The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no "content."
And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all.
For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium.
Then it is not the light but the "content" (or what is really another medium) that is noticed.
The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized.
For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth.
A fairly complete handbook for studying the extensions of man could be made up from selections from Shakespeare.
Some might quibble about whether or not he was referring to TV in these familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet:
To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy.
It was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as
"the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture-that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas."
For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the "point of view" or facet of perspective illusion.
Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of
patterns, lights, textures that "drives home the message" by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion.