As a communications and public relations student trying to make sense of the world, I thought that it would be best if if I began at the beginning and the communication and media theories posed by Harold Innis, the man who inspired Marshall McLuhan.
As many of you know, McLuhan was a Canadian professor of English literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist based at the University of Toronto. He is known for coining the expressions “the medium is the message” and “the global village.” McLuhan played a major role in discussing media from the late 1960s to his death and he continues to be an influential yet controversial figure in the present day.
How many of you know about Harold Innis? Innis, like McLuhan was an esteemed professor who taught at the University of Toronto; however, Innis’ forte was Canadian political and economic history. Leading up to his death in 1952, Innis wrote a series of essays exploring the roles of media and communication in the creation of history, resulting in his collection The Bias of Communication. Innis’ historical overview of the forms of communication that helped precipitate the rise and fall of civilizations is a critique of media up to the first half of the twentieth century.
Innis argues that social organization within culture and society is constructed through the type of media used to communicate vital information, and that the predominant form of communication within a civilization establishes the social and psychological outcomes of the society. He states that particular ancient civilizations were socially and culturally more stable over time because of their use of the oral tradition (storytelling) as opposed to the present Western civilization where the written tradition is prone to a bias of communication which creates fragmentation and assumptions.
The oral tradition is a slower and more complex way of communication because it emphasizes memory and training. It is slower time-based media bound in the traditional form of oral communication which results in a time-based society better suited to retaining social and cultural stability. On the other hand, the written tradition is a simplified version of oral storytelling which contains fragmented elements that can’t illustrate the complexity of expression. Because the prevalent form of communication nowadays is found in the written tradition which favours control over space, because of the capability to relay news events and info quickly, Western society is susceptible to the bias of news fragmentation.
The printing press and Industrial Revolution resulted in improvements in communication; however, these improvements made understanding difficult due to a bias toward fragmentation, assumptions and commercialism. These “monopolies in language and knowledge” are maintained by the powerful through a bias that places limits on divergent voices and opinions. Innis asserts that the media can be related to those in power and those who have sustained power, because the freedom of the press allows the misrepresentation of news and information making it difficult to understand what is being conveyed. Sounds like propaganda to me.
The ability to be persuasive is paramount in communications and public relations. With the explosion of social media and all of the talking happening on blogs – how are we really communicating? Various divergent voices are being expressed through blogs which are written and must be read. Where does this all fit in the scheme of things? Is blogging a new way of combining the elements of the oral and written tradition?
