done but to the intercommunication among the staff, itself. (In other words, the medium is the message.) Mathematically stated, Parkinson's Law says that the rate of accumulation of office staff per annum will be between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done." "Work to be done," of course, means the transformation of one kind of material energy into some new form, as trees into lumber or paper, or clay into bricks or plates, or metal into pipe. In terms of this kind of work, the accumulation of office personnel in a navy, for example, goes up as the number of ships goes down. What Parkinson carefully hides from himself and his readers is simply the fact that in the area of information movement, the main "work to be done" is actually the movement of information. The mere interrelating of people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the delegated authority. Especially with the computer, the work effort is applied at the "programming" level, and such effort is one of information and knowledge. In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speed-ups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge." It is as if a symphony composer, instead of sending his manuscript to the printer and thence to the conductor and to the individual members of the orchestra, were to compose directly on an electronic instrument that would render each note or theme as if on the appropriate instrument. This would end at once all the delegation and specialism of the symphony orchestra that makes it such a natural model of the mechanical and industrial age. The