common extension of the central nervous system with the whole of mankind. Under these conditions, "conspicuous waste" or "conspicuous consumption" become lost causes, and even the hardiest of the rich dwindle into modest ways of timid service to mankind. At this point, some may still inquire why the telegraph should create "human interest," and why the earlier press did not. The section on The Press may help these readers. But there may also be a lurking obstacle to perception. The instant aJl-at-onceness and total involvement of the telegraphic form still repels some literary sophisticates. For them, visual continuity and fixed "point of view" render the immediate participation of the instant media as distasteful and unwelcome as popular sports. These people are as much media victims, unwittingly mutilated by their studies and toil, as children in a Victorian blacking factory. For many people, then, who have had their sensibilities irremediably skewed and locked into the fixed postures of mechanical writing and printing, the iconic forms of the electric age are as opaque, or even as invisible, as hormones to the unaided eye. It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes. The most that can be done by the prose commentator is to capture the media in as many characteristic and revealing postures as he can manage to discover. Let us examine a series of these postures of the telegraph, as this new medium encounters other media like the book and the newspaper. By 1848 the telegraph, then only four years old, compelled several major American newspapers to form a collective organization for newsgathering. This effort became the basis of the Associated Press, which, in turn, sold news service to subscribers. In one sense, the real meaning of this form of the