Ian Hill's Seminar Blog

I believe Innis would consider the internet a space-biased medium owing to multiple factors, like its fleeting informational content, its portability, and changeability. The more vital question for Innis, however, would probably center on whether the internet will usher in some sort of social upheaval similar to the numerous revolutions contemporaneous to other transformations of communication technology that Innis describes over and over again in his book.

Following Innis’s process model, such upheaval sees a balance between a space-biased medium and a time-biased medium, before the newer of the two technologies achieves widespread and popular usage. So, if Innis looked at contemporary society in conjunction with the internet, would he see the roots of a stable period like that he posited for the cultural primacy of Ancient Greece before writing became rampant and helped transform Greece’s oral tradition? Or, would Innis see a period of revolutionary potential in which the internet is banishing the importance of a space-biased medium to transform society? In order to speculate Innis’s position on the internet, one must first decide where in his process theory of change our current society falls. If Innis rose from the grave to assess our situation, I don’t think he would see transformation in action. Like many other internet critics, he might see revolutionary potential in internet technology like hacktivists, multitude scholars, etc. However, at the same time, Innis would also observe the continued dominance of capitalist lifestyles around the globe. Thus, because the internet is still in its infancy, especially given the vast amounts of time that new communication technologies took to usurp the primacy of former communication technologies throughout history, I believe Innis would argue that ours is a civilization in the midst of its flourishing. However, like all flowering civilization in the past, ours must fall as well. But, at the moment, the internet coexists quite in peace with global capitalism, and our civilization and the internet seem to feed each others’ strengths.

Another question to consider: what is the time-biased medium that the internet will replace in importance? The internet has transformed print into a time-biased medium. Whereas print was once the communication technology of revolution due to its space-biased characteristics, now the internet has trumped print in terms of its ability to transcend large spaces. In turn, dusty institutional libraries seem like other monuments to lost cultures like the Pyramids and the Acropolis. Libraries have become traditional, bound in time. The internet usurps the library with its ease of use. We delete unwanted information with the touch of the mouse rather than a spectacular bonfire of books.

Of course, all of the other modern communications technologies, like telephony, television, radio, etc. have all become enmeshed with capitalism without causing a total revolution, so perhaps Innis would not put much faith in the internet.

Posted by ianhill2 at 09:46 AM | Permalink

One of the main implicit themes present in The Bias of Communication is the role of new communication technologies in cultural revolutions. Minerva’s Owl begins its flight in the gathering dusk of a civilization much like the flight of information on the back of new, popular technologies like clay, stone, papyrus, parchment, print, radio, etc. The increasing capability of communication to expand and/or contract space and time influences the technique of subversion. Thus, each social revolution has its own communication technology, regardless whether that revolution is political, religious, cultural, economic, etc.

Innis describes this process in action in each of the first three chapters of the book. For example, in “A Plea for Time,” Innis writes: “We are concerned with control not only over vast areas of space but also over vast stretches of time. We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration” (64). The issues at hand are governing power relations at specific historical moments, but because all hierarchies of power have had a limited duration, their overthrow remains an essential characteristic of any historical controlling power. Furthermore, “The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an overemphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved” (64). Innis often cites ancient Greece as a paramount case of balance achieved between space and time bias due to the flexibility of their oral tradition to absorb the beginning of writing culture. When civilizations emphasize time or space in communication, balance disappears to set up a revolution via the spread of new communication technology. It seems like balance only occurs for a brief amount of time once one communication technology supersedes a previous one as in the following additional examples: clay => stone => balance with the Kassites; papyrus => parchment => balance in the Byzantine Empire; parchment => paper => balance in “modern” states (64).

Reading Innis, it seems that every new communication technology will cause a civilization-wide revolution, as his historical timeline/cycle demonstrates. A drawback to this approach comes with his analysis of present day communication technology. At the end of “A Plea for Time,” Innis rightly claims that our current civilization emphasizes the immediacy of communicating in time over the stability of space. However, the rapidity with which new communication technologies have become invented make me wonder if one technology can retain a lengthy primacy to induce a stability that must, in Innis’s model, counter the civilization-wide change brought upon us by radio, TV, the internet, etc. Does each new communication technology produce only localized stability and revolution? All of Innis’s examples come before the invention and improvement of global communications networks, so perhaps balance can only be achieved on a local level. And, perhaps each new communication technology has induced a revolution, but on a more local level. I’m not sure how Innis would even characterize the current civilization, but it seems he would emphasize the dominance of global capitalism, so this might preclude an emphasis on local power changes that have little effect on the global.

Posted by ianhill2 at 11:37 AM | Permalink

Considering the various different conclusions Miller and Slater come up with in "The Internet" in contrast to the other books we’ve read earlier in the semester, it seems to me that the essential difference between Miller and Slater and the others has less to do with the authors’ approach and object of study, and more to do with the relative newness of the technology discussed. On one hand, Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all wrote about older technologies that had plenty of time for their practice to become ossified in capitalist production/consumption. On the other hand, Miller and Slater wrote about the internet at a time when many businesses, despite the so-called dot.com revolution, had not figured out how to use the new technology. Hence Williams, Douglas, and Fischer all present histories that describe the capture of the technologies by businesses as they attempted to make their use profitable and banal. In the case of Miller and Slater, that process has not finished, as described in their sixth chapter on Trini internet business practice.

Miller and Slater describe three different approaches to Trini internet business practice that indicate the level of involvement certain businesses have with the technology. The three levels range from creating little more than internet pamphlets to have a minimal web presence, “mid-range ‘catalogue’ websites” that provide a greater level of ineractive buying and selling functions, and “fully functioning interface and ecommerce sites” that represent successful integration of local Trini business practice with globalized business practice. In terms of the other authors, the section of Fischer’s book that relates the uncontrolled spread of telephone companies in the wake of Bell’s patents expiring seems most relevant in comparison. However, whereas Fischer provides a history of unregulated business practice, he still writes his book in a historical moment that finds the world of telephony controlled by giant corporations with little deviation in business practice, and the latter part of his history describes how the telephone giants began to exert their power over other companies by expanding across the entirety of America in a relatively short amount of time. In contrast, Miller and Slater conduct their ethnography just at the moment in time when internet business practice has almost no regulation, despite the presence of giant corporations on the web. The subsequent rise of web 2.0 flea markets like e-Bay and the Amazon Marketplace, I believe, show that the period in which Miller and Slater wrote is still ongoing and morphing into new non-ossified forms of internet business practice. Indeed, the three types of website models that Miller and Slater describe still seem apt to describe the various types of business websites found online at this moment.

When Miller and Slater make the conclusion that Trini internet business practice embodies “frictionless economies” and/or “disintermediation,” (“a free flow of money, goods and desires, as smooth as electrons flowing through a superconductor, and with just as few regulatory hurdles to jump”), they do not seem to be engaging in hyperbole (168). However, if Fischer made the same claims about the early days of unregulated telephony, he would definitely seem like he was being overly idealistic given the eventual corporate takeover of telephone technology practice. The difference lies in timeliness. Miller and Slater write from the recent present to make extrapolations about the future of Trini internet business, whereas Fischer writes about a period many decades in the past to account for the development of telephone practice into its banal corporate form. Perhaps Miller and Slater should temper their conclusions and reign in their internet hype, but they seem to remain hopeful; the specter of a complete corporate takeover of the internet looms, but it has not become manifest yet, unlike with the telephone.

Posted by ianhill2 at 11:35 AM | Permalink