“The medium is the message” is a phrase that came to me during a conference of radio broadcasters in Vancouver in 1959. TV was threatening the radio world at that time and I wished merely to draw attention to the fact that each medium created its own public and set up a unique equilibrium in its users. The idea that there could be an equilibrium or “homeostasis” among the components of any living system, individual or corporate, stems from the work of Claude Bernard in the middle of the nineteenth century. Taken in a psychological or social context, any new component distorts the balance of the entire system by requiring some kind of partial compensation for the new factor. Gestalt or figure-ground considerations are natural accompaniments of any equilibrium theory, and in the phrase “the medium is the message” there is an interplay of figure and ground in that the “medium” can be figure and the “message” can be ground, or vice versa. To illustrate, the motor car is ground for the figure of the driver, but the same car is figure against the ground of the highway and the basic services of industry and fuel which sustain the car as a social fact.