The mere interrelating of people by selected information is now the principal source of wealth in the electric age. In the preceding mechanical age, work had not been like that at all. Work had meant the processing of various materials by assembly-line fragmentation of operations and hierarchically delegated authority. Electric power circuits, in relation to the same processing, eliminate both the assembly line and the delegated authority. Especially with the computer, the work effort is applied at the "programming" level , and such effort is one of information and knowledge. In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speed-ups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge." It is as if a symphony composer, instead of sending his manuscript to the printer and thence to the conductor and to the individual members of the orchestra, were to compose directly on an electronic instrument that would render each note or theme as if on the appropriate instrument.

In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speedups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge.

On the telephone only the authority of knowledge will work.

The absolute monarch is powerless opposite the superior knowledge of the bureaucratic expert.

Each of the Empedocles passages stresses "a double truth." This is a matter central to Eliot, but it is also closely involved in the work of Yeats, who, as l have suggested, has elucidated the procedure in his brief essay on "The Emotion of Multitude." This emotion, or sense of the universal in the particular, is born of "a double truth," somewhat in the mode of Quantum Mechanics where the chemical bond is the result not of a connection but of a "resonant interval" such as must obtain between the wheel and the axle. The means indicated by Yeats for achieving the emotion of multitude are familiar to modern students of Shakespeare under the head of "double plots," and these means were taught in antiquity, as essential to the aetiological epic or the Epyllion. (See Marjorie Crump's The 56+3 Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid.)

Paradoxically the sudden intrusion of Empedocles in the midst of his account of the cosmic process has exactly the effect that Yeats describes in "The Emotion of Multitude." The sudden encounter between the author and his readers, or between the author and his medium (language), creates an unexpected involvement in the very making process itself.

The simultaneous has created the mass media and mass publics, for the mass has less to do with numbers than with speed. At electric speed it is the sender who is sent. This instantaneous factor may well have changed the mass audience from passive receivers to active participants and producers.

The philosopher is impatient to correct the stupidities and misconceptions of his public and the artist is eager to open the doors of perception for his public, which he feels has been completely deprived of vision.

Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not of physical quantity.

In his study "The Emotion of Multitude,” W .B. Yeats explained why the interface of parallel but unconnected actions creates the sense of universality in poetry and drama, the sense of the crowd.

A frontier, or borderline, is the space between two worlds, constituting a kind of double plot or action that the poet W. B. Yeats discovered to be the archetypal formula for producing "the emotion of multitude" or the sense of universality. In his essay "The Emotion of Multitude" Yeats explains and illustrates how in poetry and in art, the alignment of two actions without interconnection performs a kind of magical change in the interacting components.

Yeats himself was a great frontiersman, and there's a famous passage in Yeats in which he says that one of the defects of French literature is its lack of double plots or parallel structures, without which you cannot achieve the emotion of multitude. It is by a parallel between two kinds of actions which Shakespeare frequently uses that you achieve the emotion of multitude.

In the decision-making and "make happen" aspect of the work operation, the telephone and other such speedups of information have ended the divisions of delegated authority in favor of the "authority of knowledge.

…telephone in hand, the decision maker can exercise only the authority of knowledge, not delegated authority.

And the satisfactions are just as few for the big executives as for the symphonists, since a player in a big orchestra can hear nothing of the music that reaches the audience. He gets only noise.

Telephone in hand, the decision maker can exercise only the authority of knowledge, not delegated authority.

Artists have, during the past century, been vividly aware of the ever-increasing measure in which the audience shares in the creative process. This is an aspect of the “mass audience” that is frequently deplored and misunderstood by the representatives of the old mechanical culture and environment. Such people tend to see the mass audience as the mere obliteration of old landmarks and of individual differences. They pay no attention to the increasingly creative awareness of people who are deeply involved in one another by means of electric circuitry. They are engaged in the ancient routine of regarding the patterns of the previous environment with nostalgic reverence. 

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 an inclusive field of relations.