Editing Harold Innis (section)

==Innis and McLuhan==
[[Marshall McLuhan]] was a colleague of Innis's at the University of Toronto. As a young English professor, McLuhan was flattered when he learned that Innis had put his book ''[[The Mechanical Bride]]'' on the reading list of the fourth-year economics course.<ref>Preface by H. Marshall McLuhan in Havelock, p. 10. Also see Watson, p. 405.</ref> McLuhan built on Innis's idea that in studying the effects of communications media, technological form mattered more than content. Biographer Paul Heyer writes that Innis's concept of the "bias" of a particular medium of communication can be seen as a "less flamboyant precursor to McLuhan's legendary phrase '[[the medium is the message]].'"<ref>Heyer, p. 61.</ref> Innis, for example, tried to show how printed media such as books or newspapers were "biased" toward control over space and secular power, while engraved media such as stone or clay tablets were "biased" in favour of continuity in time and metaphysical or religious knowledge.<ref>Innis, (Empire) p. 7.</ref> McLuhan focused on what may be called a medium's "sensory bias" arguing, for example, that books and newspapers appealed to the rationality of the eye, while radio played to the irrationality of the ear.<ref>McLuhan, Marshall. (2003) ''Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man''. Corte Madera, California: Gingko Press.</ref> The differences in the Innisian and McLuhanesque approaches were summarized by the late James W. Carey:
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Both McLuhan and Innis assume the centrality of communication technology; where they differ is in the principal kinds of effects they see deriving from this technology. Whereas Innis sees communication technology principally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions; Innis says much about institutions and little about perception and thought.<ref>Carey, James W. "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan" in ''McLuhan Pro and Con'' (1969) Baltimore: Pelican Books, p. 281. Graeme Patterson strongly disagrees with that view by arguing that Innis paid an extraordinary amount of attention to perception and thought, while McLuhan examined institutions. Both Innis and McLuhan, Patterson argues, were preoccupied with language, one of humanity's basic institutions. See Patterson, pp. 36–37.</ref>
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Biographer John Watson notes that Innis's work was profoundly political while McLuhan's was not. He writes that "the mechanization of knowledge, not the relative sensual bias of media, is the key to Innis's work. That also underlies the politicization of Innis's position vis-a-vis that of McLuhan." Watson adds that Innis believed very different media could produce similar effects. "For Innis, the [[Yellow journalism|yellow press]] of the United States and the Nazi loudspeaker had the same form of negative effect: they reduced men from thinking beings to mere automatons in a chain of command." Watson argues that while McLuhan separated media according to their sensory bias, Innis examined a different set of interrelationships, the "[[dialectic]] of power and knowledge" in specific historical circumstances. For Watson, Innis's work is therefore more flexible and less deterministic than McLuhan's.<ref>Watson, pp. 410–11.</ref>

As scholars and teachers, Innis and McLuhan shared a similar dilemma since both argued that book culture tended to produce fixed points of view and homogeneity of thought; yet both produced many books. In his introduction to the 1964 reprint of ''The Bias of Communication'', McLuhan marvelled at Innis's technique of juxtaposing "his insights in a mosaic structure of seemingly unrelated and disproportioned sentences and aphorisms." McLuhan argued that although that made reading Innis's dense prose difficult ("a pattern of insights that are not packaged for the consumer palate"), Innis's method approximated "the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse." Best of all, it yielded "insight" and "pattern recognition" rather than the "classified knowledge" so overvalued by print-trained scholars. "How exciting it was to encounter a writer whose every phrase invited prolonged meditation and exploration," McLuhan added.<ref>McLuhan, Marshall. (2005) ''Marshall McLuhan Unbound.'' Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press, v.8, pp. 5–8.</ref> McLuhan's own books with their reliance on aphorisms, puns, quips, "probes" and oddly juxtaposed observations also employ that mosaic technique.

Innis's theories of political economy, media and society remain highly relevant: he had a profound influence on [[Media studies|critical media theory]] and communications and, in conjunction with McLuhan, offered groundbreaking Canadian perspectives on the function of communication technologies as key agents in social and historical change. Together, their works advanced a theory of history in which communication is central to social change and transformation.<ref>Carey, (McLuhan Pro and Con), p. 271.</ref>