The basic strategy for coping with information overload is myth.

50 years ago, people could be sure of who they were that way. Today, that no longer serves as human identity. For example, among our own children today, they refuse to accept jobs as a form of identity or a mark of significance. They want roles, instead. The job was a highly classified, specialized activity. Today, the role is returning.

A man, say a top executive, doesn't have a job. He has 50 jobs, 60 jobs. That's a role. A mother doesn't have a job. She has 60 jobs. That's a role. In the electric age, all forms of human activity become associated, closely interwoven again. Fragmentation, specialism disappears with circuitry. Roles return. Roles equal depth, equal involvement, equal commitment, equal dedication.

Firstly the audience as a workforce ends all rating systems. You see when the audience becomes participant, there's no need any longer to rate programs. The audience makes its own show by being in the show. This is a happening. A "happening" being a world in which everything happens at once, like a newspaper.

After centuries of stress on instruction, we're moving into a world where education becomes a form of discovery instead of instruction.

The whole education establishment is sort of trending in that way to switch from instruction to discovery as a way of learning. When the whole environment is a world of information, as we live in electronically, then the meaning of instruction inside the classroom takes on a totally different character.

With the coming of xerography, the reader becomes publisher and writer. The book becomes a service instead of a package. People can then phone up and tell some electric information service the sort of book they need, and it will be quickly produced as an information service and sent out electronically to the individual.

To understand the change from the world of pictures to the world of icons is to understand the world of change from which there is gradation and chiaroscuro and continuity, to the world in which everything is abrupt interface. The world of the icon is a world of abrupt interface.

Take off the date line from any newspaper and you'll have a Surrealist poem.

In an electric society, where everybody affects everybody at the same moment, it is impossible any longer to say, "He done it." It's just as realistic to say, "I did it." Again, at instant speeds of involvement of people in people, not only is there no possibility of assigning guilt, or the things that people formerly had legalistically assigned guilt, there's also the difficulty of even knowing who we are.

In my opinion this is an example of hidden ground behind the motorcar. Why do Americans go outside to be alone, unlike other people? That is a pretty tough question, but as far as I've been able to determine it relates to the fact that 200 years ago or more, our people came to this continent to fight nature, to tame the wilderness, and to subdue the elements.

This typically led them out of doors to a kind of aggressive action against the environment. The environment was the enemy. It had to be subdued, tamed. This developed a habit of going outside aggressively and extrovertedly to fight.