.. -EDITED BY DAVID GODFREY Press Porcepic Victoria/Toronto .. EMPIRE AND COMMUNICATIONS CONTENTS Copyright © 1986 by Press Porcepic Limited David Godfrey vii All rights reserved. FOREWORD No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any xv means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any PREFACE information storage, retrieval and transmission systems now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. INTRODUCTION 1 This edition is published by Press Porcepic Ltd., 235-560 Johnson Street, Victoria, B.C. V8W 3C6, with the assistance of the Canada Council. EGYPT 9 Typeset by the Typeworks in Baskerville 11113. Printed in Canada. 23 Cover design by Ken Eisner. BABYLONIA Art direction and production by Jane Hamilton. 1 2 3 4 89 88 87 86 THE ORAL TRADITION AND GREEK CIVILIZATION 53 The original version of this book was published by Oxford University Press in 1950. THE WRITTEN TRADITION AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 83 --j Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data 113 \ Unlv. PARCHMENT AND PAPER Innis, Harold A., 1894-1952. i~,~}... .l"!r· ,)~\_l.t .\i ....'i +h..3 rVlk \1 Empire and communications \ I P;'3·\::-,f~.rl PAPER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 139 \ ;Ji!..... 'Jt~j Includes index. j ~~ ..""-- Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-88878-245-4 (bound). - ISBN AFTERWORD David Godfrey 171 0-88878-244-6 (pbk.) 1. Communication. I. Godfrey, Dave, 1938- INDEX 179 II. Title. P90.I5 1986 302.2 C85-091375-6 I/f) tL T 1 FOREWORD DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS Empire and Communications, first printed in 1950, is often quoted and referred to by experts in the field of communications. It has had a major impact on the development of this field of study, despite its emphasis on ancient political events and largely forgotten technologies. After more than thirty-five years, what remains attractive about the text is the boldness of its paradigms and the depth of its examples and models. At the same time, one sometimes wonders if the influence of books is in inverse proportion to their clarity. Write simply, and you may be soon forgotten. But combine just the right mixture of ambiguity, obtuse allusion, complex theory and authoritarian tone and you create a work which successive generations of scholars can debate and re-interpret forever, thus ensuring the potential of influence if not influence itself. Innis does suggest that civilization might be measured by its tolerance of unintelligiblity and Empire and Communications may appear to share some of the above characteristics, but its central ideas are relatively clear. What creates confusion is partly the cryptic style of Innis and partly the mass of data which provides ballast for the central themes. For the average reader, necessary first steps are to recognize that no single piece of data is essential and that the data is not always linked in a direct, causal fashion to the theories. Innis dealt with dynamic, large-scale, interacting human forces. Biology or differential calculus provide more apt parallels for the sense of structure in Empire and Communications Innis than -do algebra or Newtonian phYSics. I think Innis would have been delighted to have a large, continually growing database to play with, one in which values and interpretations were themselves data. His terms, like the terms of modern physics, attempt to mark complex things by simple names. The terms of physics were chosen to make the statement of physical laws simple, elegant and revealing; however, terms such as matter, energy, object and time are far from simple themselves. They are abstract, complex and removed from experience; they have clear meaning only within the formulas which link them. The same holds true for the formulas of Innis, although his are descriptive rather than mathematical. His terms, oral culture, efficiency of communication, conquering time, conquering space, monopolies of writing, religious decentralization, military centralization, the bias of a medium, etc., all attempt to focus thought into specific expressions so that major relationships can be presented in a fashion at once simple, elegant and revealing. The meaning of an individual term is shaped by the relationships it helps describe. This edition takes two approaches to helping the reader clarify the text. First, at the data level, we have illustrated and explained some of the myths, technologies, art and history which are often presented in very cryptic fashion within the text. Secondly, in the introductions to each chapter and in the new subheadings, we have presented the main structures of the work in a manner which, we trust, clarifies the framework of Innis's thought without undue simplification. It cannot be said that Empire and Communications is, as yet, a popular book even though its influence has been very strong in a wide variety of fields. As Arthur Kroker says, Innis's vision takes us into the deepest interstices of the technological experience, understood as the primal of Canadian society .... It was Innis's particular genius to make us see from within the bias of technology, both as the locus of Canadian economic history and as the 'horizon' surrounding the working-out of the Canadian fate in a turbulent world. * Nonetheless, to date, the work of McLuhan has. b~en far 1l10re popular alJ~t\(@ryJ~~"LQf McLuhan's readers know anythin~ ~nnis,,_LeJ aione"·about~·the great debt __.-------------.- - .. _.r __ ·.,..·_.-. ........ ~_.. ,........' ... ...--.'"~"~_.,~."',.",..,.~ .".....-.. _" .. ____ ._ ...... ______ ._.~ _____ .. -- McLuhan owes to Innis. Few who know them both well would deny that Innis is a far more important------.---~ theoretician. One of the goals of this new edition is to help allow the average reader to see why Innis remains important. * Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind (Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1984). viii FOREWORD FOREWORD ix SOME PATTERNS CHANGE ON THE BORDERS. There may even be a little personal bias in his description of a Innis sees the social world as a dynamic structure, subject to competing and interacting third pattern, his insistence that major changes in media always appear in the hinterlands, forces over time. We might say that he groups these forces into certain metaforces so that on the border of empire. By defining these metaforces, Innis, from his outpost at the he can better describe the events that comprise the historical traces left by such forces and University of Toronto, brought a new level of analysis and comprehension of metaforces. ·In these descriptions, however, he is aware not only of his own personal bias communications into being; from that understanding were constructed new developments. as a political economist from a former colony (whose life and institutions have been The renaissance of the Canadian publishing industry in the 1960s, for example, was shaped by the British Empire), but of the inescapable bias of the media of his civilization. planned using the theories of Innis as a conceptual blueprint. These patterns and groupings that he presents, then, always possess a certain relativity; For Innis, efficiency of communications is indicated by the growth of an empire. causes and results are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Monopolies of knowledge flourish within that empire. Monopolies tend to become inflexible and stagnate. Historically, Innis indicates, the new media that tend to destabilize ORAL VERSUS WRITTEN. One fundamental pattern to note is that of the contrast between the old empires arise not in the metropolitan centres of cultures, but on the boundaries, in oral and written communications and the consequences for society. Since most of Empire the outbacks, where the competitive forces create the need for new e!ficiencies and where and Communications deals with variations of writing, this contrast is not emphasized. a strong sense of the vernacular creates a dynamic local environment. Nonetheless, it is clear that Innis felt that all forms of writing represented a falling away from the more democratic, spiritual, humanistic and small-scale traditions of oral culture. CYCLES. A degree of the Chinese sense of yin and yang appears to lie behind Innis's Only writing-based cultures could produce empires. descriptions of the rise and fall of empires. Their movement towards excess, disintegration Writing, even before it was clearly mechanized, represented a mechanization of the and rebirth ca(l be delayed but never stopped. For Innis, empires seem neither fully natural spirit; word-processors would not have bothered Innis any more than did paper mills, nor fully mechanistic. The forces that drive them swing them now towards the militaristic printing presses and the written alphabet. Small was beautiful because it was built on a and now towards the religious, like some awkward robot trying to walk on uneven stilts, human scale of tongue and ear and living memory. Anything else was mechanized. In his stilts whose lengths appear to change suddenly. Part of the task of Innis appears to be to brief preface, Innis suggests that all make these changes more predictable. But those swings towards the poles of space conquest and time conquest appear within a larger pattern of increasing efficiency, so that written works, including this one, have dangerous implications to the vitality of an oral tradition and to the health of a civilization, particularly if they thwart the interest of a people in culture lessons learned from the past can never be precisely applied to the future. The insights of and, following Aristotle, the cathartic effects of culture. Innis come from his definition of these patterns, but he never pretends that he has seen them fully. MEASURING EFFICIENCY. Within the fallen world of written cultures, Innis further In general, Innis agrees with James Bryce's concept of long-term cycles and links concentrates upon the patterns of communications within empires.