Electracy is a theory by Gregory Ulmer that describes the skills necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of a new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to Ulmer, electracy "is to digital media what literacy is to print." It encompasses the broader cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the major societal transition from print to electronic media. Electracy is a portmanteau of "electricity" and Jacques Derrida's term "trace". Concept Electracy denotes a broad spectrum of research possibilities including the history and invention of writing and mnemonic practices, the epistemological and ontological changes resulting from such practices, the sociological and psychological implications of a networked culture, and the pedagogical implementation of practices derived from such explorations. Ulmer writes of electracy: What literacy is to the analytical mind, electracy is to the affective body: A prosthesis that enhances and augments a natural or organic human potential. Alphabetic writing is an artificial memory that supports long complex chains of reasoning impossible to sustain within the organic mind. Digital imaging similarly supports extensive complexes of mood atmospheres beyond organic capacity. Electrate logic proposes to design these atmospheres into affective group intelligence. Literacy and electracy in collaboration produce a civilizational left-brain right-brain integration. If literacy focused on universally valid methodologies of knowledge (sciences), electracy focuses on the individual state of mind within which knowing takes place (arts). Ulmer's work considers other historical moments of radical technological change such as the inventions of the alphabet, writing, and the printing press. Also, electracy is grammatological in deriving a methodology from the history of writing and mnemonic practices. Ulmer introduced electracy in Teletheory (1989), and it began to be noted in scholarship in 1997. James Inman regarded electracy as one of the "most prominent" contemporary designations for what Walter J. Ong once described as a "secondary orality" that will eventually supplant print literacy. Inman distinguishes electracy from other literacies (such as metamedia), stating that it is a broader concept unique for being ontologically dependent exclusively on electronic media. Some scholars have viewed the electracy paradigm, along with other "apparatus theories" such as Ong's, with skepticism, arguing that they are "essentialist" or "determinist". Pedagogy Lisa Gye states that the transition from literacy to electracy has changed "the ways in which we think, write and exchange ideas," and that Ulmer's primary concern is to understand how that has transformed learning. Electracy