Harold Adams Innis

Orality in the twilight of humanism: A critique of the communication theory of Harold Innis

“…It has been suggested, for example, by Donald Creighton, Melville Watkins and Ian Parker that through his studies of the pulp and paper staple industry, Innis was brought into the study of the newspaper industry. 10 Thus, his interest was at first simply in another staple study along established lines, a connection that is indicated by a number of transitional articles on the role of public opinion in economics, and the role of transportation and communication in economic theory. While the focus of interest certainly broadened in the later studies, this line of interpretation emphasises the continuity of development.…”

Innis's Great Transformation: Staples Thesis/Medium Theory

“…By the time the Second World War was over, the U.S. had become a giant, militarized power; it had dropped atomic bombs on Japan and was engaged in an escalating arms race as but one component of a new "cold" war. In his final year of life, Innis was one of the first academics-likely the first distinguished academic in North America-to oppose the Korean War, which he viewed as merely an exercise in U.S. imperialist aggression (Creighton, 1981;Heyer, 2003).…”

“…And, as Donald Creighton (1981) remarked, in his media/communication works "it was as though [Innis] was driven by a desperate compulsion to deliver his last message to a sick and troubled world" (p. 159). Forsaking the staples studies that had made him famous, Innis again threw discretion to the wind, this time to investigate developments in media and communication as contributors to heightened misunderstanding-a project by its very premise guaranteeing to estrange him from the political-economic elite.…”

4. McLuhan: Where Did He Come From, Where Did He Disappear?

“…(Carey, 1967). Innis was a Chicagotrained economist who had studied aspects of the political economy of Canada, such as the trade in furs and fish (Creighton, 1981), and became interested in the role of "media of space" and "media of time" in shaping ancient and modern nations and empires. In his classic works on this subject (Innis, 1950(Innis, , 1951, he relates the portability of media such as papyrus and writing to the extension of centralized spatial control by Rome and, later, Egypt, and the erection of monuments and writing-on-stone oriented cultures to religion and communication across generations.…”