electric, instant coverage was concealed by the mechanical overlay of the visual and industrial patterns of print and printing. The specifically electric effect may seem to appear in this instance as a centralizing and compressional force. By many analysts, the electric revolution has been regarded as a continuation of the process of the mechanization of mankind. Closer inspection reveals quite a different character. For example, the regional press, that had had to rely on postal service and political control through the post office, quickly escaped from this center-margin type of monopoly by means of the new telegraph services. Even in England, where short distances and concentrated population made the railway a powerful agent of centralism, the monopoly of London was dissolved by the invention of the telegraph, which now encouraged provincial competition. The telegraph freed the marginal provincial press from dependence on the big metropolitan press. In the whole field of the electric revolution, this pattern of decentralization appears in multiple guises. It is Sir Lewis Namier's view that telephone and airplane are die biggest single cause of trouble in the world today. Professional diplomats with delegated powers have been supplanted by prime ministers, presidents, and foreign secretaries, who think they could conduct all important negotiations personally. This is also the problem encountered in big business, where it has been found impossible to exercise delegated authority when using the telephone. The very nature of the telephone, as all electric media, is to compress and unify that which had previously been divided and specialized. Only the "authority of knowledge" works by telephone because of the speed that creates a total and inclusive field of relations. Speed requires that the decisions made be inclusive, not fragmentary or partial, so that literate people typically resist the telephone. But radio and TV, we shall see, have the same power of imposing an inclusive order, as of an oral organization. Quite in contrast is the center-margin form of visual and written structures of authority.