In Tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton. Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the "content" of the other, obscuring the operation of both. Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last ditch stand of the artist. I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it. New media may at first appear as mere codes of transmission for older achievement and established patterns of thought. But nobody could make the mistake of supposing that phonetic writing merely made it possible for the Greeks to set down in visual order what they had though and known before writing. In the same way printing made literature possible. It did not merely encode literature. If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness? At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential. In the name of progress, our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. | 
