1. Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communications & Monopolies of Power
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2. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Harold Adams Innis, a political economist, is widely credited with initiating an important discourse on media from a distinctly Canadian perspective.
He directly influenced Marshall McLuhan and continues to be a central figure in communications theory.
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3. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Innis was born in 1894 near Hamilton, Ontario, graduated from McMaster just before WW1 and saw front-line duty in France.
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4. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
His war experience, during which he saw Canadian soldiers used as cannon-fodder by the British, marked him for life: not only did he become a dedicated pacifist, he became interested in the way marginalized, colonial nations developed a sense of culture in the shadow of larger, empire-building nations.
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5. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
After the war, Innis studied political economy at the University of Chicago where he did his Ph.D. thesis on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
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6. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
As a young professor at the University of Toronto, Innis was concerned that Canadians were being deluged with American material, so he set about to remedy that deficit. For his first book, The History of the Fur Trade in Canada, he retraced many of the routes of the early fur traders.
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7. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Innis developed the staples thesis, which asserted that the Canadian economy tended to rely on the production of single commodities: fur, lumber, mining, agriculture, energy. As a result, Canada found itself in a dependent, and vulnerable relationship to the major manufacturing nations, first Britain, then the U.S.
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8. Innis’ central focus is the social history of communication media.
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9. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
He believed that
the relative stability of cultures depends on the balance and proportion of their media.
To begin our inquiry into this area, he suggests we ask three basic questions
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10. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
How do specific communication technologies operate?
What assumptions do they take from and contribute to society?
What forms of power do they encourage?
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11. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Innis said that:
The key to social change is found in the development of communication media.
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12. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
That each medium embodies a bias in terms of the organization and control of information.
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13. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
That any empire or society is generally concerned with duration over time and extension in space.
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14. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Time-based media
Time-biased media, such as stone and clay, are durable and heavy. Since they are difficult to move, they do not encourage territorial expansion; however, since they have a long life, they do encourage the extension of empire over time. Innis associated these media with the customary, the sacred, and the moral.
Time-biased media facilitate the development of social hierarchies, as archetypally exemplified by ancient Egypt. For Innis, speech is a time-biased medium.
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15. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Space-based media
Space-biased media are light and portable; they can be transported over large distances.
They are associated with secular and territorial societies;
they facilitate the expansion of empire over space. Paper is such a medium; it is readily transported, but has a relatively short lifespan.
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16. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
It was Innis’ conviction that stable societies were able to achieve a balance between time- and space-biased communications media.
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17. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
He also believed that change came from the margins of society, since people on the margins invariably developed their own media. The new media allow those on the periphery to develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to challenge the authority of the centre.
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18. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Latin written on parchment, the medium of the Christian Church, was attacked through the secular medium of vernaculars written on paper.
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19. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Oral communication speech was considered by Innis to be time-biased because it requires the relative stability of community for
face-to-face contact.
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20. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Knowledge passed down orally depends on a lineage of transmission, often associated with ancestors, and ratified by human contact.
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21. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
“The oral tradition is inherently more flexible and humanistic than the written tradition which is rigid and impersonal in contrast.”
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22. Does that make sense in the context of what Innis discusses?
When fascism comes to America, it will come in the form of democracy. --Huey Long
Does that make sense in the context of what Innis discusses?
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23. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Innis extended the economic concept of monopoly to include culture and politics. If we consider that a society has a network of communications systems, we can see that there are key junctures or nodal points where significant information is stored, and from where it is transmitted to other parts of the system.
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24. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Traditionally, the universities have attempted to monopolize certain kinds of information, as have professional associations such as doctors or engineers or lawyers, as have governments.
As both Innis and Michel Foucault have demonstrated, individuals or groups who control access to those points wield great power.
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25. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Those who monopolize knowledge are also in a position to define what is legitimate knowledge.
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26. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
The organized church comes immediately to mind, as does insider trading!
The scientific community lobbies not only for a pre-eminent status for the objectivity of knowledge, but also advocates a rigid method for obtaining that knowledge!
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27. Monopolies of knowledge derive their power from several sources:
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28. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Mastery of Complexity creates a hierarchy of professionals and amateurs.
Control of Raw Materials for Media: Ted Turner buys RKO! Bill Gates / Microsoft buys the Bettman Archives!
Performativity: Just as Egyptian priests were able to accurately predict the regular flooding of the Nile because knowledge of writing allowed them to make calculations, so does access to pubic opinion allow pollsters to predict elections within certain percentage parameters.
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29. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Speed: Advantages accrue to those who have the knowledge first. Business done in back rooms or in the corridors of power are often never reported in the media.
Ability to Afford High Costs: The cult of "production value" in design, recording, television, and Hollywood movies makes it difficult for lower budget artefacts to compete for attention.
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30. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Monopolies of knowledge encourage centralization of power.
Those who control knowledge have the power to define reality.
Think of the media blackout during the Gulf War, or (to use Foucault's example) how confession is used to convey the moral teachings of the Roman Church.
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31. Nuclear proliferation is one such example of this instability.
However, monopolies of knowledge promote tendencies toward instability.
Competitors and critics are always looking for ways to subvert monopoly power, and perhaps gain it for themselves.
Nuclear proliferation is one such example of this instability.
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32. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Neither knowledge nor power is a commodity although they are treated as such – Foucault.
One cannot own power. Power is a process which must continually be reasserted for its continuance.
Foucault draws attention to the ways in which those who are ruled contribute to the empowerment of their rulers.
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33. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
In order to understand any medium, we must attend not only to its physical characteristics, but also to the way in which it is employed and institutionalized.
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34. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
There is a dialectical relationship between society and technology: they influence one another mutually. Certain social forms and situations encourage the development of new media; these media, operating within existing situations, react back on society to produce a new cycle of change.
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35. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
In 2000, the rapid adoption of music-sharing software like Napster provoked an immediate reaction from both the recording industry and the law-makers. New regulations encouraged the development of new (gnu) technologies.
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36. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Conclusions
According to its characteristics a medium of communication may be better suited to transportation;
Or to the dissemination of knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy and durable and not suited to transportation;
Or to the dissemination of knowledge over space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily transported.
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37. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is embedded.
In other words empires are characterized by the media they use most effectively, partially because that’s how others come to know of their achievements.
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38. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
However…
The relative lightness or heaviness of the medium under consideration is not always a reliable indication of its particular bias. If we compare parchment with papyrus or paper, for example, weight is not really a decisive element. It is more useful to think of the bias of media as related to the ability of the message to survive transmission and have an impact over space or over time.
It is not the heaviness of stone that necessarily makes it a time-biased medium, but rather its ability to survive the elements and natural disasters so that it may still communicate its message centuries or millennia later.
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39. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
The pyramids, temples, bridges, and cathedrals of the world are still able to communicate something of their essential meaning to us today, if only we know how to decode their empire-building messages. Those messages which have lasted have tended to bias our view of the history of empires.
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40. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
It is really the "monopolies of knowledge" which are at stake in the longevity of empires. New media threaten to displace the previous monopolies of knowledge, unless those media can be enlisted in the service of the previous power structures.
If priests can gain a monopoly on papyrus and writing, then they will gain power relative to the king who depends on stone monuments. The boundaries of the empire shift, expanding and contracting. The shift of perceptions redefines "knowledge," what those in power claim needs to be known. New allegiances are formed. New monopolies created.
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41. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
In our own time, we have witnessed such shifting monopolies in the delivery of news to the masses from newspapers to radio to television to the internet.
Each medium has its bias, a bias which changes in relation to the significance of the others in the consciousness of cultures.
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42. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
The media, Innis tells us, are inter-related in their impact on the survival of empires. "The social revolution involved in a shift from the use of stone to the use of papyrus and the increased importance of the priestly class imposed enormous strains on Egyptian civilization and left it exposed to the inroads of invaders equipped with effective weapons of attack."
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43. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
In his provocative essay "Minerva’s Owl," Innis suggests that the richest flowering of an empire comes just before its decline and fall: "Minerva’s Owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk." Innis reasons that "a monopoly or an oligopoly of knowledge is built up to the point that equilibrium is disturbed“.
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44. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
Thus we learn from Innis that all great empires are most vulnerable in the moment of their over-reaching.
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45. Sanjay Ranade, HoD, DCJ, UoM
From the end of WWII until his death in 1952, Innis worked steadily on an investigation of the social history of communication, studying the communication media of the last 4000 years. From the thousand page manuscript which he left at his death came his two pioneering communications works: Empire and Communications (1950), and The Bias of Communication (1951).
In his Introduction to The Bias of Commmunication, Marshall McLuhan suggests that reading Innis shows us a new way to read history.
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