The Medium Is the Message
do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of
perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to
encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in
sense perception.
The operation of the money medium in seventeenth-century Japan had effects not unlike the
operation of typography in the West. The penetration of the money economy, wrote G. B.
Sansom (in Japan, Cresset Press, London, 1931) "caused a slow but irresistible revolution,
culminating in the breakdown of feudal government and the resumption of intercourse with
foreign countries after more than two hundred years of seclusion." Money has reorganized the
sense life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives. This change does not
depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in the society.
Arnold Toynbee made one approach to the transforming power of media in his concept of
annaabi.ee 
