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Ii/Jj
HAROLD INNISCanadian economist and pioneer historian of economics and communication, who believed that the main thrust for societal change is determined by development in communication forms. As new forms of communication become dominant, the nature of society changes fundamentally to accommodate these developments. Thus, e.g., the nature of oral cultures changed dramatically with the development of writing. Writing-based cultures structured their societies fundamentally differently from their oral-based predecessors.
Innis was fundamentally pessimistic about the change from a print to an electronic culture, in contrast to his pupil, Marshall McLuhan.
Innis "imaginatively used the interface, or borderline situation, to present a new world of economic and cultural change by studying the interplay between man's artifacts and environments created by old and new technologies. By investigating social effects as contours of changing technology, Innis did what Plato and Aristotle failed to do. He discovered from the alphabet onward, the great vortices of power at the interface of cultural frontiers. He recovered for the West the world of entelechies and formal causality long buried by the logicians and teachers of applied knowledge; and he did this by looking carefully at the immediate situation created by staples and the action of the Canadian cultural borderline on which he was located" (M. McLuhan and Bruce; R. Powers, 1989).
From http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/innis3.html:
Empire & Communication/Bias of Communication
(Innis's two most famous works, published in the early 1950s)Innis's idea is that the dominant form of communication determines societal structues (see also McLuhan and Walter Ong for more on this). Each civilization that has developed across history takes its form from a "bias" created by the preponderance of a type of communication. He divides media according to two such biases: time-binding media and space-binding media. Time-binding media such as manuscripts and oral communication have limited distribution potential. According to Carey (1992), time-binding media (primarily involving the roal tradition) "favored relatively close communities, metaphysical speculation, and traditional authority" (p. 134). Space-binding media such as print and electronic media are concerned with expansion and control. Thus, space-binding media "favored the establishment of commercialism, empire and eventually technocracy" (Carey, p. 134).
Looking back into history, change seems to comes about as a result of media/technological development (a technological determinist argument). For example, according to McQuail (1994), the technological shift from stone to papyrus also shifted power in societal structures away from royalty and towards the priesthood. To take another example, in McQuail's words:
In ancient Greece, an oral tradition and a flexible alphabet favored inventiveness and diversity and prevented the emergenceof a priesthood with a monopoly over education. The foundation and endurance of the Roman empire was assisted was assisted by a culture of writing and documents on which legal-bureaucratic institutions, capable of administering distant provinces, could be based. Printing, in its turn, challenged the bureaucratic monoploy of power and encouraged both individualism and nationalism. (p. 85)
According to Innis, then, modern western history began with temporal organization and ended with spatial organization. Carey wrote, "It is the history of the evaporation of an oral and manuscript tradition and the concerns of community, morals, and metaphysics and their replacement by print and electronics supporting a bias towards space" (p. 160).
See also:
- Marshall McLuhan
- Walter Ong
- Neil Postman
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~~~~~~~~~~ An American Marxist who popularised postmodernism, which he says corresponds to a phase of late capitalism. In many ways his work carries on from the Frankfurt School.
Central ideas of Jameson:
i) Commodification of culture.
ii) Increases in culture and cultural outlets; formation of the culture industry.
iii) A breakdown in the distinction between culture and the society that produces it. (E.g., Beatles had control of their music, but today Madonna is just an economic entity.)Jameson sees postmodernity in negative terms; for example, postmodern architecture is a product of "invisible" capitalism and continuing need for commodification.
The penetration of the culture industry, first noted by Frankfurt School academics in the 1920s, has intensified. Since the 1970s, things that were practical parts of everyday life and not normally part of "culture" now are cultural products to be commodified (e.g., town planning, international cuisine, etc.). This diversifies capitalism by turning social activities into economic ones. (This is Jameson's conception of "late capitalism").
Jameson says that loss of meaning in postmodern style means we lose our way, don't know where we are and then become lost on capitalism the same way as we would get lost in a shopping mall. Late capitalism manufactures new commodities like Madonna and Spinal Tap because of the fall of Fordism and the drift toward globalization and global capitalism. Jameson argues that commodification replaces other areas of life like politics and art. In terms of identity, the subject in a postmodern world is not alienated, but rather fragmented. "Alientation presumes a central, unitary self . . . [b]ut if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple, the cocept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is the anxiety of identity" (Turkle, 1995: 49).
See also:
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~~~~~~~~~~ Postmodern booster, 1982 author of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, in which he argues that the attempts of postmodernism's detractors to announce the death of the style was premature. In fact, postmodern architecture has triumphed around the world, he argues, and the desire of some to see it off is only evidence of its success. Broadly, Jencks remains quite positive about postmodernism; the opening up of new narrative styles leads to more effective ways of looking at social issues than boring old naturalism.
CT. Author Index
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