Understanding media 163 mechanical forms of the waltz. Cool jazz came in quite naturally after the first impact of radio and movie had been absorbed. In the special Russian issue of Life magazine for September 13, 1963, it is mentioned in Russian restaurants and night clubs, “though the Charleston is tolerated, the Twist is taboo.” All this is to say that a country in the process of industrialization is inclined to regard hot jazz as consistent with its developing programs. The cool and involved form of the Twist, on the other hand, would strike such a culture at once as retrograde and incompatible with its new mechanical stress. The Charleston, with its aspect of a mechanical doll agitated by strings, appears in Russia as an avant-garde form. We, on the other hand, find the avant-garde in the cool and the primitive, with its promise of depth involvement and integral expression. The “hard” sell and the “hot” line become mere comedy in the TV age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself. America, in fact, would seem to be living through the reverse process that Margaret Mead described in Time magazine (September 4, 1954): “There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational, and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together—and the people themselves must decide to move.” Margaret Mead is thinking here of change as uniform speed-up of motion or a uniform hotting-up of temperatures in backward societies. We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to the point where we could say, “Six hours less radio in Indonesia next week or there will be a great falling off in literary attention.” Or, “We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week.” Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economies of the world. In the merely personal and private sphere we are often reminded of how changes of tone and attitude are demanded of different times and seasons in order to keep situations in hand. British clubmen, for the sake of companionship and amiability, have long excluded the hot topics of religion and politics from mention inside the highly participational club. In the same vein, W.H.Auden wrote, “…this season the man of goodwill will wear his heart up his sleeve, not on it… the honest manly style is today suited only to Iago” (Introduction to John Betjeman’s Slick But Not Streamlined). In the Renaissance, as print technology hotted up the social milieu to a very high point, the gentleman and the courtier (Hamlet- Mercutio style) adopted, in contrast, the casual and cool nonchalance of the playful and superior being. The Iago allusion of Auden reminds us that Iago was the alter ego and assistant of the intensely earnest and very non-