the telegraph, man had initiated that outering or extension of his central nervous system that is now approaching an extension of consciousness with satellite broadcasting. To put one's nerves outside, and one's physical organs inside the nervous system, or the brain, is to initiate a situation-if not a concept-of dread. Having glanced at the major trauma of the telegraph on conscious life, noting that it ushers in the Age of Anxiety and of Pervasive Dread, we can turn to some specific instances of this uneasiness and growing jitters. Whenever any new medium or human extension occurs, it creates a new myth for itself, usually associated with a major figure: Aretino, the Scourge of Princes and the Puppet of Printing; Napoleon and the trauma of industrial change; Chaplin, the public conscience of the movie; Hitler, the tribal totem of radio; and Florence Nightingale, the first singer of human woe by telegraph wire. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), wealthy and refined member of the powerful new English group engendered by industrial power, began to pick up human-distress signals, as a young lady. They were quite undecipherable at first. They upset her entire way of life, and couldn't be adjusted to her image of parents or friends or suitors. It was sheer genius that enabled her to translate the new diffused anxiety and dread of life into the idea of deep human involvement and hospital reform. She began to think, as well as to live, her time, and she discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare. Care of the body became balm for the nerves in the age that had extended its nervous system outside itself for the first time in human history. To put the Florence Nightingale story in new media terms is quite simple. She arrived on a distant scene where controls from the London center were of the common pre-electric hierarchical pattern. Minute division and delegation of functions and separation of powers, normal in military and industrial organization then and long afterward, created an imbecile system of waste and inefficiency which for the first time got reported daily by