Harold Innis

Innis was a political economist of staple goods, fur and timber and cod, before he turned to communication. That is why his account of media is about weight, cost and transport rather than about content.

Media biased toward time sustain tradition and religion. Media biased toward space sustain administration and empire.

The bias

Stone, parchment and oral tradition are durable and hard to move. Societies built on them hold continuity across generations and concentrate authority in priesthoods, because knowledge lives in things that outlast people and in people who memorize.

Papyrus, print and the telegraph are light and fast. Societies built on them can administer territory at distance, which is what an empire needs, and they trade permanence for reach.

Around whichever medium dominates, a monopoly of knowledge forms: the people who can work it acquire authority that looks like competence and functions like power. A new medium breaks that monopoly, and the group that formed around the old one loses without understanding why.

Where it sits

Innis is sharper and far less quoted than McLuhan, who followed him at Toronto and made the argument famous by making it slogan-shaped.

Read him next to Mitchell on coal and oil, which is the same materialist move applied to energy rather than to writing.

Serious objections

• The time and space categories are suggestive rather than precise, and most real media sit awkwardly between them.
• The causal direction is asserted more often than demonstrated. Empires build roads and presses as well as being enabled by them.
• His late prose is compressed to the point of obscurity, which has let readers find in it whatever they brought.