Eric's Seminar Blog

My attempt at using Innis as an idea file:

"In the Reformation print was used to overwhelm sculpture and architecture as interpreters of the scriptures." (128)

Particular forms built up around print: magazines, epics, treatises, essays, novels, pamphlets, comics. Looking at this quote, I think Innis would say that the Internet's unique forms are still beginning. We see blogs, podcasts, video sharing, but I think the defining character of the Internet will come later. I have a hard time backing it up, but I think Innis would agree.

"The capacity to concentrate on intense cultural activity during a short period of time and to mobilize intellectual resources over a vast territory assumes to a large extent the development of armed force to a high state of efficiency." (133)

"Under the influence of the state, communication among themselves has become more difficult for scientists with the same political background and practically impossible for those with a difficult political background, because of the importance attached to war." (193)

The "over a vast territory" caught my eye. Has the Internet changed this? Do you still need a strong, efficient army to mobilize intellectual resources? As he points out many times, Innis could not help the strong effect WWII had on his views of science. I think this sentence comes from that experience. In the next major war, the Internet may make military control of information much more difficult than in 1943.

"The post office became an object of intense political interest and after 1825 a federal postal department was separated from the revenue system and made independent." (162)

The battle over net neutrality rings out in this comment.

"Western newspapers were at a disadvantage in time since news tended to spread from east to west" (175)

Information flow in time was a distinct characteristic of all pre-electronic media. The Internet has all but dissolved that relationship. Innis would say that we are the bottleneck in the flow now; our human information processing abilities are the slow point in the chain. (Or, maybe that's just me channeling Innis to say what I want.)

Posted by egilber2 at 12:52 PM | Permalink

I will look at the concept of "present-mindedness" in today's final essay , "The Plea For Time." Toward the end of the essay, after the rather obsessive details on the construction of calendars for various purposes (religious, administrative, agricultural, etc.), Innis jumps to the modern era to talk about the time-bias of modern media. He claims that it is severely "present-minded." I feel that it is hard to argue with him there. Especially at the time of the essay's writing, radio and newspaper represented the ephemeral end of the spectrum and had been very successful at whipping up short-scale wartime fervor. On Innis's two dimensions of space and time, 20th century communication media clearly scored high on space and low on time. What I find hard to discern, on the other hand, is whether Innis thinks that space and time are inversely proportional (of course, in a rough sense, for lack of a better phrase). Reading this essay (of course) made me wonder how Innis would analyze today's communication media. The Internet's low barrier on copying makes archiving extremely easy, yet the Internet also has a global reach: the first medium I can think of to score high on both dimensions. Is the Internet hyper-presented-minded?

(I had to comment on the essay's tangent into academic culture. Those few pages had the hallmarks of a discussion over beers that might go something like, "No one appreciates me and it's hard to get funding. Those social scientists have sold their souls." Innis seems to lament the academic's former role as the guardian of knowledge.)

Posted by egilber2 at 12:38 PM | Permalink

As best I can, I am going to take on virtual vs. real in Miller and Slater and in Williams. In the end of chapter 5, M&S come to the conclusion that interpersonal relationships are "real" on the Internet, while the political economy of the Internet is "virtual." As I read Television, Williams would come to different conclusion: viewers make virtual connections with on-screen personalities in the highly planned flow; however, the advertising on television reflects the reality of American commerce. Whereas Trinis see free-market ideals waiting to be exploited in the Internet, the commerce of television accurately reflects real American life. Admittedly, that's not the clearest thing I've ever written; and, admittedly, the connection is loose, but it's there.

I see the difference in conclusions as a result of methodology, mostly. Williams, however flawed, looked back on television after 20 years of its use in America. M&S, on the other hand, took an ethnographic approach set in the early days of the web. I think they would come to different conclusions now. I hear the same ecommerce themes expressed in M&S that I heard expressed in America around the same time: How will businesses make money using the Internet? Is it worth the cost? What will distribution look like? (Remember the days when many people questioned whether Amazon.com would ever get into the black?) I suspect that the same changes we see today in the US with regard to ecommerce, we would observe in Trinidad. And, in that case, the Internet may have actually enabled the free-market ideals that Trinis aspired to.

Posted by egilber2 at 07:36 PM | Permalink