When I say “the medium is the message,” I am using the insight of Harold Innis in The Bias of Communication. What is implied in this phrase is that the medium consists of all the services invoked or provoked by any innovation. When the Chinese shifted their writing from bamboo to paper, they developed new centralized political forms. For literate and visually oriented people, it is always a shock to learn that many of the dominant attitudes of their daily life have been structured by subliminal factors and the psychic effects of seemingly inert or neutral forms.