One obvious comment on my subject title would be to say that today's problems are the new media. We are now mainly engaged as spectators in watching a 500 - year old educational cultural achievement go down the drain. Somebody pulled the plug! A way of life based on the primacy of the printed word is dissolving in front of us. It may even prove to be the case that the entire tradition of phonetic writing, which is coextensive with our Western world and the Graeco Roman tradition, cannot sustain the electronic impact -- because, since the rise of literacy at least 2,500 years ago, our world has not been subjected to information moved everywhere, instantly and simultaneously. Let us not fail to ponder that dimension of the instantaneous, for it is the shape and meaning of the spoken word. Today information moves around the clock and around the globe in that instantaneous, simultaneous pattern. And whereas such a pattern has previously been known only to small, closed oral cultures, today it is the shape and experience of the global community of mankind. On what terms can the oral and electron coexist with the written and the consecutive?