I.E. the machine no longer on desk in front of us. It's as much in the lines and connecting switches running behind walls, under floors, and between satellites high in space. The machine is now all around us. We live in the machine: a very smart programmable machine, capable of programming us.

And it's capable of pulling the plug on our own ability to run our lives, our schools and other social institutions in ways that lie outside these systems of management and social organization, outside their logic and systemic priorities.

That's why it's vital to grasp what McLuhan meant by the phrase "the medium is the message." It means that the structures of comm. strongly determine what can and cannot be said, done, heard... New media create new environments, he said.

The global networks are becoming the new environment for work and for getting work. Also for shopping, banking and even going to the movies and getting an education. They represent a new meta- institution in which de-institutionalized, contracted out work is re-constituted, re-institutionalized through shared electronic files and access protocols. It's the new context for taking care of business in a widening variety of ways. The new site for schmoozing for contacts and bidding on contracts.

Another message of this new medium, then, is that if you're not plugged into this new environment, you're out of it.

A third message is that if you can't keep up with its performance standards, you're out of it too. By this I mean a global scale of operation, a multi-product, multi-media scope of production and distribution, plus rapid-fire turnaround and turnover through instant global connectivity. These are the new standards of competition. Speed is a big part of it -- and key to the demise of some of the national retail chains, like Woolco and Eaton's we've seen recently. In part they were bulldozed under by Wal-Mart which is the 4th. biggest user of comm. tech. in the U.S. Instant connectivity for just-in time inventories and "quick-response retailing," augmented by teleshopping and 24-hour delivery by UPS. I predict that these new standards are soon going to start affecting the economy of education, especially in this era of deregulation, privatization and free trade.

A fourth message of this new medium is that it's a corporate environment. It's being built, run and managed by corporate information systems and service providers. Globe-spanning corporations like Time- Warner, General Electric and Microsoft, accountable not to citizens and democratic principles but to shareholders and to corporate or corporatist principles. If this becomes the context in which learning is defined and managed, whether it's brought to us by Disney or MacDonald's, or by Microsoft or Stentor is quite secondary.

Essentially then, we're dealing with a huge invisible perpetual motion machine extending into all areas of our lives as people in communities. As it does this, it's driving more and more people to the point of burnout, and leaving more and more people behind.

The contradictions are beginning to surface. The burning incident in Nova Scotia. Street demonstrations in Germany. Public anger at Helmut Kohl, despite his having engineered the miracle of ec. growth in a united Germany. it's a jobless ec. growth -- just like here. Unemployment rate is over 12 per cent, and the citizens of Germany are angry. Angry at finding themselves outcasts in their own economy.