from different means of communication in time and space, but he was much interested in the changes that took place in the perceptual lives of the people involved in these changes. He played the inner and outer aspects of innovation and change back and forth across each other as a figure/ground interface. conspicuous consumption. The digital watch displaces the old circular dial, and retrieves the sundial form, which likewise used light itself to tell the time and which also had no moving parts. In the West, electronic technology displaces visual space and retrieves acoustic space in a new form, as the ground now includes the detritus of alphabetic civilization. However, the effect in the East is quite different, to the degree that its culture does not include a ground of phonetic literacy and industrial hardware. Harold Innis showed (Empire and Communications) how a shift in the media of writing, from clay tablets or stone to papyrus, was sufficient to displace temple bureaucracies by military ones with expansionist programs of conquest. The new speed of the lightweight medium was enough to release left-hemisphere outward drive and aggression. At present, Iran is enjoying the impact of electric media and driving inward at a furious rate, having shifted from a military- to a temple-controlled government, and spearheading a revival of ancient Islamic mores that is more than latent in many of Iran’s neighbours. The principle that during the stages of their development all things appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient doctrine. Interest in the power of things to reverse themselves by evolution is evidenced by a great diversity of observations, sage and jocular. Alexander Pope wrote, in “Essay on Man” (Epistle H): Vice is a monster of such frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen;