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HAROLD INNIS
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Edward Comor
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 Information, Communication & Society 4:2 2001 274–294

HAROLD INNIS AND ‘THE BIAS OF

COMMUNICATION’

Edward Comor
American University, Washington DC

Abstract
Fifty years after his death, Harold Innis remains one of the most widely cited but
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least understood of communication theorists. This is particularly true in relation

to his concept of ‘bias’. This paper reconstructs this concept and places it in the
context of Innis’ uniquely non-Marxist dialectical materialist methodology. In so
doing, the author emphasises ongoing debates concerning Innis’ work and
demonstrates its utility in relation to contemporary analyses of the Internet and
related developments.

Keywords

bias of communication, globalization, Harold Innis, Internet,

methodology

INTRODUCTION

Innis . . . offers a poetic polysemic discourse that is impenetrable to reason. He is sanctiŽ ed as

the Ž rst of Canada’s post moderns, a bricoleur whose output requires not rational assessment
but aesthetic appreciation or Kabbalistic decoding by a contemporary priesthood of connoisseurs
and cultists.
(Collins 1986)

Innis’ concern lay in the thought processes through which people of different civilisations deŽ ne
their vision of reality . . . [H]is focus is less on the individual than on the character of the society
that produces individuals and either releases or suppresses their creative potential.
(Cox 1995)

Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?

(Broeke quoted in Innis 1982)

Fifty years after his death, the body of work produced by Harold Adams Innis
remains widely cited but frequently misunderstood by students of communication
studies (Acland and Buxton 2000).1 Born at the end of the nineteenth century in
south-western Ontario, Innis is most certainly Canada’s most prodigious social
scientist. Predating and directly shaping his work on communication, Innis
was an internationally recognized political economist and historian. Through his
early interest in markets, related social-historical structures, and the role of
Information, Communication & Society
ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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DOI: 10.1080/13691180110044533
 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

transportation networks in relation to them, Innis’ interest in communication

and culture began. Most famously, Innis introduced his concept of media bias in
a 1935 paper on the intellectual habits of social scientists (Innis 1935) many years
before his explicit studies on communication. It was only in his later years,
particularly after being diagnosed with cancer, that Innis developed and applied
bias in what became an increasingly obsessive effort to draw scholarly attention
to the dynamics underlying the general inability of twentieth century Western
civilization to redress its cultural imbalances.
Innis never considered his concept of bias to be some sort of analytical fulcrum
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through which the causal mysteries of history could be revealed tout court. Nor,
as Collins believes, should his work be classified as some kind of subjectivist
mantra useful only to a ‘priesthood of connoisseurs and cultists’ (Collins 1989:
218). Instead, as Cox recognizes, bias and other Innisian concepts were developed
as heuristic tools to help us better understand those forces and relations shaping
society’s critical and creative capacities (Cox 1995: 20, 28). McLuhan, in his
later ‘Introduction’ to Innis’ 1951 publication The Bias of Communication (1982),
adds that ‘Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an
instrument of research’ (Innis 1982: xi). Indeed, it is my view that Broeke’s
philosophical question – ‘why do we attend to the things to which we attend?’ –
prominently quoted by Innis in this book, should be understood as the deŽ ning
question in Innis’ communication studies.2
This paper argues that misreadings of Innis’ work in general, and his concept
of bias in particular, to some extent afŽrm the reason for Innis’ initial formulation
of bias – a concept Ž rst used in an attempt to enable social scientists to be explicitly
re exive. In what follows, I will explain Innis’ concept of bias in both the context
of his larger body work and in terms of its contemporary relevance. In Section 1,
commonplace criticisms or misinterpretations of the bias of communication will
be addressed and clariŽ ed. Section 2 focuses on Innis’ more general methodology
involving a form of dialectical materialism that is overtly concerned with the
dynamics of power, how people think, and the long-term implications of
technologies, organizations and institutions in relation to these. Here, a heuristic
model is presented as a means of summarizing Innis’ work. Section 3 applies
both bias and this model to questions regarding the potentials and implications
of Internet-based technologies in the early twenty-Ž rst century. The Ž nal section
– the Conclusion – underlines Innis’ political concerns with contemporary
developments and the overwhelming cultural bias he observed – an orientation
towards spatial dominance and away from temporal sustainability. It argues that
in light of capitalist-based globalization and technology developments, these
concerns are perhaps more pressing today than at any time in history.
275
 EDWARD COMOR

THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION

Even in Canada, where Innis was born and worked (at the University of Toronto),
his Bias of Communication (1982) was not immediately well received. Innis
had established himself as that country’s pre-eminent social scientist based
largely on his ‘staples approach’ to Canadian economic history and its more
general implications for political economy. This work involved Innis in a series of
decidedly holistic, materialist and dialectical but explicitly empirical analyses
of how frontier economies develop. Through this work, Innis revealed that the
ways in which economists had come to understand economic history involved
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assumptions based on the experiences of relatively developed political economies.

Moreover, Innis demonstrated how developments ‘at the margins’ of the world
economy, based largely on the extraction of staple resources, entailed a complex
of structural conditions and subsequent political economic dynamics. Through
this work, Innis recognized, in extraordinary detail, the interconnections between
various regions and vested interests and the crucial roles played by transportation,
communication, and culture in these power-laden relationships (Innis 1995). As
such, Innis’ apparent turn away from Canadian economic history and his staples
approach to his relatively abstract analyses of communication over four thousand
years of history – a project conducted in just the Ž nal years of his life – seemed
to his contemporaries a rather eccentric and less than successful pursuit (Buxton
and Acland 2000: 8–10). Despite the apparent suddenness of this ‘turn’ and
subsequent isolation from his many colleagues, in many ways these later studies
directly involved many of Innis’ earlier concerns and analytical tools. As Innis put
it, ‘it is part of the task of the social scientist to test the limits of his tools and to
indicate their possibilities’ (Innis 1982: xvii). Indeed, what had really changed was
his use of a much broader historical canvas, his compulsion to emphasize concepts
rather than empirical detail, and the explicitly political concerns driving his work
both forward and, paradoxically, deeper and deeper into the intellectual
wilderness.
What Innis referred to as the ‘biases’ of core institutions, organizations and
technologies – the nodal points through which what we know and how we know are
produced and reproduced – constituted his core concern throughout these Ž nal years.
For Innis, a communication medium may facilitate the capacity to control space
(or territory) as a necessary prerequisite to increasing control over time. In other
circumstances, similar attempts to increase control over space could lead to a
decline in the capacity to control time. As explained below, the bias of commu-
nication is not a reductionist concept. It is a heuristic tool in which dialectically
related contexts are crucial. For Innis, the cumulative effects of how people
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

communicate through a broad range of media, over any given time and at any
given place, are not reducible to isolated social or physical characteristics. To
apply bias, a comprehensive assessment of history is required in order to identify
key media and to generate an elaborated understanding of their influence on
history.

CLARIFYING BIAS THROUGH HIS CRITICS

To help in the task of explaining bias, it is useful to be clear about what it is not.
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The acerbic comment by Richard Collins used to open this paper was published
in his review of the re-release of Innis’ 1950 book Empire and Communications
(Innis 1986). In his critique, Collins criticizes this collection of Innis lectures
most essentially because they present neither a ‘systematic’ or ‘well-focused’
argument. Because, according to Collins, the ‘impact of communications . . . is
not sufficiently differentiated from the effect of other factors’ on historical
development, he believes Innis fails to show ‘that the structure and nature of
communications has been any more decisive a force in the life of empires’ than
factors such as social organization, legal and familial systems, and military rule
(Collins 1989: 217).
The fundamental difŽ culty of this and similar criticisms is that they assume
that Innis shares a popular deŽ nition of what ‘communication media’ are. Collins
also assumes that the absence of both precise definitions and the presence of
difŽcult prose constitute little more than ‘a set of take it or leave it dogmas . . .
camou aged by a thick frosting of sparkling information – facts lining the nest of
an intellectual magpie and concealing the fundamental intellectual disorderliness
of Innis’ system’ (Collins 1989: 218). More to the point, Collins is taking an
intellectual stand against the absence of ‘a clear structure of argument presenting
. . . propositions that are open to testing and selective discard or appropriation’
(Collins 1989: 219). In contrast to what are deemed to be his unscientific
communication studies, Collins commends Innis’ earlier staples studies for
upholding this standard. Faced with writings that are ‘impenetrable to reason’
(thus supposedly breaking ‘the rules’ of scientiŽ c discourse), Collins concludes
that ‘Innis’ later works are weathering badly in comparison to his earlier
monuments’ (Collins 1989: 218–19).
More common than this complete rejection of Innis’ later writings is the
tendency to misread and/or misappropriate his work generally and the concept
of bias in particular. Some who have done this have labelled Innis a technological
determinist. Marvin, for example, writes that Innis ‘leaps from technological
“fact” to social “effect”’ (Marvin 1983: 32). Innis, she continues, ‘failed to realize
277
 EDWARD COMOR

that meaning is not in the technological object, but only in the particular practices
to which society puts it’ (Marvin 1983: 35). SpeciŽcally, Marvin assumes an all
too common reading of what Innis meant by the bias of communication:

Innis uses the term ‘bias’ to specify media orientation. Time-biased media render the passage
of time unimportant in the transmission of messages. However far back in time a message is
launched, it remains unimpeded and undistorted. People separated by generations can have
the same message in their hands. . . . Space-biased media render the expanse of space
unimportant in the transmission of messages. From no matter how geographically distant a
point a message is launched, it remains unimpeded and undistorted.
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(Marvin 1983: 32)

In her reading of Innis, Marvin classifies ‘media’ in accordance with their

space or time ‘biases’. Time-binding media include the spoken language, clay,
parchment and stone because they are characteristically durable and difŽcult to
transport. Space-biased media, on the other hand, are light and fragile, permitting
wide-scale distribution but limiting in their duration over time. These include
paper, celluloid and electronic signals. According to this reading of Innis, time-
biased media foster hierarchy, decentralization, provinciality and tradition,
whereas space-biased media promote centralization, bureaucracy, secularism,
imperialism and the use of force (Marvin 1983: 32). As Couch summarizes: ‘Innis
. . . sought to demonstrate how the media are social environments sui generis that
determine broadsweeping everyday forms of social consciousness and social
relationships’ (Couch 1990: 112).
While these two planes of criticism – one rejecting Innis’ communication
studies as some sort of post-modernist ruse, and the other critiquing its
supposedly obvious reductionism – appear unrelated, they both, in fact, are
rooted in a general ignorance of the intellectual heritage of Innis’ communication
studies in the context of his methodology and related political concerns.

THE ORIGINS OF BIAS

As already mentioned, Innis first used bias in 1935, five years prior to the
publication of his last well-known staples study, The Cod Fisheries (Innis 1940).
This early application emerged out of Innis’ attempt to specify the dynamics that
shape the subjective tendencies inuencing the work of the social scientist. Rather
than a concept developed to prioritize the role of communication in historical
development, bias was Ž rst developed as a heuristic tool employed in the task of
empowering the social scientist, encouraging him/her to develop a re exive mode
of intellectual practice. The paper in which bias is introduced is called ‘The Role
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

of Intelligence in the Social Process’. It was written in response to an article by

Urwick (1935) who argued that the natural science paradigm was not suitable for
the social scientist because, unlike the natural world, the social world is inherently
unpredictable and ever-changing. This state of affairs, said Urwick, is largely
a result of the inherent unpredictability of the thoughts and actions of basically
free-willed human beings. Re ecting debates that are very much with us today,
Urwick wrote that the social scientist also is inevitably infused with subjectivist
tendencies. As such, no human being could hope to be objective while examining
and interpreting the inevitably unpredictable subject of social behaviour. ‘Life’,
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according to Urwick, ‘moves by its own immanent force, into an unknowable

future’ (Urwick 1935: 76).
Innis both challenged the belief that human behaviour is ultimately
unpredictable and Urwick’s subsequent rejection of the scientiŽ c project. While
agreeing that most behaviour is spontaneous and that human beings (including
academics) often act on the bases of ingrained behavioural patterns involving
degrees of unreflexive thought, Innis countered Urwick by recognizing that
these thoughts and practices are themselves developed and reproduced. He called these
thoughts and practices ‘biases’ and generally recognized them to be historically
determined. Innis thus made an important assertion: while objectivity is impos-
sible, the social scientist can develop the analytical tools needed to become aware
of his/her own subjectivities, how they are constructed, and how and why they
are unconsciously expressed again and again.
With a touch of tongue-in-cheek, this general point is made by Innis in the
following passage:

The innumerable difŽ culties of the social scientist are paradoxically his only salvation. Since the
social scientist cannot be ‘scientiŽ c’ or ‘objective’ . . . he can learn of his numerous limitations
. . . The difŽ culty if not impossibility of predicting one’s own course of action is decreased in
predicting the course of action of others, as anyone knows who has been forced to live in close
relations with one other person over a considerable period of time. The exasperating accuracy
with which such prediction is possible has been the cause of more than one murder in northern
Canada and the dissolution of numerous partnerships.
(Innis 1935: 283)

Innis goes on to explain that ‘the sediment of experience provides the basis for
scientiŽ c investigation’ and that ‘the habits or biases of individuals which permit
prediction are reinforced in the cumulative bias of institutions and constitute [or
should constitute] the chief interest of the social scientist’ (Innis 1935: 284).
It is here that Innis establishes the framework for the development of the
bias of communication. By examining how day-to-day lives are mediated by
279
 EDWARD COMOR

organizations and institutions – how the key nodal points of social-economic

power affect thoughts and practices – Innis believed that the social scientist could
and should take preliminary steps in the task of redressing his/her own biases and
their sometimes negative implications for the state of social knowledge.
This concern pushed forward Innis’ emerging focus on the role of commu-
nication media (broadly deŽ ned) in the history of Western civilization. Troubled
by the rapid growth of specialization in social science in the early twentieth
century, Innis was concerned that the university itself was becoming the arbiter
of instant solutions rather than an essential source of critical questions. After
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1945, he observed the dissipation of critical voices in the political culture of the
Cold War. In the past, ignorance and a belief in quick solutions could produce
military con ict. In the emerging nuclear age, this concoction could well lead to
the annihilation of humanity. Such weighty concerns compelled Innis to pursue
the aforementioned question, why do we attend to the things to which we attend?
Given the mobilization of weapons of mass destruction and accompanying
Cold War paranoia, Innis believed that by applying this question while re-reading
history – particularly in terms of what he observed to be the dialectic between
what he called ‘monopolies of knowledge’ and ‘monopolies of power’ – social
scientists potentially (and, for Innis, perhaps even heroically) could develop the
intellectual keys to human survival.

BIAS IN THE CONTEXT OF HISTORY AND

POWER

By monopoly of power, Innis was addressing the predominance of entities capable

of applying extraordinary military resources. By a monopoly of knowledge, he
addressed those interests possessing extraordinary control over what information
is available and/or those having a predominant influence over more complex
patterns or habits of social thought. In other words, this latter ‘monopoly’ involves
explicit and/or implicit control over the social pool of information and how that
information is used in developing what is ‘known’. As a trained economist (who,
near the end of his life, became the Ž rst non-American to be appointed President
of the American Economics Association), Innis also recognized that both power
(i.e. force) and knowledge are directly related to control over wealth.
By the time his Žrst collection of essays that explicitly addressed communi-
cation – Political Economy in the Modern State (1946) – was published following the
Second World War, Innis recognized organizations, institutions and technologies
as ‘communication media’ in that they constitute core structures through which
people interact and history itself unfolds. Through this focus, Innis again
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

underlined his concern with the underpinnings of human biases and how they are
affected by predominant institutions, organizations and technologies. As such,
Innis came to understand the bias of communication directly to affect, and be
affected by, those interests engaged in the struggle to control force, knowledge
and wealth.
Contemporary interpretations and applications of bias often involve relatively
narrow or uninformed readings. More often than not, fragments of Innis’ work
have been extracted and applied as if they could be read ‘straight’, without
interpretation. In his communication studies many instances can be found in which
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Innis makes statements concerning the biases of particular technologies. For

example, Innis would write that durable media, such as stone, ‘emphasize time’
and that the use of stone implies a time-biased society. Ancient Egypt constitutes
an example of this. Through the use of pyramids and temples, Innis argues that
the medium of stone provided the Phaoronic class with the bases for their
sustained and long-term dominance.
In raising this technology-power relationship, it is important to point out that
a deeper, more ‘political’ project is being pursued. Through his suggestive rather
than empirically detailed mode of presentation, Innis’ communication studies
actively seek to engage the reader in a kind of dialogue. By focusing on, for
instance, the durable character of stone, Innis is only addressing one aspect of the
physical capacities of what was then a predominant medium of communication.
In his writings, Innis always took pains to use words such as ‘emphasize’ and
‘implies’ when referring to bias. To illustrate this further using a medium popu-
larized during his lifetime – the radio – Innis at Ž rst considered it to have had
tremendous participatory capacities as a result of its potential emphasis on
conversation and debate, both in-studio and through its integration with listeners
over telephone lines. Based largely on its physical capacities, he recognized that
radio could be used to promote the development of democratic exchange and
mass critical thought. Innis also understood radio to be potentially positive in
terms of its capacity to act as a counter-balance to the largely one-way
communication tendencies found in the popular press. Rather than reading
centrally produced material, crafted to attract and maintain mass or specialized
consumers, the radio presented at least the possibility of generating a thoughtful
and socially inclusive dialogue.
Innis, however, understood that the application and impact of radio – as with
all communication media – also involved the context and, more particularly, the
economics of its development and control. As a predominantly commercial
medium (at least in the American context), radio, like the press, for the most part
became yet another vehicle used by private-sector interests to attract consumers
281
 EDWARD COMOR

to advertising. Through rigid schedules, well-defined personalities, and the

sensual rather than the intellectual engagement of audiences, such mass market
commercial priorities only served to deepen the emerging monopolization
of knowledge in twentieth-century North America. While recognizing radio as
a vehicle through which the predominance of short-term thinking could be
redressed (through a very public exchange of ideas and interpretations), the
context of its use, particularly in the USA, generated a bias characterized by the
predominance of power structures interested in controlling demographic markets
and political-economic territories. In the case of radio, for Innis, the context of
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capitalism most directly facilitated its use to further the already dominant cultural
bias of spatial expansion over collective memory and longevity.
All in all, in order to understand both his writings on communication and his
concept of bias, Innis must be read in the context of his concern with the very ideal
that Collins defends in his critique – the scientiŽc aspirations of the social scientist.
The bias of communication and Innis’ accompanying study of history were
pursued in an effort to advance our understanding of why we attend to the things
to which we attend. As a result of the technocratic tendencies and aspirations of
most of his academic contemporaries, and the general absence of a critical public
able to redress an emerging oligarchy of specialized experts, Innis feared that ‘the
conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science,
technology and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, western
civilization’ (Innis 1982: 190). It is the task of the social scientist, thought Innis,
to overcome this cultural bias through the rebalancing of scholarly concerns –
away from a search for concrete facts and toward the elaboration of abstract ideas;
away from answering questions and more toward the framing of them.

CRISES AND THE DIALECTICS OF POWER

The Bias of Communication (1982) is a collection of essays that apply the concept
of bias in a decidedly non-deterministic way. The main goal of its chapters is to
use communication media as focal points through which macro-historical
developments can be better understood. More speciŽ cally, for Innis, the devel-
opment and implementation of media – involving coinage, the horse, the price
system, the university, the radio and innumerable others – signal a response to
social and/or economic and/or military uncertainties or crises. In turn the
application of a signiŽ cant new communication medium or set of media itself
contributes to the restructuring of the human and natural environments.
For Innis, periods of uncertainty or crisis constitute historical moments in
which disturbances in the capabilities held by dominant interests become
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

apparent. Put another way, the apparent decline in the capacity to maintain or
expand territorial control and/or maintain control over time signals the need for
a reorganization of institutions and/or organizations and/or technologies. This
often involves attempts, as Innis often put it, to establish or extend the
monopolization of knowledge and this involves implicit or explicit efforts to
control predominant ways of seeing and thinking. Innis understood that media
play important roles in the dissemination of ways of knowing through space
and/or time. Efforts to control space and/or time also involve attempts to
monopolize force which, according to Innis, involve a range of control activities
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from brutal oppression to the more subtle implementation of surveillance

technologies.
Because Innis believed that the development and implementation of signiŽ cant
new communication media often signal attempts to redress uncertainty or crisis,
he thought that the social-economic collapse of historical empires reflect the
failure of existing strategies to control space and/or time – strategies that are
directly conditioned both by what is known and the ways in which what is known
becomes or remains known. By recalling that bias was introduced in his formative
staples writings, and its application in reference to ways of conceptualizing the
world, it becomes apparent that Innis’ work consistently is concerned with the
capacity of a society to recognize and resolve crises. As Innis warned, ‘[e]ach
civilization has its own methods of suicide’ (Innis 1982: 141). A contemporary
example of this, our deepening environmental crisis, serves as an illustration.
An Innisian perspective would view the contemporary environmental crisis
in terms of the predominant way we see or understand ourselves in relation
to the natural world. This involves the presence of an almost ingrained bias,
characterized by an obsession with the short-term and a generally acritical
approach among most commentators and public ofŽ cials in relation to the long-
term systemic causes of pollution. Most fundamentally, the predominance of
particular biases – such as the view that growth and competition are inherently
‘progressive’ – tend to limit what is culturally feasible or realistic in efforts to
respond to this and other crises. As I address below, this malaise is being directly
conditioned by contemporary media (e.g. the Internet) and its development in
the context of capitalism.
Innis observed that biases tend to be cumulative and self-reinforcing. This is
important because what is feasible or realistic today – since it fundamentally
re ects the way of thinking that facilitated crisis in the Žrst place – may simply
serve to ‘hold-the-fort’ or ‘buy time’. Such ‘solutions’ also may serve to exacer-
bate the problem structurally thus making the crisis, over the long-term, less
rather than more correctable. Owing to the cumulative tendencies and intellectual
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 EDWARD COMOR

characteristics of bias, societies often unconsciously construct barriers to the

long-term resolution of their systemic problems. Again using the environmental
crisis as an example, watered-down versions of the sustainable development
paradigm, for instance, become an apparent solution. Through the concept of
bias – because it compels the analyst to focus on historically produced and
structurally ingrained intellectual habits – this kind of thinking can be recognized
and potentially redressed.

INNIS’ DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM

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As noted above, bias constitutes just one element in Innis’ more elaborate
methodology. A related concept is Innis’ time-space dialectic. For Innis,
throughout history, efforts by a particular group, collectivity or class to assert
power, explicitly or implicitly, usually involves problematic efforts to control
the temporal and spatial conditions (both mental and physical) of day-to-day
life. Through historically structured biased media, powerful concerns often will
attempt to normalize their interests as if they were natural, universal, inevitable.
Thus, for example, the pyramids of ancient Egypt served the Pharoahs and priestly
class by spatially representing their eternal presence and God-like capabilities.
Today, as discussed in the next section of this paper, the Internet, in relation to
the context of its development and use, can be viewed as a medium whose
moment-to-moment obliteration of both spatial and temporal barriers serves to
normalize (or make ‘inevitable’) the perspectives of those with vested interests
in particular modes of globalization in relation to those who may not.
From Innis’ general body of work, a heuristic model can be constructed
involving his implicit conceptualization of a struggle involving not only time,
space and the temporal or spatial biases of predominant media, but also (as
discussed earlier) control over knowledge, wealth and force. This model (shown
below) constitutes a means of anticipating and assessing potential developments
involving how changing media environments effect power relations.
The struggle to control knowledge, wealth and force can be represented as a
dialectical triad that serves to make explicit signiŽ cant historical tensions and
possible contradictions. In relation to bias, this struggle is directly shaped by
predominant and historically structured media (institutions, organizations and
technologies) at any given place and time and their often unobserved effects on
social epistemologies. In the context of this model, hegemonic stability rarely is
attained over sustained periods of time and resistance (whether organized or
fragmented) constantly plays a role in the outcome of particular tensions and in
the restructuring or development of media in the future.
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S
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Figure 1

According to this model (Figure 1), human beings, their histories and
constructions, all take place within the context of the earth’s natural environment.
As arrows  owing into and out of the middle of the diagram indicate, the ongoing
and over-arching limitations of nature are themselves subjected to human
generated modifications. The next and, of course, dialectically interrelated
level in this model is the predominant mode of production or ‘how we produce
and reproduce’ our collective lives. Through this level, how society at any given
place and time organizes its material survival – from hunter-gatherer, to slave-
based, to capitalist political economies – is recognized to be the next essential
context affecting (and affected by) human thought and action. At the centre sits
the triad itself. Here it is assumed that a given social or world order involves the
predominance of, or struggles involving, the interests of some in relation to
others.
Furthermore, relative stability (or hegemony) presupposes the capacity of
particular interests to control the interrelated components of power: knowledge,
wealth and force. How human beings conceptualize themselves, their world and
their interests, in the context of this ongoing struggle, is conditioned by
innumerable local, national and global media. As such, history unfolds in the
context of our existence in relation to the natural environment, our predominant
political economies and the realities (and perceptions of reality) shaping power
struggles.
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INNIS AND THE INTERNET

Innis’ work provides valuable tools in efforts to assess what has become the focus
of great interest almost Ž fty years after his death – the character and implications
of the Internet and more general digital technology developments. In Innisian
terms, questions related to these include: will such technologies serve to
democratize communications, breaking the monopoly of knowledge built up
over the twentieth century by mostly largescale corporate entities? Or, will the
context of capitalism and its complementary technological, organizational and
institutional mediators suppress such potentials, thereby consolidating the power
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of capital in deeper and more expansive ways?

As discussed, through his historical research, Innis believed that the
development or signiŽcant reform of media communication takes place, most
typically, as a response by vested interests facing some kind of crisis in their
capacity to control knowledge and/or wealth and/or force. In the twentieth
century, Innis believed that time and again (with radio being his most contem-
porary example) the full potentials associated with communication technologies
were superseded by the context of capitalist political economies and the many
institutions, organizations and other technologies that emerged to shape the biases
of policy makers and publics. In one of his Ž nal essays, ‘A Plea for Time’, Innis
recognized that interests with inordinate control over knowledge, wealth and
force aspire to structure the mediators of contemporary culture in efforts to
consolidate or extend control.
Mediators of this sort, for Innis, would include the American state through its
ongoing efforts to control or expand the boundaries of US interests speciŽ cally,
and capitalism more generally. Another is the institution of consumerism and its
promotion of constant up-to-dateness and individualistic growth through
commodities. It also, of course, involves commercial mass media whose efforts
to extend and maintain ears and eyeballs compelled them to promote the sensual
here-and-now over relatively intellectual ruminations. More generally, it was the
context of capitalism and its systemic tendency to dominate economic and other
relations (not to mention the necessity, at least in its competitive form, to focus
on short-term profits) that constitutes the context through which both the
struggle for power takes place and the mediators of this struggle take shape. Under
these conditions, as Menzies suggests:

For all the contemporary talk about a postmodern information society, Innis’s ideas would
suggest that a real test of change is whether the social movements using the Internet . . . serve
the bias of time – not just at the innovation stage and at the end-user level of intertextual
rhetoric, but at the stage of institutionalized technological development and the enabling

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infrastructures associated with it, not just at the level of language games, but at the material level
of structures that determine who gets to speak about what and who referees and designs the
game plan.
(Menzies 2000: 324)

AN INNISIAN STRATEGY

In pursuing this research focus, Innis’ methodology directs us to assess Internet

developments in the context of the world’s predominant mode of production –
capitalism. For the last twenty years or so, structural changes have been taking
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place in the global political economy involving free trade and other neo-liberal
policy reforms. As a result of associated, unprecedented and increasingly
transnational fixed capital formations, the demand for technological devel-
opments designed to facilitate more efficiency has become extraordinarily
important. One aspect of this systemic drive has been a dramatic extension in the
capacity to profit from information-based products and services, sometimes
generally referred to as the ‘commoditization of culture’.
Despite the significant and perhaps rising wave of non-commercial (and,
sometimes, potentially counter-hegemonic) information and communication
activities being accommodated by Internet-based developments, for the most
part these new technologies are being developed and implemented to enable
capitalist interests to expand their reach and improve efŽ ciencies. All in all, the
wealth and force under the direct or indirect control of the world’s largest
corporations and nation states constitute resources being used to promote the
Internet as a means of increasing proŽ ts. In relation to this, what economist Ian
Parker observed in 1988 remains insightful today:

The commoditisation of culture has intensiŽed the cultural differential between those individuals
and institutions with Ž nancial resources to purchase, retreive and process large volumes of
specialised and costly information and those who do not. At the same time, the increase in the
average standard of living and leisure time and the extension of the mass media, particularly radio
and television, have increased general access to a basic level of cultural programming which is
literally unprecedented in global-historical terms. Particularly since 1945, we have thus
witnessed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of a rapid and significant increase in the
absolute general-informational density of advanced capitalist economies . . . combined with an
increase in the relative concentration or monopolization of specialized knowledge.
(Parker 1988: 223–4, orginial emphases)

As a result of this historical context, and the role of Internet-related technologies

in shaping it, knowledge is becoming an increasingly central means through which
the production and reproduction of both capitalism and hegemonic order takes
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place. From a Marxist perspective, class rule requires the expropriation of

material and non-material resources and a class’s capacity to do this implies its
relative control over key organizational resources. As in the past, the development
of the Internet and related technologies was a response to insecurity or crisis.
Certainly a communication blackout following a Soviet nuclear attack (the basic
incentive for the precursor to the Internet’s original funding by the US military)
and, later, what has been called the collapse of the post-1945 Fordist regime of
accumulation in the 1970s (Harvey 1990) would qualify as such moments of
insecurity and crisis.
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The direct and indirect references to Marx in the preceding paragraphs,

indicating a number of similarities between Innisian and Marxist political
economy, serve to remind us that in the 1970s and 1980s several, mostly
Canadian, theorists argued that aspects of Innis’ work, in fact,

provide a means of dealing in dialectical materialist terms with several crucial lacunae in Marx’s
analysis: those of the dialectic between forces and relations of production and between the
economic base and the superstructure; and at a more concrete level, those of the theory of the
State and of the international economy that were to have occupied the unwritten Ž fth and sixth
volumes of Capital.
(Parker 1977: 548).

And while the debate over Innis’ afŽnities or utilities for Marxist political economy
(and vice versa) has largely come and gone (Macpherson 1979; McNally 1981;
Parker 1983), the analytical and strategic possibilities of relating the former’s
conservative and communication-focused dialectical materialism with the latter’s
radical perspective remains pregnant with possibilities (Comor 1994).
In relation to the contemporary post-Fordist period of rapid change and, thus,
insecurity, from an Innisian perspective, the Internet and many other media
both re ect such social-economic conditions and modify their character. As Innis
put it, ‘the subject of communication offers possibilities in that it occupies
a crucial position in the organization and administration of government and in turn
of empires and of western civilization’ (Innis 1986: 5). By ‘civilization’, Innis, of
course, is referring to long-term macro-structures and processes – a level of
abstraction so removed from here-and-now experiences that it was itself used
by Innis as a frame of temporal-spatial reference for both analytical and political-
strategic purposes.

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AN INNISIAN ANALYSIS

Almost Ž fty years after Innis’ death, the Internet constitutes the most signiŽ cant
of recent technological developments affecting how people may relate to one
another over time and space. As a medium of communication, it also re ects and
restructures power relations (involving control over knowledge, wealth and
force). Indeed, Innis’ holistic understanding of communication media compels us
to guard against any kind of Internet- (and even technology-) centred analysis. The
Internet is just one of many signiŽcant mediators and communication scholars
should be wary of assessing its development and implications in isolation from its
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historical context and the other technologies, organizations and institutions.

Nevertheless, Innis’ methodology directs us to think through the bias of Internet-
based technologies in terms of the dialectics of power and control.
In its use in the annihilation of both time and space (at least in terms of
the distribution and exchange of electronic forms of information) and in the
context of the systemic pressure on capitalists, political leaders, workers
and others to make decisions, buy commodities and take part in consumption
activities more quickly and efficiently, the emerging bias of the Internet is
disturbing indeed.
I use the word ‘disturbing’ for two reasons. First, the historically and
technologically produced bias of the Internet to annihilate both time and space
– its tendency to impel people to do much more in less time and with little
regard for spatial barriers – challenges a broad range of vested interests and
other communication media that tend to favour relatively long-term memory
or decision making and/or various modes of spatial segmentation. Vested interests
such as the labour movement or some domestically focused corporations, and
media such as the book, or paper currency, or the nation-state, will no doubt
continue to in uence the temporal and spatial activities and orientations of people.
As such, the Internet and related technologies constitute media that are, through
their use, disturbing several established ways of doing and thinking.
The second reason for my choice of the word ‘disturbing’ to describe the bias
of the Internet directs us to consider Innis’ larger concern with how new
communication media redress and/or stimulate other (or perhaps deeper) crises.
In its implicit promotion of the short term – itself stimulated by the annihilation
of spatial barriers such as nation-state borders (which could be used to ‘buy time’
for a culture, an economy or a government policy) – already we are experiencing
disturbing trends. These involve the rapid erosion of the time to make decisions.
Whether such decisions involve the bombing of an enemy, the security of one’s
investments, the options one has in the workplace and so forth, the Internet, the
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general commoditization of culture and the related values placed on speed and
efŽ ciency arguably have set the stage for deepening political–economic crises as
transnational investors respond to market ‘signals’ with spasmodic acts of panic
selling, as consumers fail to keep up with the demands of sellers to buy more
commodities more often, as the environmental crisis reaches a point of no return,
and as cultures around the world become increasingly concerned with the here-
and-now.
At a more personal level, efforts to promote the Internet and related
technologies – through media ranging from the growing number of corporate
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interests promoting online consumerism, to educational organizations seeking

access to vast information resources, to officials in World Bank development
ofŽ ces – explicitly or implicitly are serving the interests of those promoting the
globalization of capitalism. Beyond the efficiencies of instantaneous buying,
selling, distribution and the agglomeration of information about consumer
preferences, all of the world’s people and places potentially will become
networked in what Menzies calls a ‘lego set of costlessly interchangeable
production units’ operating as a kind of transnational ‘perpetual motion machine’
(Menzies 2000: 331).
While an Innisian approach understands that media, once established and
widely accessible, can be used in ways not intended by those initially structuring
them, it does seem clear that if the main access points to the Internet continue
to be dominated by proŽ t-seeking interests and if corporate interests continue to
be most in uential in shaping national and international policies related to its
development, it appears probable that the Internet will become, predominantly,
a spatially biased medium. The more that this technology is structured to facilitate
the ongoing growth and expansion interests of capital to the detriment of its
potentials as an inclusive network in which vested interests concerned with
conservation and duration (such as community groups, workers movements,
religious organizations, environmental activists, and others) remain marginalized,
existing controls over knowledge, wealth and force, for the most part, will be
entrenched rather than challenged.
On the subject of knowledge, Innis was referring to not just what information
is available and who has access to it but, more fundamentally, why we attend to
the things to which we attend. In other words, in his elaboration of various media
and their structured biases, Innis was concerned with the annihilation of
civilization coming when space or time becomes a cultural obsession. Through
the Internet and predominant media, the practices and thoughts of more people
in more parts of the world are becoming increasingly obsessed with immediate
concerns and individual needs. Rather than a condition of capitalism per se, for
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Innisians, this is an accumulated result of the context of capitalism shaping and

deepening the powers of some over others in conjunction with the spatially biased
structures constructed to mediate day-to-day life.
In its moment-to-moment use, the Internet links many in relations directly or
indirectly promoted by the systemic demand for efŽciency. For many others, it
links people in innumerable and instantaneous virtual communities. Either way,
the relative intimacy of many non-commercial and face-to-face relationships tend
to be pushed to the periphery of the human experience. At this juncture in history,
the bias of the Internet is being structured and used in ways that diminishes time
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into the functionary of space.

CONCLUSION

For social scientists and, particularly, communication scholars, Innis’ bias of

communication constitutes an important analytical tool for three main reasons.
First, bias directs us away from both technological and structural determinist
positions precisely because its  exibility compels the analyst to recognize that, for
the most part, physical or structural capacities at any given time and place are
historically constructed. In Innis, such capacities are dialectically related to the
intellectual and cultural capacities of human agents. As such, the bias of commu-
nication directs us toward a relatively sophisticated, critical, and materialist
assessment of why we attend to the things to which we attend.
Second, bias enhances our ability to locate historic and contemporary cites of
instability and crisis. Specifically, it directs us to consider the contradictory
potentials of ‘ways of thinking’ and subsequent ‘ways of doing’. Using bias as a
conceptual tool, the seemingly successful short-term responses of vested interests
to social-economic crises, for instance, can be seen to themselves entrench the
very biases that contributed to the original crisis. As the case of environmental
collapse illustrates, habits of socially structured thought are both historically
produced and potentially disastrous.
Third, bias directs the researcher to pay particular attention to the core
institutions, organizations and technologies used to mediate social-economic
power relations. But again, because these media and their biases are socially
constructed, the study of bias directs the social scientist away from reductionist
and determinist modes of analysis. In light of this point, contemporary myths
involving the Internet and related digital technologies could use a stiff dose
of Innisian critical analysis. The fact that these history-shaping constructions
have become ‘inevitable’ and ‘desirable’ compels the critical scholar to investigate
the biases at play, the vested interests involved in their perpetuation, and the
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implications of struggles associated with them. This involves a focus on what

institutions, organizations and technologies – what communication media – are
most directly shaping such developments and their accompanying assumptions.
According to Carey:

What Innis recognized . . . is that knowledge is not simply information. Knowledge is not given
in experience as data. There is no such thing as information about the world devoid of conceptual
systems that create and deŽ ne the world in the act of discovering it. And what he warned against
was the monopoly of these conceptual systems or paradigms.
(Carey 1975: 45)
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In the context of the early twenty-Ž rst century, the Internet and other emerging
technologies, organizations and institutions constitute the deepening predomi-
nance of an obsession with spatial expansion, organization and control through
ever-shortening time frames and an accompanying neglect of historical and social
conceptualizations of time. As Innis put it in his essay ‘A Plea for Time’,

a stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of

space and time. We are concerned over control not only over vast areas of space but also over
vast stretches of time. We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation
to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in
civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only
at rare intervals are these biases offset by the in uence of another medium and stability achieved.
(Innis 1982)

Half a century after his death, the concept of bias and Innis’ dialectical materialist
approach helps counter the guarded optimism held by some members of the
intellectual movement that Collins, among others, has associated with him – post-
modernism. Today, Innis no doubt would be extraordinarily concerned with the
trajectory of contemporary developments. While resistance would be anticipated,
both the scale and rate of change associated with our obsession with growth,
efficiency and immediacy – and thus the extreme difficulty of orchestrating
sustained oppositional movements – would have surprised even him. The antidote
to this state of affairs and its associated consolidation of power through control
over knowledge, wealth and force involves a concerted effort (perhaps,
paradoxically, involving the Internet and other such technologies) to restructure
existing and emerging means of mediating relationships involving the promotion
of a collective critical memory and general sustainability. As anticipated by his
dialectical triad, this effort to counter space with time will involve a near-future
featuring tension rather than harmony. The alternative, for Innisians, most
certainly involves a violent turn in the century now upon us.
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 HAROLD INNIS AND THE B IAS OF COMMUNICATION S

Edward Comor
Division of International Communication
School of International Service
American University
Washington, DC, 20016-8071
USA
[email protected]
http://www.american.edu/faculty/ecomor/

NOTES

1 Thank you to the editor of this series, Christopher May, and to the reviewers of this paper.
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Their critical and constructive comments have been very helpful. Thanks also to research
assistant Erin Leonard.
2 On its relation to the essays presented in The Bias of Communication, Innis writes that ‘[t]hey
do not answer the question but are re ections stimulated by a consideration of it’ (1982:
xvii).

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