We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future. - Marshall McLuhan

Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience. (p. 171)

The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. If art is an “early warning system,” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.

Since Sputnik there is no Nature. Nature is an item contained in a man-made environment of satellites and information.