Innis and the Internet
Today's Question: What would Innis make of the Internet? Write a brief analytical comment about the relation of the Internet to society that you can defend as consistent with Innis's ideas in some way. For example, you might employ one of his concepts (information monopoly, time-biased, space-biased) or borrow one of his analyses from an earlier technology (cuneiform's effects on the invention of abstraction in math) and apply it to the Internet.
Given Harold Innis’ text, The Bias of Communication, it is easy to associate the rise of new communication technology as a necessary outcome of technological, political and social change. His chapters are full of examples of how new communication technologies overthrow traditional forms of media precisely because the new communications technology offers either an administrative or technical edge over the old. Paper is more durable than papyrus, and allows for greater uses and ease of transportation, and allows for greater cultural and artistic expression through the medium than papyrus ever could allow. Innis charts the rise of newspapers and how through technological advances of paper production, the cost of publication and production dropped on a consistent basis. Innis remarks on the radio, and how it has allowed “national leaders to remain in power for unusual lengths of time is a fact not unrelated to the use of radio.” (p. 202) So, at first glance, it appears that Innis would have viewed, and perhaps even predicted, the internet based on the practical necessity of having a global communications medium that is instantaneous and ubiquitous as the global capital markets themselves. However, this “precognition” of the future should not be confused with its blind acceptance.
Innis clearly favors “time binding media” such as hand written media and oral traditions over “space binding media” such as the mass media of newspapers, radio and television, because “time bound media” reinforces intimate dialog of person to person communication. It is no accident that Innis focuses on the role of education within a society, as it is clear that he favors this personal, Socratic method of education. For Innis, personal dialog with a handful of students is the basis for a true and meaningful education. Innis states, “We should, then, be concerned like the Greeks with making men, not with overwhelming them by facts disseminated with paper and ink, film, radio and television. Education is the basis of the state and its ultimate aim and essence is the training of character.”(p. 203) He quotes Lord Elgin, remarking that “ the purpose of education not to prepare children for their occupations but to prepare them against their occupations” provides a refreshing contrast to the modern universities preoccupation of “credentialing” rather than educating. Perhaps the most biting criticism that Innis offers at the prospect of “the internet” is his quote, “mechanical devices become concerned with useless knowledge of useful facts” (p. 205) I cannot think of a more succinct, culturally relevant criticism of the internet than his quote.