The Swiss cultural historian Giedion has had to invent the concept "anonymous history" in order to write an account of the new technological culture in Anglo-Saxondom.

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.

It is a characteristic chiasmus that waits upon the utmost development of any process that the last phase shall show characteristics opposite to the early phases.

A typical example of massive psychic chiasmus or reversal occurred when Western man fought the harder for individuality as he surrendered the idea of unique personal existence.

Just as Mill fought for individuality even though he had given up the self, the poets and artists moved towards the idea of impersonal process in art production in proportion as they berated the new masses for impersonal process in the consumption of art products. A similar and related reversal or chiasmus occurred when the consumer of popular art was invited by new art forms to become participant in the art process itself

Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend to eliminate the fragmented specialties of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization

Poe saw plainly that the anticipation of effect was the only way to achieve organic control for the creative process. T. S. Eliot, like Baudelaire and Valéry, gives his entire sanction to Poe's discovery.

No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him.

Society was a hostile and polluted realm into which the men made forays and from which they returned with loot. Their women were to be ·kept pure from this commercial pollution.

“Like Joyce, McLuhan is more interested in the fun than the pun. The pun itself is simply one of many weapons in a mammoth arsenal of verbal stunts; puns frequently become basic building blocks for more elaborate structures. For example, when McLuhan wrote, ‘Boldness of print created boldness of expression” he was not simply contrasting two meanings of one word; he was (1) using those related meanings to upset the reader’s expectations and (2) employing the identical words, ‘boldness’ and ‘boldness’ to perfectly balance a formally symmetric sentence. Placing such a tight, rhythmic sentence at the close of a more complex, verbally acrobatic paragraph adds a musical punctuation of contrast and completion. In composition, McLuhan knows the score.”
Thomas W. Cooper

Such is also the case in symbolist poetry whose completion of effect from moment to moment requires the reader to participate in the poetic process itself.

A ball game or a horse race can now be replayed for its meaning, as it were, minus the experience.