Harold Innis (review)

Communications theory is increasingly important in the current digital revolution, and contemporary scholars are again turning to Harold A. Innis, an eminent political economist with a strong predilection for history who was among the first to recognize the importance of communication technologies to cultural development. The Ontario-born Innis, educated at the University of Chicago, spent his entire career at the University of Toronto, establishing an international reputation before his early death in 1952 at the age of fifty-eight.

Innis's earliest works, most notably A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923), The Fur Trade in Canada (1927), and The Cod Fisheries (1940), were primarily economic histories and only hint at the importance of communications in the economic, as well as the political, development of Canada. Most Canadian historians think of Innis primarily in the context of the so-called staples thesis, and some still debate the relevance or irrelevance of the theory to an understanding of Canada's economic advancement. In the last years of his life, however, Innis published a number of studies, most famously Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communications (1951), in which he signaled that communication techniques profoundly affected the history of Western civilization.

Drawing on his broad knowledge of history, especially in the classical age of Greece, Innis developed new insights into how communications influenced cultures, arguing that techniques and their context, rather than ideologies, were the most important drivers of history. In particular, he suggested that time-based media—stone, clay, and parchment, for example—were hard and lasting, favoring centralization and hierarchies as well as strong religious controls. On the other hand, space-based media (papyrus and paper) were soft and less durable, encouraging decentralization and expansion as well as individualism and restrained religious supervision. The character of the medium, then, and the tools it uses are its biases. Throughout history, the different biases of various communication technologies had distinct impacts on human culture.

Considering that Innis's prose is always turgid, usually awkward, and at times totally impenetrable to modern readers, Paul Heyer has written an excellent introduction to his books. His overviews of Innis's writings are clear, concise, and instructive. They should pique the interest of budding scholars and perhaps even sharpen the perceptions and understandings of veteran students of communications. One would always hope, of course, that after reading Heyer's overviews and interpretations both neophytes and veterans will refer to Innis's original publications.

The strength of Heyer's commentary is that it places Innis's contribution to communications theory in context. Heyer gives an important place to his upbringing, his education, his mentors, including his wife, and his early publications. He also notes the economic and social times in which Innis learned and wrote. And he properly attributes the sources of Innis's ideas and discusses the impact he had on other scholars, such as Marshall McLuhan.

While Heyer clearly admires Innis, he is not reluctant to mention some of his faults. He was basically very conservative and sought to ingratiate himself with university administrators. Nor does Heyer skirt Innis's inability to write clearly. Although he ponders whether Innis wrote disjointedly in order to make his points more emphatically, in the end he tends toward the view that he was simply not good at expressing himself and never learned the art of using transitions. With Heyer as a guide, however, a student interested in Innis's profound contribution to our understanding of the pervasive influence of communications upon human cultures should be able to navigate through the rocks and shoals of his turgid prose.