Harold Innis died in 1952, long before the Internet existed. Yet many of his ideas about media and communications seem relevant to it. Discuss some ways that Innis’s concepts about media apply to the Internet. There is no ‘correct’ answer here. Feel free to include your own experience as well as other sources of evidence or insight. This is a brief essay intended to show your familiarity with the Innis sections of the course and readings.
Use APA citation style. This should like (Lastname, year) or for direct quotes (Lastname, year, p. #). These should come at the end of the sentence, before the period. For example: The opening line of Dickens classic novel is “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (Dickens, 1859, p.1).
Tips:
- Write a creative title
- Cite early and cite often
- Short sentences add clarity
- Only use direct quotes if necessary, paraphrasing is better
- Avoid biographical information about Innis, focus on his ideas not his life.
I was looking for:
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grammar/punctuation/spelling/word choice
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organized thoughts I could follow: clarity, explicit and specific points, not meandering,
generalized points
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don’t make the reader infer!
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critical and creative thoughts on Innis
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your own thoughts and opinions
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connection to real world examples
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connection to Innis!
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The strongest papers were the ones that include debate and ideas from current
critics of media or cited sources from places other than just Innis, or just people
who wrote about Innis
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Citing people who analyzed Innis is a good approach/technique
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Class one, Jan. 6, 2020
-the course proceeds in four units. the first focusses on the work of canadian economics and communications scholar, harold innis, who provides a theoretical framework for thinking about media. the second unit deals with mass media such as radio, tv, newspapers or movies. until the last decade or two, this was the primary meaning, when media were referred to. that is no longer the case. mass media still exist of course but they are only part of what media now means. In some ways mass media have become a part of media history. the third unit deals with what’s sometimes called new media and focusses on the Internet. the final unit locates canada in the media context. we will deal with the relationship between culture and media as the course proceeds. the two used to be relatively separate but have grown more linked and overlapped in the era of new media/the internet.
In some ways, the term media did not exist until the era of mass media (radio, film, tv, newspapers). In earlier times there were not enough forms of media to need a term for them. There were simply books and newspapers. With the rise of media like radio and tv, the concept of media developed. In our time, mass media have been overtaken by newer media, or the internet.
Harold Innis:
-was Canada’s bestknown, most respected academic in the first half of the 20th century. an economic historian who wrote a series of works on the ‘staple’ resources around which the canadian economy developed. including cod fisheries; timber; the fur trade; the railroads. He founded the ‘staples school’ of economic analysis. he became canada’s most renowned scholar and academic author, respected worldwide for his economic studies
-late in his career turned unexpectedly to ‘communications studies’ which are more commonly called media studies. he rarely used the term, media. this is partly because the field barely existed in his time (he died in 1952). he was one of the creators of the field and he and marshall mcluhan are often referred to as the central figures in the ‘toronto school’ of media studies
-there is a question about the connection between his earlier economics studies and his work in media during the final years of his life. The shift baffled many of his students and admirers a the time, tho he is now probably best known for his writings on media. some think there is a clear link between the phases. others think it is more of a break from his earlier work.
-grew up in southwestern ontario farm country. a very good student and probably read a great deal, as his link to the wider world, and the realm of ideas in those years. perhaps he was someone who books ‘saved’ from a sense of isolation. but he also lived in a society where the oral tradition and storytelling were present. went to mcmaster university theological school(then in toronto, where the royal conservatory now is on bloor). planned to be a minister. this reflected a sense of social responsiblity to others, more than a personal religiosity. enlisted in army for first world war because he believed in the war’s moral justice and necessity. he wanted to do something meaningful and useful with his life. as a student he aimed to join the christian ministry to fill this purpose. during the war, he served in signal corps in europe. He was horrified at what he saw in the trenches, the waste. (of 65 million men called up by the militaries of all sides, 8 million died, 21 million were wounded. A rate of 6000 soldiers per day died for four and a half years. 12 million civilians died in a time before the existence of serious air power.) had difficulty talking about it even with friends for the rest of his life. almost everything the soldiers had been told about the war through official sources like newspapers or their political and military leaders turned out, based on their real experiences in the trenches, to be false. soldiers started to believe not what they were told but only what they had actually seen, or were told by others who had been witnesses. This began Innis’s skepticism about print media and his interest in the oral tradition, which we’ll discuss at length in class. this was a case of people becoming skeptical about ‘fake news’ in a much earlier time. it also led to innis’s interest in the use of media for propaganda- another word for fake news- which is reflected in the video we watched about recruiting propaganda for the first world war:
I’ll Make A Man Of You From Oh! What A Lovely War
he decided not to continue in theology after the war because of the support given to the war by the churches. became a scholar in the field of economic history. he felt he could serve in a different way by trying to understand what had led to the horror of the war, which was widely seen as a conflict between empires, so he studied the ways that empires operated, particularly how they operated economically. he developed the ‘staples thesis’ which explained the patterns of development and behaviour in a country like Canada in terms of the needs of the imperial powers (England, France, later the U.S.) to extract resources from it. when that resource for example was fur, this required a relatively underpopulated landmass with good lines of communication to transport the furs back to europe. if the population was too large, it would destroy the habitats of the beaver or other furbearing animals. this trade in turn required the use of the knowledge developed over many centuries by the indigenous peoples, who were recruited by offering them products, such as knives, firearms, axes and iron pots, which they didn’t possess. this in turn broke down the stable cultural and social patterns of those peoples. innis was always interested in the cultural effects of economic or technological phenomena. this carried over into his work in media and communications later in his life. at the same time he stressed the impact of the colonial economy on the lives of those in the imperial centres like london and paris. he did not think the influences went in only one direction. empires were affected by the enormous wealth they extracted from their colonies and the power they exercised over others. it made them feel superior to the peoples under their control and created a sense of their right to impose themselves. ultimately this kind of imperial mentality is part of what led to clashes like the first world war.
-innis was a proud Canadian and a nationalist, not in the sense that led european nations to go to war with each other because they felt superior to each other, but in the sense that he believed Canadians could make their own unique contribution to scholarship and other areas, since they had a view from the fringes of empire (british, french or american) that gave them insights not available from the centre of the empire. at the time, canadians interested in becoming economists preferred to study at the centres of imperial power like harvard or oxford. but innis felt that those at the centre of the empires were blinded by their own wealth, success and power to what was truly happening to themselves as well as those they ruled. (marshall mcluhan too felt his insights were based on his perspective from toronto, on what was happening in imperial centres like new york. He said that if he had moved there, he would have lost that detachment and the insight it allowed him to gain.)
-innis remained haunted by fear of future catastrophes like the first world war and hoped his insights could help to prevent them. during the 1930s, when he was at the height of his fame as a brilliant scholar of economic history, he became dismayed at two developments: the rise of the global depression and the rise of fascist and racist political movements like nazism in germany. he sensed the approach of a second world war which might well be even more disastrous than the first. it was as though all his work to understand the way the world functioned and malfunctioned had done no good. In fact he described what he saw happening as the destruction of western civilization. this phrase is of course eurocentric and reflects innis’s time but for our purposes, we could think of it simply as human civilization. it’s likely that in this mood he began searching in other directions than economic history to find the sources of what had gone wrong. his final years were spent studying not economics but what he called technologies of communication or what today are known as media. he felt they contained an important clue about where human civilization had gone off track and what might turn it back in the right direction. This was an unexpected break from the path he had followed with great success until then- that is, from the study of economic history- and many of his students and colleagues were surprised by it. Some of them tried to find connections between his economic studies and his explorations of media. Others felt somewhat embarrassed and thought the shift was inexplicable. We’ll discuss these interpretations: continuity or a break
-this uncertainty about what innis was doing with his communications studies arises partly because his writings on media are very different from his clear, lucid books on canadian economic history. in those books on economics, he relied on firsthand research into archives and records, and on interviews during his travels. To study the fur trade, for example, he canoed thru the old trading routes and pored over records from the hudson’s bay company. his writings about media, however, seem fragmentary and disconnnected. he lacked firsthand research when writing about the origins of the oral, written and print traditions. So his media writings are aphoristic and impressionistic. part of this may be due to the fact he was working in a field that barely existed at the time. but it also reflects his sense that the written tradition itself, in which he had worked and been very successful, was partly responsible for the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century like world war one and the depression. so he was trying to write in a different way about the written tradition itself. we will explore his reasons for coming to such a drastic, unusual judgment about the written/printed word in the coming class, based on your readings.
-innis was admirable for his willingness to question the things he had based his life on- such as reading and traditional forms of scholarship- and to move fearlessly in new directions late in his life. As one example, we talked about something mcluhan recalled innis saying: that the formal essay was invented by a chinese dynasty to prevent intellectuals (“the literati”) from thinking too much. Why would rulers want to prevent too much thought? Because it might threaten their power by causing thinkers to become critical and see flaws in them and their policies. but new ideas and insights arise more from discussion- the oral tradition- where writers or thinkers challenge each other- than by individuals sitting alone and writing lengthy treatises or essays. So, rather than essaysooks and b being the ultimate form of critical insight and thought, innis felt they were an attempt to undermine and diminish it. Yet he himself had assigned and read probably thousands of essays. He had written many esteemed books. We’ll find that innis was remarkably able to question the foundations of his own past and even of his own great success.
-when he died, the university of toronto cancelled classes for a day. he is the only u of t professor to have a college named after him.
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Classtwo, Jan. 13, 2020
The title: innis uses the word bias in a special way most of the time. He doesn’t mean a preference or prejudice- the usual meaning of the term. He means bias in a more ‘objective’ sense: as the ‘tilt’ or colouring that a particular thing, like a medium of communication, lends to whatever it’s discussing or communicating. It’s comparable to focussing the lens of binoculars or a telescope at a certain distance, like 100m, so that you will clearly see only objects at that distance, others will be fuzzy and you will be more likely not to pay attention to them because you know they’re not what the device is set for. That’s the sense of bias in his book’s title: The Bias of Communication. He felt the biasses of technologies of communication- his term most of the time for what we call media- affected both empires and individuals. And he felt it was possible to become more aware and see more clearly by knowing the biasses of the media that were ‘tilting’ our view of things. He occasionally uses bias in the more common sense: when, for instance, he refers to his own bias for the oral versus the written tradition. He means he has a personal preference for what the oral tradition contains, but it doesn’t mean he fails to appreciate the values of the written.
p. 3 minerva’s owl image. The owl of minerva only takes flight in the gathering dusk. from the philosopher, hegel. minerva was the greek/roman goddess of wisdom. the point of the image is that wisdom appears late in the careers of societies or individuals, including innis himself. there are some important matters, like what you should do with your life or who you should spend it with, that you can’t possibly have enough information or experience on, at the time you must make the decision. it’s only much later that you’ve learned enough to know whether it was the best direction to take. the same can be true for the self-awareness of entire civilizations. toward the end of his career innis looked back and wondered whether his own civilization had made the best choices, such as increasingly relying on the power of print as a form of communication, to the exclusion of oral forms, after the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. his conclusion was that the effect of the domination of print (books, newspapers etc). as the main way of communicating, versus oral communication, had to some extent led to disasters like the two world wars.
Preface:
innis’s own professor of philosophy, james ten broeke, asked his students to write an essay on the question: why do we attend to the things to which we attend. this question stayed with innis all his life and suffuses his approach to media. what are the reasons we- not so much as individals but as members of our society- pay attention to some things and not to others? it isn’t simply that some things are there and others aren’t, because we focus our attention on some of the things that stand before us in our field of perception and largely ignore others. innis wonders why that happens, and what role media play in drawing certain things to our attention more than others. what role have the dominant media played in inclining us to notice certain aspects of reality and paying less attention to others. in a preliterate society for example, where the main ‘medium’ is the Oral Tradition- the handing down of knowledge and wisdom through myths, rituals, storytelling etc.- there tends to be more attention to things which seem eternal or permanent: like the cycles of the seasons, heroes and ancestors who left lasting instructions to their descendants, religious practices that focus on questions of morality and divinity. our society by contrast tends to pay attention to change, either in historical or natural upheavals and revolutions, or even in gossip and new inventions. examples would be celebrity gossip, awards shows or major news stories like terror attacks. In our society, people tend to focus on matters that are fast, fairly superficial and often sensational. innis argues that this is at least partly due to the ‘bias’ in the media through which we receive most of our information: written and print-based media, in which he includes not just books and newspapers but also electronic media like radio and television. he classes these as extensions of the written tradition, even though in some cases they come to us through sight and sound, because they lack the element of live presence and back-and-forth communication which is found in the oral tradition. even in clearly serious matters, like wars or natural disasters, our media tend to present them in factual terms, as opposed to vaguer or more open-ended discussions about causes, remedies and the disastrous effects involved- because those are harder to present in our unidirectional, fact-oriented media formats.
innis was unique in the way he divided all ‘media’ (or communications technologies) into two basic strands: the oral tradition and the written tradition. no other media theorist has started with this basic distinction. the oral tradition is slow but penetrates to the depths of issues. it is better for dealing with questions of meaning, justice and longterm values. the written tradition is far quicker and easier to spread information with, but it doesn’t deal as well with longterm and ethical issues because it doesn’t allow for questions or debate. when reading and writing, there is relatively little opportunity to ponder and question, compared to oral communication which can be slow and laborious but gets to the bottom of things precisely because of the care and time it takes, and the opportunity to raise questions and receive responses to them.
note that by the oral tradition innis does not mean simple speech or conversation. speech and language are not a medium, they are just the way that the human mind operates. language underlies all forms of communication. but the oral tradition is a ‘technology’ by which preliterate societies passed on their forms of knowledge and wisdom, through story telling, religious rituals and gatherings etc. which retold things that they considered important and which needed to be transmitted to the entire society, and to future generations. In our society we tend to use books and other versions of print, including online, to transmit the ideas and information which we deem as important. In a preliterate society, there would be great value placed on people with good memories, since they were the storehouses of information and attitudes that the society had determined were important to its welfare and its future. but however good their memories were, there were limits to what they could keep in their minds and pass on. the capacity of writing and print to contain and pass on information and facts, are far greater.
innis (p.9) says it is impossible to clearly recreate a sense of the oral tradition because of course it was not written down. it is only ‘revealed darkly through the written or printed word,’ as they remain in our possession. the oral tradition wasn’t a form of literature since literature only exists once the written tradition arrives. as another writer, walter ong, put it: thinking of the oral tradition as oral literature which had not yet arrived, is like thinking of horses as cars without wheels. the oral tradition was thick with meaning in its own ways, since it employed not just words but all the apparatus of live communication: tone, gesture, glances, reactions between people, dramatization, hesitation. for these reasons oral communication was more nuanced and ‘dense’ than the written. the written is relatively simplified compared with the oral. The oral always had a bodily component, as even today, oral communication still does: when people speak on their cellphones, they gesture with their hands and use facial expressions. Innis expressed the idea (p.11) that the written tradition “implied a decline in the power of expression” even though we tend to think of writing and literature as a higher and more creative form of expression than conversation or speech. He challenges that prejudice of ours by making us take into account the richness and complexity of speech, with all its gestures, interaction, tone etc. print by contrast is relatively thin and lacking such richness. if you actually wanted to record everything that gets expressed in a normal conversation, it might take hundreds of pages in print.
Innis did not reject or wish to eliminate the written tradition and written forms of expression, that would have been insane given the power of the written and the fact that innis himself had grown up with it and was a very successful writer himself. the written tradition of course had its upside. For instance, it contributed to developing critical thinking and the ability to question. How? Because when something is written down, you can go back over it and think about whether you agree or disagree. That’s much harder to do if you only hear it, and then it’s gone. so that’s a plus for the written tradition. What innis always sought was a balance between the values found in the written tradition and those in the oral, what he lamented was the loss of that balance when the invention of the printing press meant that written forms of thought and expression began to overwhelm oral forms. As an example of the shift between oral and written, consider the way a classroom of kids changes when the teacher tells them to put their heads down and start reading. The sense of a cohesive unit that can delve into many matters together, disperses into completely isolated individuals
p. 10 innis reveres the ancient greek philosopher plato because he lived during the transition between the oral and the written traditions and combined them in ‘dialogues’ he wrote portraying the philosopher socrates talking with his students about ‘big’ issues like justice or the immortality of the soul. plato didn’t write books in our sense: as complete things in themselves. he wrote in order to convey in written form the sense of living conversations between socrates and his students. He tried to convey the oral in written form, so he combined the strengths of the oral and the written. for that reason, innis thought, plato ‘dominated’ the intellectual history of the west for 1500 years.
what innis admires in plato is the balance between the virtues of the oral and the written traditions. It lasted about 2000 years. this balance was destroyed, innis thinks, by the invention and the success of the printing press in the mid 1400s. until then, writing was found in manuscripts and was limited to small groups who were literate like scribes and priests who could then pass on elements of the written tradition in oral form to largely illiterate populations, for instance during bible readings and sermons at weekly church services. so before the rise of print, the written retained an ‘oral’ character, it was still closely linked to oral forms. When the written tradition only existed in manuscripts, not in printed texts, before the invention of the printing press, it was more closely linked to the oral even in its form. For instance, manuscripts do not have capital letters, punctuation or even spaces between words. They lack titles and chapter headings. They are continuous, the way speech is. In speech for instance, it’s hard to say what a word is, because speech is a continuous flow of thought. but print changed this. it made the written tradition available to huge numbers of people and overwhelmed oral forms of knowledge. as an example of this transition from writing to print, we looked at a page of talmud, jewish religious texts which contain discussions of bibilical laws and ideas by different generations of religious scholars or rabbis, over long periods of time. on a single page of talmud, in typographical form, you can see an attempt to duplicate in print, a sense of dialogue and conversation between differing scholars and generations. This was a sort of effort, like plato’s dialogues, to keep the balance or connection between written and oral ways of expression, but the power of print eventually overwhelmed the oral approach. today the oral tradition, to the extent it exists, is often considered marginal or quaint, like storytellers at street festivals or to indigenous societes that are not yet literate. but it was once the dominant way that a society transmitted its core beliefs and imperatives.
print also created the sense that words are separate, even that they are things, which can be contained in ‘boxes’ that are books, with covers. These are things we take so much for granted that it’s difficult to think about them.
Innis declared his own bias for the oral tradition (190) especially as it was found in ancient greece and for trying to recapture some of its spirit. That is: he was not in favour of the impossible- going back entirely to the oral tradition, but he wanted to restore some balance where the oral tradition would also play a role in the modern world.
he explains his sense of what has been lost by saying (p. 191) the oral tradition was “overwhelmingly significant where the subject matter is human action and feeling, and it is important in the discovery of new truth but of very little value in disseminating it”- he means that the oral tradition can only reach those within earshot so it is only of limited effect in spreading ideas and information while the written tradition, especially in printed form, can reach vast audiences. yet on the plus side, ‘the oral tradition inherently involves personal contact and a consideration for the feeling of others and it is in sharp contrast with the cruelty of mechanized [eg, printed or broadcast] communication and the tendencies we have come to note in the modern world.’ print and electronic media like radio and tv are ‘cruel’ in the sense that they can’t respond to individuals, since they involve no interaction. They ‘address the world rather than the individual’ (p. 191) because they communicate in only one direction: from writer or broadcaster to reader or viewer. No book ever talked back to a reader or was able to answer questions addressed to it, or had a sense of the individual who was ‘reading’ it, the way a living person can do, that’s what innis means by cruel. It’s true that tv viewers might feel ‘the connection’ personally when they watch oprah (or at least when they used to) but if so it’s a delusion, and might be considered (at least somewhat) sad
regarding the limits of the written, innis (31) said that ‘enormous improvements in communications have made understanding more difficult.’ At first sight that might seem odd. but what improvements in communication do is increase information, not understanding. those improvements came mainly through the written tradition which is very good at transmitting information swiftly and efficiently- like strings of facts, or chronologies that describe what order things occurred in, or even recipes- but it lacks the ability of the oral tradition to carefully and painstakingly raise questions and deepen understanding through the back and forth of conversation and dialogue. in the written tradition, writers and readers cover a great deal of ground and may have the impression that they now ‘know’ more, but they also understand far less than they are able to from a lengthy discussion or conversation that doesn’t cover much material. you can cover far more pages reading alone than in a discussion, since no one interrupts or slows down your progess’, but how ‘much’ you have learned depends on how you take into account the depth of what you have covered.
We discussed ways in which innis might have viewed the internet. Is it part of the oral or the written tradition? It is largely printed which makes it part of the written, but it is interactive, which is a symptom of the oral. The interactions on the internet are mostly written, which means you have a chance to consider what you’re going to say before you say it, which is not the way interchange happens in direct conversation. Is the internet some kind of hybrid? There are no straightforward answers to these questions. The value of innis is he opens up questions and ways of thinking about the internet- even tho he died long long before anyone could envision anything remotely like the internet. (you could say he wanted to restore emphasis on the value of thinking itself, versus simply on the knowledge that can come out of thinking) Even the internet itself is more than one thing. So some of it may be oral, some written, some a hybrid. It could be one, the other, neither or both. How is it like and unlike live exchange? No matter how lifelike (with the emphasis on ‘like’) the images and texts become, they are still images, versus live actual human presences. Does that matter? If so, in what ways? Also: does communication on the internet evolve through generations, so that it can become more ‘oral’ as it becomes more a part of people’s communication? is texting the same as talking, or can it be?
what about radio, tv, film, or recorded music? are they in the written or the oral tradition? innis seems to have felt that radio, film and television (which barely existed at the time he died) fell in the written tradition, not the oral. even though they were visual and/or spoken, because they were one-way forms of communication and did not involve interactive responses between the speaker and the audience. this interaction and response was the real essence of the oral, not the mere fact that it was spoken aloud. (this, by the way, is something mcluhan, innis’s successor, who admired him greatly) seems to have misunderstood).
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Classthree, Jan. 20, 2020
Marshall mcluhan, innis’s successor and admirer, who described his own writing as footnotes to innis, said ‘the medium is the message.’ mcluhan liked putting things in a challenging and paradoxical way. innis would have probably put the point a little less sensationally: the medium biasses the message. In fact both statements make the same point
the readings for this week were largely about innis’s views of time and space, he was very concerned with political stability and social cohesion. he felt that a society living under the oral tradition, like preliterate societies or ancient greece, tended be stable and united because the spoken word unites its audience. they gather to hear it for the purpose of lawgiving by its leaders or to perform annual religious rituals or to hear its founding myths, which explain its origins and its purposes. people listen together and the kind of unity and sense of community this creates can be maintained over many generations. it is why innis said the oral tradition helped maintain unity and stability over time. however the oral tradition is limited geographically because the spoken word can only reach a limited audience. So it unites people over time but not over a very large space. the written tradition on the other hand is useful for maintaining control over space. it’s possible to maintain control over large territories through written messages, orders, sending and receiving important information about populations, commerce, enemies, military matters and in a later era, it does all these things through written or broadcast information. for these reasons innis felt the written tradition had the ability to maintain control over a large area but was not so effective in keeping a situation stable through time, i.e. across generations, since written messages and information command less loyalty and social coherence than a group experiences under the oral tradition.
A very simple and concrete example of this difference occurs when teachers ask their students to put their heads down read something in class. Anyone who has taught will have noticed that the unity of the class when they are discussing or listening, fragments almost instantly into individuals absorbed in their own reading experience. It’s an example of how the oral tradition unites people while the written, individualizes and separates them.
according to walter ong, a scholar who followed in innis’s footsteps, writing, and especially print, implies that words are things in a way that never happened in the oral tradition. in the oral tradition, words have no visual presence, they hardly exist in separation, they are part of the ongoing flow of speech. There are no ‘spaces’ between words when they are spoken. in the written tradition before print, i.e.,, before the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, this oral quality was still reflected by the absence of spaces between words as they appear in handwritten manuscripts. Words in manuscripts flowed in a similar way to how speech itself flows, without spaces between words. but with the rise of print, words were separated and for the first time, a book became a sort of box containing words, which seemed to be separated things that existed in their own right. Thinking of words or ideas as things in themselves was unimaginable under the oral tradition and difficult to imagine in the written tradition before the era of print. But print made words seem more like things that occupied space instead of ‘events’ that one experienced as they were heard and then vanished in the ongoing flow of speech. but, in the written and especially the printed form, speech became ‘spatialized’ and seemed to exist in space. So- turning to the subjects of time and space which were in this week’s reading- in the oral tradition, there is no record of the past as a series of things or events existing in books or written records. until the rise of writing- and even more after its spread thru print, the past only existed in the living voices of those who recounted it. whatever did not seem memorable, was simply lost. it vanished. It could not be ‘looked up’ anywhere. only very basic and important items were retained, like the founder or heroes of a society and the laws they left behind. This led to a very different sense of time and history before the rise of the written tradition.
this is why innis says (p 61) that history in the modern sense is only 400 years old. that is, what we now understand as history- a series of particular events that stretch back into the past- is something we think of as spread out in space, almost literally as something behind us, the way accounts of it are laid out in the pages of a book, describing different moments and events that exist ‘back there’ or ‘out there’ in time: in timelines or lists of events like wars and elections. this is a spatialized concept of time, something like a train stretching behind the ‘engine’ of the present (tho innis doesn’t use this image). it’s as if we can look back at the train of history, climb down from the front and wander back to examine whatever ‘car’ we want to: the middle ages, the ancient world etc. this sense of history is only possible in an era dominated by print. it would have been unavailable and literally unthinkable to a pre-print person, no matter how intelligent and educated they were. in the oral tradition, as ong says, the past isn’t known as an ‘itemized terrain peppered with facts,’ it knows of no lists or charts or figures, it isn’t history in the modern sense that innis describes (and which innis wrote about in his many books on economic history). So history is different in the oral tradition, it ‘exists’ only in the knife edge of each present moment as it presses relentlessly into the next present moment.
For instance, where is the past? We tend to think it’s ‘behind’ us. But that’s actually a spatial metaphor for something that occurs in time. There is literally nothing behind us except a different part of space. The only ‘place’ that history exists is right now, in the present moment, and in whatever residue of the past still exists in the present moment. The existence of historical records and history books creates the illusion that history is a thing, or a set of things, and that events themselves are objects out there in space, even if they are ‘behind’ us in the past. but that’s just a metaphor. there is nothing actually ‘behind us.’ the only thing that exists is the present, right now, with whatever memories are embedded in the present and carried along with it. These are difficult ideas, because we are so accustomed to the ways of spatialized thinking that make sense in the written era.
this sense of an ongoing perpetual present is the kind of thing innis means when he says that the print era lost ‘touch with the problems of time’ (p. 76) and that time had ‘been destroyed’ (p. 129) in the age of print.
In the era in which the oral tradition dominated, this meant people had a greater appreciation for the ongoing present, on p. 90 innis talks about the sense of time under the oral tradition in which people ‘hallowed existence beyond change’ as opposed to ‘living in the moment’ i.e., living from changing moment to moment without a sense of underlying continuing, permanent values. this is hard to even imagine in our era, in which ‘change’ seems to be the only permanent quality. We are told that the only constant thing is change, and ‘change is good.’ Some of innis’s language here is difficult to follow because we experience the world as members of a print-dominated culture. His view was that people in a print-dominated culture tend to experience ‘the present’ as an always transforming and shifting series of moments- like different things or separate words- so that living in the present for us is very swift, fragmented and transient. Innis felt that oral societies had a stronger appreciation for qualities and values that endure and were less impressed or interested in ‘change.’ Our society by contrast tends to value and appreciate change while undervaluing permanence or denying there is even such a thing.
On 187-188 innis discusses the conflict when one dominant medium is challenged by a newer one and the ‘cultural disturbances’ and ‘dislocations’ that can occur. For example, prior to the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, there was relative stability based on a ‘balance’ between the oral and written tradition. the source of authority was the bible, but there were few available copies of it since it only existed in manuscripts, and the priests of the catholic church interpreted its meaning to the masses of people through their readings and sermons in church. in other words there was a mix of the written (the bible) and the oral (sermons and readings). this may or may not have been a good thing for the lives of people, but it did tend to create a fairly stable situation. but the printing press led to the dominance of the written over the oral. people could now read the bible for themselves and find themselves disagreeing with what the church leaders had told them was in it. this led to breakaways from the catholic church and the creation of new ‘Protestant’ forms of christianity. This in turn led to centuries of religious wars (based partly on the newfound ability of literate masses of people to read the now widely available scriptures for themselves and disagree about them, particularly with the priests and leaders of the catholic church, who had held a ‘monopoly’ till then, over interpretations of the bible).
innis held the apparently paradoxical view that ‘improvements in communications led to less ‘understanding.’ but a moment’s thought shows how this is so. as the printed word replaced the spoken word, there was less chance to think and talk about what was being said, and the opportunity to understand what had been stated, diminished. he also felt that new media (or techonologies of communication, as he called them) led to ‘social and cultural disruptions’, like the protestant reformation and the religious wars of those years, that followed the rise of print.
though we haven’t yet discussed all of this in class, he extended his analysis to other new media that arose, like radio and television which challengeed the authority of the printed word as it had existed in newspaper form. those who control an older dominant medium always try to control the new medium as well, and to ‘adapt’ it, in innis’s term, to the same points of view that they promoted in the old medium. but new groups and individuals usually try to assert their own power in the new media. this leads to instability based on changes in the dominant media. meanwhile, new media always have their own ‘biasses’ which assert themselves despite any efforts to use them to promote the same values and attitudes that held sway under previously powerful media. so for instance, newspaper owners tried to control the new media of radio and tv. sometimes they succeeded and sometimes not. but the new media lead to new ways of thinking and new ‘biasses’ no matter who controls them. so, with the rise of the internet, the owners of newspapers, radio and tv have tried to buy or control it, but new media forces have emerged, such as microsoft, google and facebook. (the ‘FAANGs’: facebook, amazon, apple, netflix, google) in recent years there has been conflict over who will make the rules about ownership of content on the internet and especially, who will profit from the advertising that accompanies the content: will it be the old content providers like publishers, tv networks and record companies or the new media owners. these conflicts are still being fought out. innis provides a valuable perspective and structure for understanding these conflicts or ‘disturbances,’ as he sometimes called them. in his words, ‘extensions’ in communications (or new forms of media) always lead to ‘cultural disturbances’. we will look into some of these examples in the coming units of the course on mass media and ‘new’ media.
innis applied his concerns about losing the strengths of the oral tradition to what had happened to universities, even in his own time, during the first half of the 20th century. ( 32, 193-4) He felt universities could play a role in keeping the virtues of the oral tradition alive, but only if they ‘remembered’ that teachers and students are human, and not merely vessels into which the bare facts and information available in books or in print could be poured. He felt that the emphasis on exams detracted from the ability to develop critical minds and deeper forms of understanding, which could in turn lead to the discovery of new truths and insights. in fact he argued that the emphasis on exams was in direct contrast to the process of real learning.