Innis part 2
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.