Innis on Innis: "I Have Already Written 'The Book' on the Internet"
Harold Innis was a scholar who had many thoughts on communication. Indeed, it seems that there was not a form of communication he didn’t find to be of interest. He had thoughts on technologies that ranged from cuneiform to the calendar. Needless to say, if Innis were alive today, he surely would have some thoughts about the Internet, and blogs in particular. In The Bias of Communication, Innis analyzes the history of the newspaper and publishing in great detail. I suspect that he would provide a similar exploration of the Internet rather than reduce it to a tidbit, or “idea file,” as he does with many of the other technologies he discusses.
One of Innis’s contentions is that the defeat of John Adams and the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789 were a tribute to the power of the press (157). This makes me suspect that Innis would be very interested in the power of blogs on the Internet. He would be intrigued by the Swiftboat bloggers in the election of 2004 and might even go so far as to attribute John Kerry’s defeat to the rise of this new technology, just as the power of the press determined the election of 1800.
Additionally, Innis would be interested in the political nature of blogs. He would be curious to understand the connections between bloggers and politicians. He would want to determine if bloggers had ties to political campaigns in the same manner that newspapers, such as the United States Telegraph, were connected to various Presidential administrations (164). Innis would be quite curious to learn with whom the swiftboat campaign truly originated.
He would also follow with a similar concern. Just as the election of 1800 demonstrated the power of the press, so too did it demonstrate the rise of a partisan press. Innis would be concerned that blogs demonstrate the rise of a partisan Internet and that once again, “Freedom had become license” (157). Furthermore, in his history Innis notes that “Technological advances in the production of newspapers and of paper supported the competition of a new type of newspaper” (159). Innis would see the development of technological innovations in the production of websites as leading to a new form of website, the blog. He would suggest that the technology of the blog challenges other websites, such as those found at CNN . Likewise, this “new type of newspaper… emphasized more sensational news” (160) just as blogs emphasize more sensational items.
Innis, of course, would attempt to relate blogs to other forms of technology. Innis argues that the press used the new technology of the telegraph to its own advantage (167). Innis would want to determine how blogs have been used by the modern media. He would search for examples of how the popular press used information found on blogs to their own advantage. For example, Innis would ask how the swift boat campaign become adopted by the major media. He would want to understand blogs as a potential resource for more traditional forms of journalism. Just as the telegraph led to demands for faster news (168), Innis would be interested in how the rise of blogging led to a demand for more personalized and interactive news, and would be particularly interested in any mainstream media sources that adopted blogging strategies.
Innis would also be interested in the implications of this technology and its use of language. Innis contended that, “The existence of a large population with a single language gave the telephone a position of greater importance in the United States than that of the telegraph in Europe with its numerous languages” (173). He would likely find that blogs are more important in the United States than elsewhere for the same reason.
He might find that the political disturbances of the early Twenty-First Century were the result of a period of adjustment in which other forms of mass media adapted to the Internet and to blogs. This parallels the political disturbances of the late 1800’s that were caused by the adjustment of newspapers to the telegraph (175). He attributes the election of Franklin Roosevelt to fourth term to the power of the radio (188). Likewise, Innis would suggest that the demand to impeach the current President or at least remove his cronies, is a result of the partisanship of blogs and the inability of the media to provide credible forms of commentary.
Innis contends that history is cyclical and that the cyclical nature of history has not been fully explored in the field of communications. It is important to study history because it might repeat itself (xxvii). In the case of the Internet, and blogs in particular, Innis would likely make this connection. Innis might claim that we need not interpolate his ideas to the Internet; they are already present. In the Bias of Communication, he had already written “the book” on the Internet.