world of public interaction has the same inclusive scope of integral interplay that has hitherto characterized only our private nervous systems. That is because electricity is organic in character and confirms the organic social bond by its technological use in telegraph and telephone, radio, and other forms. The simultaneity of electric communication, also characteristic of our nervous system, makes each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world. To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience. Actively, we are more likely to have this awareness when reading the newspaper or watching a TV show. One way to grasp the change from the mechanical to the electric age is by noticing the difference between the layout of a literary and a telegraph press, say between the London Times and the Daily Express, or between The New York Times and the New York Daily News. It is the difference between columns representing points of view, and a mosaic of unrelated scraps in a field unified by a dateline. Whatever else there is, there can be no point of view in a mosaic of simultaneous items. The world of impressionism, associated with painting in the late nineteenth century, found its more extreme form in the pointillisme of Seurat and the refractions of light in the world of Monet and Renoir. The stipple of points of Seurat is close to the present technique of sending pictures by telegraph, and close to the form of the TV image or mosaic made by the scanning finger. All of these anticipate later electric forms because, like the digital computer with its multiple yes-no dots and dashes, they caress the contours of every kind of being by the multiple touches of these points. Electricity offers a means of getting in touch with every facet of being at once, like the brain itself. Electricity is only incidentally visual and auditory; it is primarily tactile. As the age of electricity began to establish itself in the later nineteenth century, the entire world of the arts began to reach