Innis and Internet Society
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.