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Today’s Agenda
History of Communication in Canada:
the Transmission model ( Part One)
Historical Narratives: Media and
Modernity ( Part Two)
Part Three: Harold Adams Innis and the
Bias of Communication
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Part One: Technologies
& Communication
Theory
Key Assumptions
Key Events
Adoption of Innovation
Technological Bases of Modern Society
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Key Assumptions
Communication involves the transmission
and extension of information and knowledge
The medium of transmission/shapes a
society.. The medium is the key to unlock the
riddle of social, economic and political
development
More extreme view asserts that the medium
of communication technology determines
society
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Ideas about Historical
Causality
Each communication technology
changes the process of selection,
production,organization and
interpretation of information
Each technology involves a struggle
between economic producers of the
time for control over the profits and
powers arising from the new medium:
may contribute to rises of new classes
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Key Historical Trends
Space and time are compressing
Media are moving from social to
individual forms
Each generation of communication
technology spreads faster in advanced
industrial economies
But, while some media have been
displaced( eg. Telegraph) each
successive generation of technology
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Space/Time
Compression
Waves of adoption are compressing in
time:
In less than three years, the Internet’s World Wide Web
spawned some 10 million electronic documents at a quarter
of a million Web sites.
By contrast, the Library of Congress took 195 years to
collect 14 million books (Source: Tim Miller, New Media
Resources,1995)
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History of Canadian
Communication Studies
Originally tied to policy studies in the
university ( policy, political economy and
geography disciplines)
SFU’s school created in 1983
The second national policy: like the railroad,
communication seen as important for the
transmission and reception of ideas, goods
and services throughout Canada
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The Transmission Model
This view sees communication like
transportation: in which some thing is
transported from one place or person to
another
This transmission model is defined in
Grossberg et al, page 16
Source/Sender-Message/Content-Receiver
Key to the history of communication studies in
Canada
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Canadian Transmission
Model
Defining markers of transmission model:
Size of country: second largest in the world
Low population density: 32 million ()
200 mile corridor along the 49th parallel: US
Initially dependent upon natural resource ( staple) exports, needing
good communication links from centre to periphery or colony
Like the railroad, after Confederation, communications
infrastructure seen as central to:
Western settlement
Economic infrastructure
Social development
Much early spending by the Canadian State ( rail, hydroelectric
power, telegraph, post system, heavy regulation of telephones to
ensure extension of service, and provision of public radio)
What Aitken, a noted economist calls Canada tradition of ‘defensive
expansionism’
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Canadian
Communication Studies
II
Recognized by influential US historians (
James Carey, Daniel Czitrom) as producers
of radical and elaborate thinkers
Grounded in political economy ( English Canada)
Bilingual: strong influence of Quebec Catholic
social thought (French Canada) and emphasis on
cultural studies: importance of language and
culture
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Adoption of Innovation
Telegraph & rise of international news
agencies 1850s-1900s
Canada longest telegraph network in the world
Canadian inventor introduced standardized time
Telephony-1900s
Canada site of first transatlantic phone message (
Cape Breton: Alexander Graham Bell)
Film 1920s-1930s
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Adoption Cont’d
Radio-1930s-50s
Canada first radio service on its rail service (CPR)
Television-1950s-70s
First and fastest nation to widely disseminate
cable television
Satellite—1980s
Canada first geostationary domestic satellite
system
Internet—1990s
Canada among fasted adopters of Internet: now
over 2 in 3 citizen users
Among first 3 nations to wire up all schools (
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Adoption/ Cont’d II
Canada is among the most developed
communications infrastructures in the
world
Many key inventors, medium theorists,
rapid adoption of communication
technologies, often regulated by State
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Paradoxes
Paradox: not a major manufacturer of
communication technologies ( TV equipment,
computer signalling equipment, satellites, although
emerging in fibre etc) where it is still dependent on
imports
Paradox: content development ( message,
production) not kept up with transmission/distribution
development– eg. School Net
Theme: technological nationalism
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• Part Two : Overview
Social Histories:’Narratives’
Three Main Epochs
Key Canadian Thinkers:Harold Adams
Innis
What is the bias of communication?
What is the relationship between empire
and communication?
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Main Ideas Today
1. History of Communication involves a
Selective Story
2. The Story revolves around technology and its
relationship to society, communication and
culture
3. The development from oral to print to
electronic cultures must be understood as the
Western story of Modernity.
4. Communication media both help
invent/determine and construct our idea of
Modernity
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Ideas II
1. Canada’s story is one of technological nationalism
- Use of communication technologies to settle the country
from sea to sea
- Associated with national railroad( telegraph)
- Assertion and protection of national sovereignty in journey
from colony to nation
- reflected in the policy focus in the study of communication
itself
2. Major thinker: Innis contributes to political economy
and cultural approaches to the study,and produce
seminal ideas without borders
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Social Histories:
‘Narratives’
Mediamaking ( Grossberg et al, 2000) argues
typically that the history of communication is
presented as a ‘march of progress’ or ‘triumph of
National Will”
a series of adoptions of technological inventions—
which then shape the movement from oral to print to
electronic cultures of communication
This tendency to technological determinism at the
heart of a transmission model of communication
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Origin of
Communication
People have always ‘communicated’:
Used non verbal signs, language and later symbols to exchange
meaning in all agrarian and hunting societies
to exchange meaning the two people have to share
assumptions about what the words or symbols mean, to agree
that they mean the same thing to both
Exchange of meaning then depends not only the word but its
cultural, economic and social context
As technology begins to mediate communication, the relation of
the words to their context changes: another person distant over
space and time may experience a word or meaning fragment
from a totally different context
From orality to literacy
From pre modern to modern
From human to mass communication
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Major Epochs of
Communication History
Pre Modern ( oral and early print media)
Modern ( late print and electronic
media)
Post Modern ( digital media)
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Pre Modern ( 1000 BC to
1500s)
Pre Modern
Close association of control of
communication with Church or rulers or
monarchs
Agrarian, dispersed societies
‘divine right’—rulers chosen by god
Elite production and dissemination of
communication ( poets,scribes, monks,
priests work by hand)
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Pre Modern Cont’d
Much reliance upon spoken word
transmission of values by word of mouth, elders
oral communication
Epic poems, sacred myths, storytelling
Focus on flexibility, traditional community knowledge
Major historical event: invention of the alphabet and rise of clay
tablets, parchment manuscripts
Custom, cosmology, unwritten rules
Time bias: social goal is to conserve and transmit core values of a
society over generations ( Innis in The Bias of Communication)
Oral communication has its limits:
Michelle Martin, page 11:
Orall communication lasts only as long as it takes one to speak and it only
reaches those within earshot
Yet social organizations have an eternal drive to communicate with long
lasting and ever more far reaching effect
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Oral Culture ( from
prehistory to 1200s)
No records
History is preserved only in the telling of
the story: different sense of time ( see
Grossberg, p.39)
Past is present only in the speech and
social institutions of a people
CMNS 110: studies Walter Ong
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Oral Culture/Cont’d
Public culture: telling, not authorship is valued, therefore there is
a tradition of collective intellectual property ‘ownership’
More intimate: reliant on face to face communication, personal
and socially involved
Often reinforced hierarchies of ‘elders’ or other truth tellers in
society: culture seen as resistant to change
Critical view saw it as a ‘closed’ conservative society
Contemporary thinking now realizes oral culture ( common
sense ways of knowing, alternative “word of mouth” persist as
important communication dynamics today
Strictly: Supreme Court of Canada’s Delgamuukw decision accepts
native oral history as a valid basis for pursuing land claims
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Tensions: Oral/Written
Cultures
Socrates ( 400 BC) emphasised oral debate
at the heart of early city states
Socrates feared that the written word would
threaten public discussion
Socrates student, Plato, (300 BC) sought to
banish poets-his view was that written poems
prevented face to face association and
mediation of disputes
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Key Events in Transition
to Modernity:
Gutenberg,1454
Printing Press:
technology of moveable type
Key to industrialization, rise of colonial trading
empires, and transition to capitalism
Associated with the rise of logical, linear thought,
rise of rule of law, individualism, science
A technology of modernity
Portable: could extend over large territory
Space bias ( Innis: the Bias of Communication)
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‘Reading’ Gutenberg
The Printing Press is presented as probably
the most revolutionary development in media
history
Mechanical production of books allowed
wider spread of knowledge
Book the first mass-marketed communication
medium– duplication:
replaced manual labour;
sped up distribution;
made books more affordable
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‘Reading Gutenberg’
Press also standardized the alphabet,
techniques of public communication
Broke elite control over book production
and consumption
BUT: as Martin notes in the custom courseware,
technologies of marketing, shipping and
distribution take many centuries to become
efficient
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The Historical Perspective
Michelle Martin: even in the early stages of the transition
between oral and written cultures we can see that the change in
the form of communication was not only related to economic
factors, but also to political factors, such as legislation that
allowed the state to use the new technology to wield ever
greater control over the masses.
( page 13-14)
EG: the development of the book as a mass medium waited until
paper from wood technologies was cheaper then sheep or calfskin,
until the state began to require written and signed copies of
contracts; and until education in writing and reading began to
spread ( literacy)
Contributes to state intervention in licensing guilds and
typographers
Note: profession of author born of printing and so was the concept
of copyright as legal protection of mental labour
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After Gutenberg
The invention of the Telegraph important for
solidifying military and economic control over
a distance ( 1850s)
Invention of radio ( communication over the
airwaves, and not via a printer or electrical
impulse down a wire) ( 1900-1910)
Invention of television and then satellites (
1940s)
Invention of the Internet ( 1950s)
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Against Gutenberg I
Innis:
The conditions of freedom of thought are in
danger of being destroyed by science, technology
and mechanization of knowledge
In Empire and Communication
Why? The printing press ( has) permitted the production of
words on an unprecedented scale and increased the
difficulties of thought: words have become powerless,
Gutenberg succeeds only in the devaluing of words,
information and knowledge
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Against Gutenberg II
Communication history criticised for its
Western bias
Asian Scholars: printing press not a
Western invention: existence in China
centuries before did not have the same
social consequence—therefore Gutenberg
/technological determinism less strong than
supposed
Read Custom Courseware: Martin page
18-19
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Harold Adams Innis
1894-1952
Associated with U of T’s school of political
economy
Wrote extensively about the US,
communication and the McCarthy era( purge
of communists)
Writes about the transformation from oral to
print to electronic culture
Key Ideas:
Oral versus Print Cultures
Time versus Space Bias ( or tendency)
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Innis’ Empire and
Communication
The fundamental basis of political and social power is to control
the media of communication—this is the power to define what
reality is
Rulers and Governors struggle to achieve ever more
perfect/control over means of communication
Monopolies on knowledge are built up until the point that
equilibrium is disturbed
Technological inventions compel realignments
Inventions often developed at margins, then penetrate to centre
The introduction of print allowed others to attack the temporal
monopoly of the church, foster growth of capitalism, rise of
nation state
Each improvement in long distance relations leads to a dialectic of de/
re centralization
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Innis’s Space and Time
Bias
Posits a dialectic/tension/opposition/between
space and time biases in medium theory
If medium is durable, hard to transport quickly
( eg. clay tablets): a time bias ( pre modern)
If medium is light, easy to transport with
reasonable speed eg. paper: space bias. (
modern)
Ideal type of time bias: oral culture: Greece
Ideal type of space bias:print culture: Rome
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Print Culture (
emergence of
Modernity)
Writing changes relationship between
communicator and audience
Can widen over space and time
Early print media centralized and made
knowledge hierarchical
The beginning of Empire: ( Innis, quoted in
Grossberg et al, p. 41).
In a writing culture, fixed written rules or
codes of law can develop
The individual reader emerges as separate
from the community
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Print Culture/Cont’d
Literacy allows power to be hoarded
This transformed with Gutenberg/ but
printing press allowed the emergence of
new classes ( no longer priest but
merchant classes) but then a
rehoarding of power
Innis: monopolies of knowledge can
develop/be challenged and reemerge
which challenge the rigid hierarchies of
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Electronic Epoch
Emergence of electrical messages (
telegraph)
Allowed almost instantaneous
transmission over space and time
Fostered international rationalization of
time ( standard time a Canadian
inventors’ invention)
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Electronic Epoch cont’d
Carey thesis quoted in Grossberg et al:
Telegraph (1840s)marked the decisive separation
of ‘transportation’ and ‘communication’
Telegraph key to rise of international
news/newspaper industry
Finalised the transformation of information into a
commodity or thing
Together with the institution of advertising,
contributes to rise of mass marketing,
Industrialization
Rise of computers, satellites, internet further
compress space and time
Early electronic era ( radio, TV) organized
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Electronic Epoch Cont’d
Characterised by general interest /mass
communication
Late electronic era ( satellite, internet)
organized globally, and with global
individuals
Characterized by specialised,
personalised contents
Rarely linear or logical
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“Post Modern Epoch”
Corresponds to digitization, internet and
beyond
Post industrial capitalism: flexible post
production, consumption, individuation
Globalisation
Shift from nation state to global governance
Increasing mobility of people and
communication
Global village: versus villages
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Conclusions
1. History of Communication involves a
Selective Story
2. The Story revolves around technology and
the relationship to society and culture
3. The development from oral to print to
electronic cultures, must be understood in
the context of Modernity
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Conclusions II
1. Canada’s story is one of technological
nationalism/protection of sovereignty in
journey from colony to nation reflected in the
policy focus in the study of communication
itself
2. A major thinkers: Innis contributes to political
economy and cultural approaches to the
study, with the notion of time and space bias
3. BACK TO LECTURE NOTES
4. BACK TO INDEX
