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Abstract
During
the late 1940’s and early 1950’s a Canadian scholar working at the University
of Toronto wrote most prolifically upon the subject of human
communications. Ever since that period, the writings of Dr. Harold Adams
Innis continue to be interpreted by contemporary scholars. In an era that
is constantly quite literally being re-defined by newer communication
technologies, we often search for some understanding or predictability of the
enormous changes and challenges to our Western society wrought by rapid
innovations to communications. Dr. Innis is considered by some to have
been at the forefront in illustrating the impact of changing modes of
communication upon ancient societies as well as the modern epoch. This
research paper will illustrate how Dr. Innis influenced our understanding of
communications.
While
developing a research paper for an undergraduate class in distance and open
learning I became aware of the works of Dr. Harold Adams Innis. In contrast to
the often-cryptic prose of his former graduate student, Marshall McLuhan, I
found Innis' work illuminated certain theories regarding concepts of
communication. It was as if the works of these two remarkable scholars
needed each other to be more understandable. While Dr. Innis took his
rightful place among Canada’s more famous historians, he never really gained
the broader public acclaim Dr. McLuhan experienced.
At
this point, I take the reader to 1994 when the impact of newer communication
technologies gained momentum in the communication industry and to a somewhat
lesser extent, education. What we experienced at the time is now
recognized more widely as a paradigm shift. Scholars, students, the
high-technology industry, and to a lesser extent, the investment industry
searched for clues to answer the constantly changing questions occurring with
expanding new possibilities on an almost daily basis. The era mocked many
of our efforts to rationalize or organize what we experienced into any
simplistic formula or over-arching theory. It took a few years to gain a
collective understanding of communication innovations: we were involved with
nothing less than a revolution. Indeed, we may just be beginning to grasp
a basic understanding of the importance of newer communication
technologies. History teaches us that once revolutions gain some sort of
critical mass, they cannot contain themselves, much less be contained.
Much
lip service was paid to this idea of a revolution in communications, and
Marshall McLuhan, as an unintended darling of North American pop culture and
the intelligentsia, was the de facto ‘Guru’ and spokesman for this revolution.
(Duffy, 1969) How many people fully absorbed his message would seem to be
an open question and McLuhan’s fame and standing gradually diminished until he
died. I often wondered if Dr. McLuhan’s work was understood in his own
time. He may have been cursed with the dilemma of speaking and writing in
an era that experienced a revolution on different fronts, as Western culture
openly challenging its own values, icons, and ideas. A large and youthful
audience readily listened to, and often re-iterated these revolutionary
concepts without submitting them to the critical analysis they deserved, and
upon maturation, these former acolytes discarded the dated concepts as though
changing fashions for a new season.
Perhaps
it would not be too unkind to say that Marshall McLuhan was captured within his
era's particular medium, that is to say, the electronic medium (Duffy,
1969). While Dr. McLuhan wrote eloquently and prolifically, he gained
much wider exposure within the constraints of electronic images via
television. Media personalities of all types quoted McLuhan. But
because much of McLuhan’s work dwelled within and upon the impact of electric
communications, much of his work became trapped within the time and space of
his own era, a sobering reminder to any scholar who might seek a measure of
immortality. McLuhan did say that even a light bulb changed the way
people lived and learned as it allowed for night reading, but it was the
growing influence of television that held his attention as well as that of the
public eye.
What
do we then make of Dr. Innis' work? How did he contribute to communications
theory, and what made him different from anyone else, including McLuhan?
Subtle differences emerge between McLuhan and Innis in explaining
communications theory, yet their separate work ultimately strengthens each
other's arguments. One of Innis' most profound contributions concerned
the theory of administrating empires and religion, or as Innis termed it,
attempts to control time and space. Differing from Emmanuel Kant's work
which tied everything to a time and a place, Innis theorized that in many
matters of communications, history repeatedly illustrated that communications
were largely efforts to control time and space. Time in the sense of a
reliable calendar, and space being an area of land or water between separate
points. The most modern application of communications technology to
control space is the Global Positioning System. Developed for the
military, the GPS is a prime example of an enabling tool developed to assist an
individual to control space.
Arguably,
the military itself is the ultimate state-sponsored entity designed to control,
or even terminate, human time and space. Innis, a Gunner with the
Canadian Expedition Overseas during World War I, would likely understand and
appreciate this latest military communication technology.
The
rapid speed that trains travel caused Sir Sanford Fleming to develop a
universal system of time zones that allowed for an accurate system for
predicting arrivals and departures. This system of time zones is still in
use and illustrates the modern-day merging of human attempts to control time
and space. Sir Fleming’s system also gives an early example of the
secularization and commercialization of Western society’s attempts to control
time. Moreover, Sir Fleming’s innovation in reckoning time illustrates
another example in the shift from religion controlling time to that of
commerce.
Innis'
views on Time
The
measurement of time was often the exclusive province of religious authority,
and Innis went to great lengths to describe this association. In many
cases astronomy and philosophy could only be practiced within a religious
institution, making them subject to that institution's checks and
controls. A religion's credibility to deliver the reward of an after-life
might be measured against its ability to reckon time in a more earthly
setting. Planting and harvest, feasts and holy days were instrumental in
forming the basis of religious authority. A religion's ability to predict
seasons, solar and lunar eclipses, and the length of days or nights likely
caused some semblance of awe in ancient peoples. A religion that could
not organize and schedule some sort of rudimentary structure in a society could
not ensure the success of agriculture, something essential for founding a
civilization. Without agriculture a band or tribe would not be stationary long
enough to build anything lasting or establish enough wealth to provide for
administrators or scholars. Many of the world' first temples were
structures built in alignment with different stars, planets, and constellations
which formed the basis for marking seasons. A calendar developed and
events could be coordinated. Innis claimed that these efforts were all
examples of attempts to control time. And through the experiences of Galileo,
we can see how jealously religion will protect their exclusive control. A
few examples of this phenomena is the fact that elements of Judaism still
observe their own calendar. The Orthodox Church still reckons time with
the Julian calendar as do the Mohammedan observe their own calendar. All
these religious groups may interact with each other and the world temporal with
the Latin–inspired Gregorian calendar, but each jealously guard their own
system of time and the religious holidays observed within each of their own
particular calendars. Also important to the continuation of any society,
religious or secular, is the education of their young. Literacy in language
must be continually and consciously fostered if anything of a particular
culture is to survive. Historically, some sects of Christianity pushed
the concept of literacy from the concept of religious instruction into a
secular public forum, ultimately creating the systems we have in place today.
Innis'
views on Space
An
accompanying theory on the concept of controlling time Innis posited the theory
that human societies attempt to control space. A tribal land or those of
a local king had to be defended and administered and this meant that a ruler's
will had to be imposed upon areas beyond his immediate line of sight, a notion
that required a degree of delegated authority. The coordination of a
monarch's army required the communication of complicated and abstract
ideas. Taxes had to be assessed and exacted in order to feed and cloth
some sort of standing force, which in turn had to assert a ruler's authority
over an extended space. Borders had to be defended and frontiers policed
all requiring constant and secure communications between a ruler and his agents
(Innis, 1950).
The
hallmark event of a civilization was the effective coordination of a monarch's
temporal authority over space with a religious body's administration over
matters regarding concepts of time (Innis, 1950). People might enjoy a
plurality of religions and deities, but none could survive or function with a
variety of calendars. Some vehicle for reckoning time had to exist along
with a general recognition and acceptance of its authority and accuracy.
Innis claimed that the first instance where the above prerequisites were met
took place in the Upper Valley of the Nile. Much later in the Industrial
Age, the demands of coordinated shift work would see commercial and secular
entities make a series of inroads into the various state and religious bodies
attempts to control time.
McLuhan's
era
In his
later years Innis often considered text and images while McLuhan devoted a
large part of his life to understanding and explaining electronic
communications and media (Duffy, 1969). However, due to the time and
space in which McLuhan lived and worked public attention and concern was
largely focussed on radio, and increasingly television. At the time,
large state or corporate entities controlled media, not the freewheeling,
unregulated internet-era, upon which we now embark. McLuhan responded to
the concerns of his own era. I doubt if McLuhan awoke one day and decided
to become a "media guru". In the post-war era most people were
not fully conscious of any particular media other than newspapers, as radio was
well accepted and television was a medium only recently beginning to develop
its potential as a news and information service.
During
the 1960's through to end of the 1970's, television became the principle form
of information for many people. Noam Chomsky's valuable work on
interpreting media had not reached its full impact, and people largely looked
at electronic news media less critically. Radio news tended to be
compressed and fact-driven, as did television. The drift to radio and
televised editorial and panel style discussions was slow and pernicious.
It was much easier to control public debate by choosing what was being
discussed in public forums, and what positions the participants would take on
these issues. If a participant did voice views outside of the private or
public sponsors concerns, it was unlikely that they would be invited back, or
even filmed in the first place (Chomsky, 1998). One of the first examples
of the power of televised images to influence public outcomes was the famed
Nixon versus Kennedy debate (McLuhan, 1964). The irony being that Nixon
already demonstrated his understanding of the power of televised images to
influence political outcomes when he brought the issues surrounding his
family's dog 'Checkers' onscreen to counter charges of fiscal improprieties
against him. Images have the power to convey many ideas in an instant.
However, images tend to be taken at 'face value', and seldom invite the
critical debate almost inherently surrounding speech or text. Indeed in
an era before televised images, noted 19th century economic historian J. E.
Thorold Rogers stated "… a cheap investment [is] to be made in popular
delusions. I know no safer speculation" (Innis, 1952). Whether
the public has developed the visual literacy necessary for television is an
idea that is still being debated.
Other
Scholars’ influence on Innis
At
this point the works of Dr. Innis shed the most light on the ongoing tensions
between vernacular speech and text or print. During a lecture honouring
the memory of Josiah Charles Stamp, First Baron Stamp of Shortlands, Dr. Innis
spoke of the individuals who helped him form his own thinking. Baron
Stamp was once responsible for investigating the problems of marketing grain in
Canada, and Dr. Innis considered the Stamp Report to be an important document
in the history of marketing. Innis also paid tribute to the works of one
of the founders of the London School of Economics, Graham Wallas, whose work,
he felt, was most influential in Baron Stamp's thinking, and ultimately found
_expression in The Stamp Report, a national grain marketing research document
for the Government of Canada (Innis, 1952).
In his
lecture on Baron Stamp, Innis related how Wallas' largely neglected later
publications had concentrated on the problem of efficiency in creative thought.
Wallas emphasized the enduring importance of an oral tradition in an era where
mechanized forms of communication tended to overwhelm speech. Professor
Innis further pointed out that even Wallas recognized that this mechanized
communication, in his day the printing press, makes it very difficult to even
recognize that we possessed an oral tradition both in fact and in law.
Innis, in a lecture, which is one of the oral tradition's surviving forms,
credited Graham Wallas with illustrating the ongoing struggle between speech
and print. (Innis, 1952).
Perhaps
we did not realize that we had an oral tradition until a form of mechanized
communication competed with it, and Innis claims that we could not examine this
oral tradition without an appraisal of the mechanized one (Innis, 1952).
At this point the reader may see modern comparisons emerging now that we look
back on a century of electronic communications, a vastly more competitive and
pervasive form of communication than that of print. As did Innis, Dr.
McLuhan repeatedly pointed out that each new medium is influenced, and to some
degree shaped, by the media which proceeds it. McLuhan also said that:
"Nothing is inevitable provided that we are willing to pay
attention." I believe that Harold Innis was the first to pay
attention to the varying forms of communication and their broader impact upon
civilization.
Innis
view of the uses of Communication to influence Time and Space in Early River
Civilizations
Innis'
earlier work concentrated upon economic history, and some of these seminal
works examined the subject of communications, or more precisely how trade and a
nations trade and economic history were influenced by methods of
communication. His book "The Cod Fisheries", an exhaustive
work, resonates with the themes of the time and distance involved in crossing
the Atlantic, and the effects of this time and distance upon communications
between Europe and Atlantic North America, and in consequence, future human
settlements. When reading his following works one gains a sense of Dr.
Innis being increasingly drawn into the concept of communications to explain
the various dynamics of economic history. And as such, he was well
grounded in his research when he published "Empire and Communications"
in 1950.
Innis
documents how the Egyptians, in order to coordinate agriculture, trade, and
communications with the floods of the Nile, used astronomy to reconcile the
lunar calendar with the solar year. The Egyptian ecclesiastical
authorities used this more accurate calendar in combination with the Pharaoh to
regulate society and coordinate and combine the labour of their subjects.
This event marked the imposition of Osiris and Ra, the respective gods of the
Nile and the Sun, on largely agrarian peoples of Upper Egypt. The wishes
of Osiris and Ra were exercised in human form by the words and actions of the
priests and the Pharaoh. The calendar, divinely inspired, became a matter
of royal authority, and a written language soon emerged which the Greeks described
as Hieroglyphics, a Greek word which means sacred engraved writing (Innis,
1950). As writing evolved from semiotics to phonetics the monarchy was
able to write increasingly complex laws and dictates, thus, writing helped
consolidate royal authority until the Pharaohs could effectively subvert the
priests authority and gain for themselves the status of gods. Ultimately
all arable land came under the authority of the Pharaoh. After years of
consolidating royal authority Innis speculated that irregularities in the
sidereal year meant that a day was gained each year and these difficulties with
the calendar ultimately allowed the priests to re-assert their knowledge and
authority. In the course of a few years the priests successfully
subverted the Pharaoh from the status of individual godhead to the Son of
Ra. Again the Sun became law, but this law was interpreted by the word,
which could only be issued through the king, on the advice of his priests of
course. In the earliest times these words could only be written on stone,
a rather inflexible medium, but almost indestructible and not easily given to
manifold interpretations. Innis claims this successful centralization of
gods, by creating a functional duality of priests with the monarchy, favoured
the growth of political ideas (Innis, 1950).
A more
contemporary calendar was created and imposed upon Egypt by the clergy of
Helkiopolis. As Egypt's priests gained power Egypt became a defacto
oligarchy. As royal power shifted from a single king to the royal family
more change emerged. Egypt became more like a feudal society with local
administrators consisting of local clergy and royal officials.
Equally important, papyrus increasingly became the predominant medium for
print. Although papyrus had been used since the first dynasty it did not
supplant stone as a medium because power was centralized and permanence was
preferable to transportability. As power became more decentralized the
need for administrative communications became more pronounced and hieroglyphics
written on papyrus filled this need. Egyptian writing became less of a
religious activity. Now its writers work began to more closely resemble that of
a scribe, and they implemented innovations which changed older sacred symbols
to speed the writing process. As a form of shorthand that was
unrecognizable from the older sacred symbols emerged, a more fluid form of
script became the predominant written language (Innis, 1950).
This
concept of writing by hand developed along with secular writing. Politics
began to be manifest in print outside of the older priest/king axiom.
Broadened literacy made social mobility possible, and the exhausting forms of
labour at the time could be avoided by learning to write. This newer form
of communication created the climate for greater change, and religious reform
allowed for the extension of the afterlife to the masses. Eventually
religious rights and property rights became codified into law. Stone writing
remained the language of the pyramids, but the public embraced a newer form of
communication with scripted papyrus. However, writing required a long
apprenticeship and it followed that reading required a great deal of
instruction. In a fashion repeated throughout history, power eventually
was re-centralized by including the scribes in the upper classes of generals,
priests, and the nobility (Innis, 1950). Innis asserted that the
Egyptian experience was an early example of knowledge reforming itself into a
monopoly resisting change.
The
natural tendency of the Nile to flood its banks required Egypt's farmers to
organize themselves at some level to insure survival. The priesthood
monopolized knowledge of astronomy and exploited this knowledge in conjunction
with the local king to create social order through absolute authority,
metaphysical as well as temporal. Although communicating ideas with a less
cumbersome form of script by painting on the lighter medium of papyrus enabled
change, knowledge and power effectively re-trenched and re-centralized itself
with the priests and the monarchy. The old Egyptian monarchy, whose
priests used their calendar to predict the floods of the Nile and asserted
itself over concepts of time and space by erecting the still visible pyramid,
remained more or less intact. The Pharaohs and priests willingly re-tied
themselves to the older form of communication, writing on stone. The
priests and kings recognized the origin of their authority and easy duplication
or re-interpretation of words did not serve their long-term interests, the
retention of power. Religious and state written communications had to be
re-monopolized in order to preserve the monarchy and religious caste's place at
the head of Egypt's social order (Innis, 1950).
The
Sumerians represent another great empire centered on a river. The
Euphrates was regulated from the earliest times and a calendar was not as
critical to their development as a civilization. Writing evolved from a
system for keeping records of property, exacting taxes, and matters of royal administration.
The Sumerians' unique cuneiform writing style was made possible by the medium
on which it was developed, the clay found throughout the Euphrates
valley. The Sumerians used a reed stylus to inscribe impressions upon
clay tablets; these impressions possessed a triangular indent, which varied
with the degree of weight delivered through the stylus. These clay
tablets proved to be too easily copied or forged for reliable communications
from the monarch, so the clay tablets were fired to allow for greater integrity
and preservation. Ready-made rolls were carved to allow for the rapid and
a reliable impression of a multitude of clay tablets, a kind of early prototype
of the printing press (Innis, 1950).
The
weight of these engraved tablets became their principle drawback, and
consequently their medium of communications restricted the size of their empire
to the distance traveled by the boats on the Euphrates or the early Sumerian
chariot drawn by four asses. When the larger Asian horse was crossed with
the much faster and lighter African horse, an animal emerged that could be
ridden. This meant that a single rider, a much swifter means of travel,
could deliver communications greater distances, a partial conquest over
space. The introduction of parchment required a new utensil for writing,
and the three dimensional symbols of the cuneiform were modified to allow for
easier reproduction on parchment, which of necessity, lost its three
dimensional depth as the stylus on clay was replaced with a brush on parchment.
Only royal, religious, and legal seals were left in the earlier forms of
inscription (Innis, 1950). The dual developments of a single horseman
with easily transported parchment made for faster communications; an event not
lost on nations that possessed the ambitions of empire.
The
Sumerians stable city state society allowed for the accumulation of sufficient
wealth to draw successive waves of invaders and among the first were the
Babylonians, but later tribes were predominantly Semitic in origin. Most
of these invaders adapted the Sumerian cuneiform to their own language, and the
original form of cuneiform remained intelligible only to the Sumerian
priests. The various invaders created a situation similar to that in
Egypt: they mutated the original form of written communications to more closely
reflect their spoken word, often unrelated to the original Sumerian
language. Script became a means to more closely symbolize sounds of the
spoken word, and as such, ideas emerged. This emergence of ideas began to
flow not from the priests, but from agents of commerce, and a different group
gained a means of wider communication. At first the kings and landholders
of Sumeria had adopted the cuneiform to flesh out their mathematical, tax, and
property title communications amongst each other; later invaders adopted their
writing for their own needs, which were chiefly commercial. It was from
this tradition that secular writing emerged in the lands around the Euphrates,
first in Babylon, and later with the Phoenicians. It followed that the
script of these two nations would, by conquest and by contact, have a lasting
impact upon the Hebrews (Innis, 1950). The fact that Judaism still exists
despite all efforts to eradicate it is as much a testament to the enduring
legacy of their own distinct script and calendar as it is to their remarkable
faith which is wrapped indivisibly into these aforementioned concepts of
communication.
Mobile
media allows for the survival and expansion of ideas
The
Hebrews left Egyptian captivity with new sense of respect for the power and
sanctity of the written word, an eventuality with ramifications for their
culture as well as our own. Their view of the world and their place in
the cosmos now began with the word. All God's wisdom was captured in the
written word. Writing allowed for the preservation and enrichment of
Jewish culture. All activities were modulated by the word, and images or
even representations of images were proscribed (Innis, 1950, Saul, 1993).
As sculpture was the most effective medium for competing pagan religions,
Yahweh's Commandment delivered to the people by Moses proclaimed: 'Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that
is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth' (Exodus xx. 4). On this divinely
inspired development Innis wrote, "The written letter replaced the graven
image as an object of worship" (Innis, 1950).
A
strong monotheistic faith largely unfettered by time and place evolved.
The observation of the Sabbath coupled with a litany of religious occasions
allowed for a religion that could survive with its peoples' covenant with time
unrestricted by place, space or distance. Such a people and religion could
now endure conquest, colonization, enslavement, and even captivity in foreign
lands. Jehovah's chosen people took from these dominant cultural elements
which strengthened their own, and, as such, they took a universal concept of
God and nationalized it in order to protect their religion and
themselves. In turn, their concept of God was strengthened and deepened
by the fact that this was a largely unseen God. A God that allowed for no
representative sculptures or icons could resist destruction indefinitely, as long
as people believed, a system of beliefs that required and encouraged broader
literacy. Partly in consequence of this, a theocracy evolved which
differed from others in that it openly distrusted kingship. The king's
authority came from God but was subject to recall by the people; all were to
strive to be righteous, rulers, priests and the laity. It took the
efforts of later prophets, namely Ezekiel and Jeremiah, to re-subordinate the
political state to that of their religion, and Judaism could be successfully
practiced anywhere, thus ensuring its survival (Innis, 1950).
Much
later the early Christians would ensure the survival of their beliefs by
writing the four gospels in Greek on parchment compiled with the Hebrews'
portable and easily referred codex, creating a Christian Byblos or Bible.
This allowed for much wider dissemination and gave early Christianity a
valuable edge in its competition with other religions. Innis wrote that
Judaism and the early Christians depended on Aramaic as a vernacular language
with Hebrew largely confined to religious scripture and the priestly
caste. With an Old Testament that was largely indecipherable, and an
occupying Latin speaking force that was already hostile to Israel's religion,
it proved beneficial to the early Christians that Judaism had already been
assimilated into the Hellenistic world in Egypt where Judaic scriptures were
already translated into Greek. And so the single religion, which differed
only on a point of doctrine, became two separate entities when the Christians
abandoned Jerusalem and Antioch after Titus destroyed the Temple. At this
point the orthodox Talmudic Rabbinism was effectively severed from
Hellenistic-influenced Judaism (Innis, 1950). Thus the two strains of a
similar monotheistic religion with common origins were able to develop and
survive in relative isolation from each other. The Jews fostered their
faith by keeping sacred the written word within their Talmud and keeping their
covenant with time their own calendar enabling religious holidays and the
Sabbath to be unerringly observed. Indeed, what form of Christianity
might have survived to present day if Saul had not committed Christ’s parables
to print? It is most noteworthy that Christ, much as Socrates, never wrote
anything as far as we may know. Moreover, Christ would say “It is
written, but I say unto you”. An interesting point illustrating tensions
between print and the vernacular.
Innis
views historical tensions between spoken and written words
In
"Empire and Communications" Dr. Innis analyzes how writing began to
unravel traditional Greek civilization by subverting its oral traditions with
writing's much more rigid form of communication. He documents how in 470
B.C. Athens was largely illiterate, but in a mere forty years Herodotus found
it more convenient to turn his work into print, an event that would imply that
reading had become more common. Naturally, we in modern times are
indebted to Herodotus for committing his observations to print, but imagine
what this may have signaled in his own era. Divisions in the Greek
language began to re-emerge as history, law, and religion retreated from a
wider oral quasi-national forum into the individual city-states and the various
regional dialects. Innis claims that as the Ionic form of Greek succeeded
in suppressing the Doric form, the Greeks sought a uniform manner of
writing. The Ionic form of writing in turn was replaced by one of its own
dialects: Attic became the dominant language for writing (Innis, 1950). Something
still larger was going on in Greek society, and Innis, with his critical eye
for the particular events of history, found support in the works of his
predecessors to warrant many of his claims.
The
relative isolation of the Greek peninsula and islands from the rest of the
ancient world fostered the development of an independent society that enjoyed
relative safety from large land-born armies. Even if Greece's northern
boundaries were attacked, the plethora of southern peninsula and island
city-states insured cultural survival and integrity borne by a long oral
tradition. The oral tradition of Greece first achieved its greatest
lasting contribution to our Western society in Athens; it was in Athens that
the concept of democracy was first born (Innis, 1950).
This
hallmark event would have been unimaginable if Greek intellectual thought was
restricted to priests and scribes. The recitation of poetry, history, and
law depended upon a rich oral tradition, and it was in Athens that a voice was
given to the demos, the Greek word for people. Ideas could be introduced,
disseminated and discussed with an eye to the greater public good. It is
hard for us in our latter day, text dependent society to imagine a truly oral
society, but without a strong and vibrant oral tradition it is unlikely that
the early Greeks would have developed democracy. And the import of
democracy in Athens is difficult to overestimate: it meant that for the first
time in recorded history law began to replace force (Innis, 1950.) With
the use of argument, laws could be initiated, changed or modified, and
nullified. All this depended on lively and inclusive debate, which in
turn, was given form and strengthened by an enduring oral tradition. By its
very nature these debates engaged an individual's memory, which in turn aided
in developing a collective consciousness.
Perhaps
Socrate's book Phradrus lends us an interpretation to the mixed
reception given the growth of text by Greek society. In one of the book's
passages used later by Innis, Socrates reports a conversation between Thoth,
the Egyptian god that invented letters, and the god Amon. Amon argues
that:
"this discovery of yours will
create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their
memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember
of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory,
but to reminiscence, and you will give your disciples not truth but only the
semblance of truth: they will be hearers of many things and will have learned
nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing:
they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the
reality."
Socrates continues:
I cannot but help feeling, Phraedrus, that
writing is unfortunately like painting: for the creations of the painter have
the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a
solemn silence, and the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine
that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question
to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer." (Innis, 1950)
Innis felt that the spread of writing destroyed a civilization
based on the oral tradition, but in large part, this oral tradition has survived
throughout Western history. Innis also claimed that this latent oral
tradition helped us to survive being imprisoned by ancient writings, thus
helping to save the spirit and soul of Western civilization when in crisis
(Innis, 1950). The challenge for contemporary scholars is to determine
what impact the shift from the separate mediums of print and television into a
combined entity on the Internet will have for societies.
Innis
also argued that Plato and Aristotle wrote their works after Greek oral tradition
had suffered a major disruption in Athens culminating with the death of
Socrates. Robbed of the vitality of their own oral traditions, Plato and
Aristotle had to turn to other cultures for a written tradition. The
Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet and over time a twenty-four-letter alphabet
began to emerge. The Greeks, in representing their own vowels, used
Semitic characters representing consonants. Consonants carried the same
weight as vowels, so the Greeks represented them in each written word.
This allowed the _expression of nuance and subtlety in Greek writing which in
turn enabled a form of text that allowed for greater "elasticity" in
representing Greek speech, thus a written language that was more responsive and
more closely associated with Greek thought developed. However this new
and arguably more efficient form of communication was not without major
drawbacks to Greek civilization. "The spread of writing contributed
to the collapse of Greek civilization by widening the gap between the
city-states" (Innis, 1950). Insights such as this led Dr. Innis to
claim that any innovation in communication carries with it a natural tendency
to imitate the previous form of communication that it is replacing. In
his book "Empire and Communications", Innis describes how this played
itself out by separating Greek civilization into the naturally authoritarian
nature of a martial Sparta, and the democratic tendencies of Athenian
individualism.
This
polarization in communications had a detrimental and lasting impact upon Greek
civilization, and as Innis noted: "The deeply rooted division between
Ionian and Dorian Greeks was reinforced by geography, dialect, and cultural
development." As a consequence of the Peloponnesian wars, Athens fell
into a long decline, and victorious Sparta, also weakened, fell to the
Thebans. Thebes alone could not defend the entire city-state structure of
the Greeks, and Phillip of Macedonia fostered further divisions among Greek
city-states with calculated propaganda (Innis, 1950).
Whereas
most empires were of necessity involved with international intrigue, Greece was
involved with individual development, and as such gained the most, and in turn,
gave the most to Western civilization. These two separate tendencies
caused Innis to reflect that "Civilization was concerned with the
absorption of the two strands." Innis felt that the oral tradition
of the Greeks coupled with the flexibility of their alphabet allowed them to
separate concepts of political empire, and its preoccupation with space, from
the concept of ecclesiastical empire and its preoccupation with time. He
noted that the Greeks had successfully separated time from religion, and space
from empire, and had for the first time "…reduced them to the rational
proportions of the city-state" (Innis, 1950). No longer could a
complex system of writings be the sole preserve of monarchies and priests, and
absolute authority would forever be compromised. Easy public uniformity
could no longer be so easily assured, and as such, empires and other large
political organizations suffered enduring problems with trying to impose
absolute authority. With the use of a more flexible Greek alphabet,
nations now had a means of preserving their own sense of time and place, and
were not as easily absorbed by the ambitions of others. The concept of
rationalism was preserved and fostered, and with this the West's approach to
culture and history underwent a sea change (Innis, 1950).
The
Greek alphabet was introduced to Rome by way of its Greek colonies in Sicily
and the Italian mainland and the Etruscans used Greek to further develop their
own script. The Etruscans also introduced the more humanistic Greek gods
to Rome. These Greek gods were allowed equal status to the statues of the
old Roman animal gods. Local Roman cults grew around these New Greek gods
in order to propagate and protect them. These gods with human forms were
seen as moreof the people, and more responsive to the people, and
quickly gained acceptability among the pleb.Until Cicero's time laws and
precedents were largely retained in the memory of men, and almost all
transactions involving property were scrupulously witnessed, to testify carried a far greater
personal responsibility in Roman times than our own. Contract law
developed and verbal contracts took on the weight of obligation as well as
duty, and as a result, civil law was strengthened (Innis, 1950).
After
several centuries of warfare Rome finally prevailed against the various
maritime Greek city-states and their sundry colonies, but Rome's eventual
success caused Horace to comment that "Captive Greece took captive her
proud conqueror". Indeed, Latin literature was founded by the
arrival in Rome of Livius Adronicus, in 272 BC. Livius Adronicus was the
first Greek to write Latin and translated the Odyssey from Greek to
Latin. In 249 BC a choir of virgins sang a Greek choral lyric to a Roman
audience for the first time. Returning Roman soldiers had grown fond of
the Greek tragedies and comedies, and in 240 BC Livius introduced these as well
as dramas for the public's enjoyment during Roman festivals. Cato was
concerned with the unchecked advancement of Greek literature on Roman society
and his polemics are credited with helping to develop Latin into a language more
suited to the creation and administration of empire. But Greek thought
and culture had already seeped into the people's consciousness and Greek
rhetoric was used to advance the democratic cause, quite possibly causing or
giving voice to a series of slave revolts (Innis, 1950).
The
strongest evidence of an enduring Greek culture within the Roman Empire lies
not in Rome, but to its East. In part in an effort to escape constant
Roman political intrigue, as well as the plethora of pagan cults, Constantine
the Great centered his empire in Constantinople. Born in Britain of a
pagan Roman general and a Christian British mother, Constantine quite possibly
recognized Rome's continuing ability to absorb and overthrow any usurper.
That Rome depended on her distant armies to defend against the many tribes
surrounding, and ostensibly within the confines of her empire, in turn shows
how weak the capital and surrounding country-side were from attack. Too
many local legions did not lend themselves to Rome's external safety, or
perhaps more to the point, Rome's internal stability. Rome required some
distance from its more ambitious generals. Rome could fight well on a
single front, especially one of its own choosing, but the fact that they became
increasingly dependent upon foreign tribes and mercenaries illustrates how
over-extended Rome's borders had become.
By
establishing his empire's capital on Asia-Minor's side of the Bosphorus,
Constantine exploited an already existing division in Rome's empire: the linguistic
division between the Greek-speaking Hellenistic world and the remnants of the
Latin-influenced Roman Empire. This point of linguistic division may be
used for further evidence of Innis' theory about the inherent political and
cultural bias of communication (Innis, 1951). One of Constantine's
efforts to foster uniformity in the newer Christian religion was the Council of
Nicea, and all Bishops were invited to attend. It was held in Asia Minor
near the coast of the Adriatic, and perhaps in censure or perhaps by
proscription, no Roman Bishop is on record as attending. This act of
omission may have been the first concrete step in a division of Constantine's
ecclesiastical empire, perhaps proving once again that religion is the
collective politicization of individual spirituality.
The
division of the empire into a Latin province in the West with the larger
predominantly Greek speaking component remaining in the East heralded an era of
increasing instability. Centuries later, the former Roman Empire's division
of space developed into a division of time with separate Gregorian and Julian
calendars. Various nations asserted themselves in Western Europe from
Rome's former provinces. In the lands of Northern Europe, increased
hostility was brought to bear upon the rigidity of written Roman law when
dealing with the region's tribes and clans spoken vernacular law. An oral
tradition that coincided with, but developing in isolation from, Greek
traditions refused to be completely dominated by Rome's newfound culture
(Innis, 1950).
As
Rome's empire began to recede, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon oral traditions of law
began to re-emerge unhindered, and a new Anglo-Norse language used the Latin
alphabet, later borrowing whatever words it required from the Franco-Norse dialect
of Norman conquerors. Ironically it is Muslim traders that are credited
with re-introducing original Greek literature into Western Society.
Reinterpretation of the original Greek scripture spawned a greater diversity in
religious thought, ultimately fuelling a religious reformation. The
monasteries, which did much to preserve and spread Roman religion, law, and
language, fell out of favour in Northern Europe, an area with little or no
history of Roman occupation. In short, Europe's monasteries' did that
which they were founded to do, and as Innis pointed out, this was one more
example of the inherently defensive nature of knowledge monopolies (Innis,
1951).
Within
England English Common Law again began to develop and asserted itself wherever
English was spoken. English Common Law carried forth both by a large
maritime trade and by force of arms created a new and still larger empire than
that of the Greeks and Romans combined. Much as the Empire of Portugal
was assisted in expanding partly due to the development of Latitude in
navigating unfamiliar waters, so to were the British empowered by the
development of Longitude. That the British Royal Navy maintained
supremacy due in part to their navigation skills aided the expansion and
development of their empire. An empire that began to unravel before its climax
aided by the efforts American pamphleteers and French intrigue, yet another
example of an empires' vulnerability to a literate public sharing ideas given a
wider distribution by the power of the press (Innis, 1950). We may look
at the development of longitude as an early example of a more contemporary
phenomenon, that is the merging of time with space. Longitude was
possible due to the use of an elaborate system of clocks coupled with the
reckoning of distance.
The
gains made by British commerce and militarism were reinforced in far-off lands
by a broad system of public education. Conscious efforts were made to
replace a variety or regional languages by governing authorities imposing
English as the vernacular, thereby making administration of space less of a
local concern and enabling a broader and more universal form of
imperialism. That all communication carries its own cultural bias was a
point little dwelled upon as evangelical Christianity stepped into what
administrating authorities often considered a moral vacuum. Dr. Innis’
book “The Bias of Communication” makes effective arguments illustrating the
inherent cultural bias within any form of human communication.
Ironically, this idea of a expanded public literacy quite often lent itself to
a larger debate concerning the merits and faults of imperialism, and even the
merits and faults of the very religion which chose to use literacy as a means
to evangelize a populace. A situation not dissimilar to what took place
much earlier upon the banks of the Nile.
The
first and most lasting impact of Gutenberg's printing press was the Bible,
which was soon printed, in vernacular languages, allowing individuals a greater
degree of freedom and independence in interpreting scripture. As local
printers increasingly gave voice to local concerns, some absolute monarchies
began to fall. The few monastic centres of learning that survived the
reign of England's Henry VIII did so concentrating upon becoming more like
universities. Universities designed originally to help the Crown
administer the nation's business, much later by Royal decree and public demand,
became institutions that concentrated upon the creation and dissemination of
knowledge (Innis, 1951).
Centuries
later Hitler would re-exploit oral communications aided by news reels, radio,
and the megaphone to compete with the written propaganda of Communists.
Hitler's first influence on the concept of time was declaring May 1st a paid
national holiday, thereby pre-empting the atheistic Communists the sole day
devoted to honouring the founding of their beliefs. Hitler used the
unifying tendency of the common German vernacular to infuse a sense of
belonging to the people (Innis, Christian, 1980). Hitler had possibly
recognized and countered the Communists' constant division of people into
class. The German masses were drawn to Hitler's spoken praises rather
than to the Communists' social moralizing. The Austrian Hitler was also
seen as less foreign, and thereby preferable to the imported notions of
Communist internationalism. Bismarck's diplomatic intrigue coupled with
force in the creation and consolidation of a modern German state served Hitler
with a ready model for his ambitions. Hitler was quite simply selling the
people on something they already believed, that Germany was a world class power
crippled by foreign intrigue, and the more recently arriving East European
Jews. By reviving Germany's militaristic society, Hitler appeared as the
protector of German-speaking people both within and without of Germany's
boundaries, thus a potential dictator was successfully elected to power in the
Reichstag. The presence of modern day neo-Nazis within Germany after
every attempt was made to eradicate it attests to a possible ingrained cultural
bias. Also, Hitler’s use of the education system and the very effective
use of text and images along with a combined with a sense of pageantry may have
had a more enduring impact upon the children schooled during Hitler’s era.
Conclusion
Harold
Innis gives an exhaustive account of the various laws and consumable
commodities which surrounded the subject of printing presses to the point that
he gives the individual cost of the parchment, rags, and pulpwood used in printing
presses in pennies to the pound (Innis, 1952). Indeed, Innis' later works
assert that communications is actually a staple of human societies, and many of
his writings treat it as such. He argues that the spread of written ideas
had an enormous impact on Western Civilization, and from this Innis draws
parallels between the dispersion of ideas and knowledge with the availability
of a medium for communication. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan restrained
himself from delving too much into the history of communications because his
predecessor had already done such a thorough study of it (Duffy, 1969).
This in turn may have left McLuhan with the impression that he must study and
write upon the impact of the electronic communications media. McLuhan tried
to capture a larger dynamic within the context of his own era, and we, as well
as future generations, will undoubtedly benefit from his insights.
However
it is Dr. Innis who should be lauded as the principal communications
theorist. Critics claim that his later work seemed rushed, a point which
may be countered by the fact that he was gravely ill, and quite possibly
cognizant that his own time was drawing to an end. His theories on the
use of rivers for communications is still used to counter the arguments of those
who postulate that North American communications naturally and historically
followed North/South lines (Innis, 1930). Innis argued the North American
continent was penetrated by three great river systems. The fact that
Southern Canada's system of rivers largely run on an East/West axis allowing
for the development of independent trade and lines of communication proved
fundamental to the establishment and history of Canada (Glazebrook,
Innis, 1941).
Innis'
work also documented well-established events, rather than centering on unproven
theories (Duffy, 1969). His work offered a unique style that allowed for
manifold interpretations. Innis' work enables us to interpret the effects
of changing media upon communication. Innis’ interpretation provides us
with an ability to measure the possible impact upon societies experiencing
changes in their manner of their methods of communications. Any resource which
enables us with predictive skills is most critical at our current juncture with
communication technology. By paying attention we may possibly avoid
tearing down ivory towers only to re-monopolize knowledge within newly built
towers constructed of silicon. His recognition of communication as an
historic agent for change is the great legacy he leaves us. I feel quite
strongly that until sound evidence is presented to the contrary, the scholastic
contributions of Dr. Harold A. Innis will provide his works with a life well
beyond any restrictions upon his own time and space.
References
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Innis, Harold A. (1940). The Cod Fisheries. New
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