Innis and Revolution
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.