Emily Shaw's Seminar Blog

An ‘idea file’ inspired by Innis

Innis would probably start by admitting that every author who approaches the subjects of information and communication technology is biased by those media that characterize the social environment in which he or she is situated (see the first pages of “The Bias of Communication”, “A Plea for Time”, “Industrialism and Cultural Values”, “Technology and Public Opinion in the United States”). It may be for this reason that histories of ICTs tend to have somewhat more enduring legacies than contemporaneous accounts and analyses of technologies in which the authors are perhaps too thoroughly immersed to gain the distance needed to at least convince readers that they wrote with a measure of objectivity. That said, Innis or anyone hoping to grasp the role of space and time in the development and functioning of the Internet would be hard-pressed to make generalizations. The Internet impacts the social, political, and economic on multiple levels.
Although it is far more decentralized and unregulated than other information and communications technologies, recent debates over Internet governance have exposed on the international stage just how much control (arguably monopoly control) lies with whomever assigns domain names, IP addresses, and controls root servers and the standards which make machines on the network communicate and inter-operate with one another. Scholars (and some journalists) have been writing for years to debunk the pervasive public myth of the web as free and un-biased; yet the depth and breadth of technical understanding needed to effectively engage in the boiling international debate is over the head of the average Internet users, and indeed over the heads of many of the people whose opinions and votes will determine the course of the Internet’s future. Since the divvying up of domain names and IP addresses was transferred from the control of the engineers and professors who developed it and made the purview of the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in 1998, Innis might agree with many in the international community that despite its being a private-sector company and not a full-out government agency, the ICANN is a blatant example of American cultural hegemony (enabling what Innis might call a monopoly of knowledge). Transferring control over the Internet to an intergovernmental entity (eg. the UN) would reposition the monopoly of knowledge, perhaps creating smaller regional monopolies. As new IP addresses become a scarce commodity, it becomes increasingly clear that control over the domain name and IP address system means considerable control over who gets to participate in the Internet, where, and to what end.
Media consolidation (especially post-2003) is another lens through which Innis might look at knowledge monopolies in the context of the Internet. The “press” is little like the press Innis knew and described in his book. Today’s press is frequently called the “media”, reflecting the variety of ICTs used to disseminate the “news”, information about current events, and to shape the ephemeral “public opinion”. The same companies and individuals who own the biggest television shows also own the biggest music and movie production companies, Internet service and content providers, radio stations, newspapers, etc. etc. Though the agency of individuals to shape the content transmitted through these different channels should not be ignored, the litigious, corporate structure which structures media conglomerates concentrates the power to make the big decisions at he top of the massive corporate trees (an evergreen is the most appropriate image I can come up with).
Innis might also point to sharing and peer-production and sharing as another level of the Internet coming under the control of knowledge monopolies in the form of the aforementioned media conglomerates and publishing companies who seek to reign in the freedom of individuals to do what they wish with content on the Internet.
And on a final, somewhat related note, I’ve been messing around with GoogleBooks and A9.com lately, and I decided to search for all instances of the word “memory” in this text. The searches returned a couple of items, with page numbers, which a student of Innis might use to figure out if in fact he made coherent arguments, even if not in a coherent order. I will reproduce the statements in which the word “memory” appears:
p. xvii- “For Innis, the important feature of an oral tradition is not its aural nature…but the fact that it emphasizes dialogue and inhibits emergence of monopolies of knowledge leading to overarching political authority, territorial expanision, and the inequitable distribution of power and wealth. Writing, in contrast, yields a “transpersonal memory.”
p.9 – “The oral tradition emphasized memory and training.”
p.105- “Education involved training, cultivating, and strengthening the memory. The specialized reciter was the carrier of social traditions. The memory took the place of logical process in writing and supported an immense burden of vocabulary and grammatical complexity with the help of verse, metre, rhyme, and proverbs.”
p.119- “After the death of Mohammaed and the loss of many reciters at the battle of al-Yemama in 633, steps were taken to write down the tradition and to provide an official written text. The memory was the seat of the book.”
p.127- “Music was handicapped by limitations of writing ‘for is music is not retained by man’s memory, it is lost, since it cannot be written down.’”

I’m not sure how Innis would respond to full-text searching and the potential through them to dissect his arguments in a more systematic manner. Attempting to analyze Innis through this type of searching may prove to be frustrating and might not lead to a more thorough study of his writing, but the very ability to manipulate the time- and space-biases of his writing through Internet-based technology is certainly provocative.

Posted by efshaw2 at 09:09 AM | Permalink

I pretty much like Innis’s style. As much as he jumps around from place to place and civilization to civilization without offering us logical segues or explicit connections, I found it fairly easy to extract themes and recurrent motifs of his writing. In “Minerva’s Owl”, Innis lays out his main arguments early on, following with somewhat chaotic evidence from history. His central argument is that the character of knowledge in any time or place can be understood through the lens of the dominant communications medium, and that new communications media compel realignments of the monopolies and oligopolies of knowledge toward which human society has strong tendencies and a long history. He identifies law and politics, religion, learning (mostly of the organized sort), and economics as central institutions influencing the use of a medium and the knowledge regime which controls it. He uses Hegel’s quote (“Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk”) to argue that cultural production by scholars, artists, and musicians tends to flower in light of their societies’ imminent decline (this due to weakened protection of organized force, ie. war).
He continues by arguing that “the success of organized force is dependent on an effective combination of the oral tradition and the vernacular in public opinion with technology and science. An organized public opinion following the success of force becomes receptive to cultural importation” (5). The rise of TV in the U.S. is perhaps a compelling example of the first part of this statement, namely that after World War II (1950s), TV programming developed to woo the American public and promulgate a shared sense of the greatness of America and the American dream through the use of vernacular language and imagery. The second part, suggesting that organized public opinion lends itself to cultural importation, eludes me, and Innis doesn’t really develop an explicit argument in support of this contention. It seems perhaps more intuitive that a public with a strong and unified opinion such as might develop in support of the ruling party (a unified opinion against the ruling party would necessarily characterize an un-unified public opinion) would be more prone to reject cultural influences from the outside in the name of nationalism, and might promote the exportation of their own cultural forms.
This is perhaps where the frustration voiced by many scholars toward Innis’s work comes in; pulling out his main points is not difficult, but locating the appropriate evidentiary support in the chaotic jumble of historical information that surrounds these points is not only mentally taxing, but can also be a futile endeavor.

Posted by efshaw2 at 11:03 AM | Permalink

A number of comparisons can certainly be made between the Internet and other information and communication systems, but the numerous differences between the role of the Internet in Trinidadian society and that of the television in the U.S. (for example) stem only partially from differences in the technology: the other critical part, which is arguably the central concern of any book that claims to employ an ethnographic approach, is the cultural context in which the system is situated. While I don’t intend to discount the importance of the technology in any system of communication, I’m more interested here in how conclusions about the societal role of telecom systems are very much dependent on context (perhaps an obvious point, but nonetheless worth discussing).
The authors identify “dynamics of positioning” as one of the dimensions through which to view the Trini Internet; this “dynamic” can be used as part of a framework for understanding the way in which people use the Internet in any location, or indeed how they use any communication technology in any location. Each of the other course texts (Williams on TV, Douglas on radio, and Fischer on the telephone) focused on the telecommunications systems in the pioneering countries (namely the U.S. and the UK) in which the specific technologies and their incorporation into a social system were first widely deployed; the early development of these technological systems had far-reaching impacts and these nations continue to dominate the international media landscape. Small nations such as Trinidad, though not without certain degrees of agency, have had to adapt as peripherals in a technological landscape shaped and controlled by institutions of dominant metropolises (to borrow Miller and Slater’s use of these terms).
The authors state at the end of chapter 5 that in the unique context of Internet development in Trinidad, “the issue is not one of choice – the Internet is regarded as fate; it is about strategies of positioning between freedom and control that will allow Trinidad to realize itself.” (142). Here, ‘freedom’ is represented by Trinidadians’ fetishization of a completely deregulated telecoms market, and ‘control’ is embodied by the telecoms monopoly TSTT. This tension differs somewhat from the core tension identified by Williams as defining the early history of TV, that of competition/contrast between the ‘public service’ and the interests of commercial entities (36-37). In the case of Trinidadian telecommunications, the distinction between acting in the public good and protecting the open market for business is not so easily made, as the local telecomm monopoly (TSTT) is a joint venture between the government and a multinational telecoms company.
Though most Trinidadians express frustration at the perceived inefficiency of the local telecoms monopoly (TSTT) in facilitating Trini Internet development, Miller and Slater describe the nearly impossible task of the government in deciding how to move Trinidad into the optimal position for facilitating the realization of the nation’s expansive potential. The authors argue that “The reason these values [of freedom and the immense Trinidadian potential] can dominate such powerful institutions as huge media companies and the government itself is because they are not mere creatures of the political economy….The deepest concerns of Internet provision overlap considerably with values such as national sentiment and freedom that we have met in quite different contexts” (142).The government seems to know that Trinidad’s telecoms service is not the absolute best it could be, but the alternative is an uncertain future in which Trinidadian ideals of individual freedom and competitive ability could be subsumed in the open international markets that operate through the Internet. Thus it is faced with a frustrated citizenry so fixated on deregulation of the telecoms market as the path to freedom that it cannot see the very real possibility of a small nation such as Trinidad getting quickly swallowed up by the massive tides of multi-national media conglomerates if the government completely deregulates the market. While the government still has control over national telecoms, it still has some say in the positioning of Trinidad in relation to the rest of the world; but the limited capacity of the current telecoms infrastructure restricts the freedom of individual Trinidadians and Trini businesses to determine their own positioning vis-à-vis the Internet. There is obviously no easy solution, and this perspective of a small nation trying to chart the best course through a complicated and treacherous landscape of international interests is certainly new for this course.

Posted by efshaw2 at 11:23 AM | Permalink