700 words reading response with conections

2

Class three, Jan. 20, 2020

 

Marshall mcluhan, innis’s successor and admirer, who described his own writing as footnotes to innis, said ‘the medium is the message.’ mcluhan liked putting things in a challenging and paradoxical way. innis would have probably put the point a little less sensationally: the medium biasses the message. In fact both statements make the same point

 

the readings for this week were largely about innis’s views of time and space, he was very concerned with political stability and social cohesion. he felt that a society living under the oral tradition, like preliterate societies or ancient greece, tended be stable and united because the spoken word unites its audience. they gather to hear it for the purpose of lawgiving by its leaders or to perform annual religious rituals or to hear its founding myths, which explain its origins and its purposes. people listen together and the kind of unity and sense of community this creates can be maintained over many generations. it is why innis said the oral tradition helped maintain unity and stability over time. however the oral tradition is limited geographically because the spoken word can only reach a limited audience. So it unites people over time but not over a very large space. the written tradition on the other hand is useful for maintaining control over space. it’s possible to maintain control over large territories through written messages, orders, sending and receiving important information about populations, commerce, enemies, military matters and in a later era, it does all these things through written or broadcast information. for these reasons innis felt the written tradition had the ability to maintain control over a large area but was not so effective in keeping a situation stable through time, i.e. across generations, since written messages and information command less loyalty and social coherence than a group experiences under the oral tradition.

A very simple and concrete example of this difference occurs when teachers ask their students to put their heads down read something in class. Anyone who has taught will have noticed that the unity of the class when they are discussing or listening, fragments almost instantly into individuals absorbed in their own reading experience. It’s an example of how the oral tradition unites people while the written, individualizes and separates them.

according to walter ong, a scholar who followed in innis’s footsteps, writing, and especially print, implies that words are things in a way that never happened in the oral tradition. in the oral tradition, words have no visual presence, they hardly exist in separation, they are part of the ongoing flow of speech. There are no ‘spaces’ between words when they are spoken. in the written tradition before print, i.e.,, before the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, this oral quality was still reflected by the absence of spaces between words as they appear in handwritten manuscripts. Words in manuscripts flowed in a similar way to how speech itself flows, without spaces between words. but with the rise of print, words were separated and for the first time, a book became a sort of box containing words, which seemed to be separated things that existed in their own right. Thinking of words or ideas as things in themselves was unimaginable under the oral tradition and difficult to imagine in the written tradition before the era of print. But print made words seem more like things that occupied space instead of ‘events’ that one experienced as they were heard and then vanished in the ongoing flow of speech. but, in the written and especially the printed form, speech became ‘spatialized’ and seemed to exist in space. So- turning to the subjects of time and space which were in this week's reading- in the oral tradition, there is no record of the past as a series of things or events existing in books or written records. until the rise of writing- and even more after its spread thru print, the past only existed in the living voices of those who recounted it. whatever did not seem memorable, was simply lost. it vanished. It could not be ‘looked up’ anywhere. only very basic and important items were retained, like the founder or heroes of a society and the laws they left behind. This led to a very different sense of time and history before the rise of the written tradition.

this is why innis says (p 61) that history in the modern sense is only 400 years old. that is, what we now understand as history- a series of particular events that stretch back into the past- is something we think of as spread out in space, almost literally as something behind us, the way accounts of it are laid out in the pages of a book, describing different moments and events that exist ‘back there’ or ‘out there’ in time: in timelines or lists of events like wars and elections. this is a spatialized concept of time, something like a train stretching behind the ‘engine’ of the present (tho innis doesn’t use this image). it’s as if we can look back at the train of history, climb down from the front and wander back to examine whatever ‘car’ we want to: the middle ages, the ancient world etc. this sense of history is only possible in an era dominated by print. it would have been unavailable and literally unthinkable to a pre-print person, no matter how intelligent and educated they were. in the oral tradition, as ong says, the past isn’t known as an ‘itemized terrain peppered with facts,’ it knows of no lists or charts or figures, it isn’t history in the modern sense that innis describes (and which innis wrote about in his many books on economic history). So history is different in the oral tradition, it ‘exists’ only in the knife edge of each present moment as it presses relentlessly into the next present moment.

For instance, where is the past? We tend to think it’s ‘behind’ us. But that’s actually a spatial metaphor for something that occurs in time. There is literally nothing behind us except a different part of space. The only ‘place’ that history exists is right now, in the present moment, and in whatever residue of the past still exists in the present moment. The existence of historical records and history books creates the illusion that history is a thing, or a set of things, and that events themselves are objects out there in space, even if they are ‘behind’ us in the past. but that's just a metaphor. there is nothing actually 'behind us.' the only thing that exists is the present, right now, with whatever memories are embedded in the present and carried along with it. These are difficult ideas, because we are so accustomed to the ways of spatialized thinking that make sense in the written era.

this sense of an ongoing perpetual present is the kind of thing innis means when he says that the print era lost ‘touch with the problems of time’ (p. 76) and that time had ‘been destroyed’ (p. 129) in the age of print.

In the era in which the oral tradition dominated, this meant people had a greater appreciation for the ongoing present, on p. 90 innis talks about the sense of time under the oral tradition in which people ‘hallowed existence beyond change’ as opposed to ‘living in the moment’ i.e., living from changing moment to moment without a sense of underlying continuing, permanent values. this is hard to even imagine in our era, in which ‘change’ seems to be the only permanent quality. We are told that the only constant thing is change, and ‘change is good.’ Some of innis’s language here is difficult to follow because we experience the world as members of a print-dominated culture. His view was that people in a print-dominated culture tend to experience ‘the present’ as an always transforming and shifting series of moments- like different things or separate words- so that living in the present for us is very swift, fragmented and transient. Innis felt that oral societies had a stronger appreciation for qualities and values that endure and were less impressed or interested in ‘change.’ Our society by contrast tends to value and appreciate change while undervaluing permanence or denying there is even such a thing.

 

On 187-188 innis discusses the conflict when one dominant medium is challenged by a newer one and the ‘cultural disturbances’ and ‘dislocations’ that can occur. For example, prior to the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, there was relative stability based on a ‘balance’ between the oral and written tradition. the source of authority was the bible, but there were few available copies of it since it only existed in manuscripts, and the priests of the catholic church interpreted its meaning to the masses of people through their readings and sermons in church. in other words there was a mix of the written (the bible) and the oral (sermons and readings). this may or may not have been a good thing for the lives of people, but it did tend to create a fairly stable situation. but the printing press led to the dominance of the written over the oral. people could now read the bible for themselves and find themselves disagreeing with what the church leaders had told them was in it. this led to breakaways from the catholic church and the creation of new 'Protestant' forms of christianity. This in turn led to centuries of religious wars (based partly on the newfound ability of literate masses of people to read the now widely available scriptures for themselves and disagree about them, particularly with the priests and leaders of the catholic church, who had held a 'monopoly' till then, over interpretations of the bible).

innis held the apparently paradoxical view that 'improvements in communications led to less 'understanding.' but a moment's thought shows how this is so. as the printed word replaced the spoken word, there was less chance to think and talk about what was being said, and the opportunity to understand what had been stated, diminished. he also felt that new media (or techonologies of communication, as he called them) led to 'social and cultural disruptions', like the protestant reformation and the religious wars of those years, that followed the rise of print.

though we haven't yet discussed all of this in class, he extended his analysis to other new media that arose, like radio and television which challengeed the authority of the printed word as it had existed in newspaper form. those who control an older dominant medium always try to control the new medium as well, and to ‘adapt’ it, in innis’s term, to the same points of view that they promoted in the old medium. but new groups and individuals usually try to assert their own power in the new media. this leads to instability based on changes in the dominant media. meanwhile, new media always have their own ‘biasses’ which assert themselves despite any efforts to use them to promote the same values and attitudes that held sway under previously powerful media. so for instance, newspaper owners tried to control the new media of radio and tv. sometimes they succeeded and sometimes not. but the new media lead to new ways of thinking and new ‘biasses’ no matter who controls them. so, with the rise of the internet, the owners of newspapers, radio and tv have tried to buy or control it, but new media forces have emerged, such as microsoft, google and facebook. (the ‘FAANGs’: facebook, amazon, apple, netflix, google) in recent years there has been conflict over who will make the rules about ownership of content on the internet and especially, who will profit from the advertising that accompanies the content: will it be the old content providers like publishers, tv networks and record companies or the new media owners. these conflicts are still being fought out. innis provides a valuable perspective and structure for understanding these conflicts or ‘disturbances,’ as he sometimes called them. in his words, 'extensions' in communications (or new forms of media) always lead to 'cultural disturbances'. we will look into some of these examples in the coming units of the course on mass media and 'new' media.

 

innis applied his concerns about losing the strengths of the oral tradition to what had happened to universities, even in his own time, during the first half of the 20th century. ( 32, 193-4) He felt universities could play a role in keeping the virtues of the oral tradition alive, but only if they ‘remembered’ that teachers and students are human, and not merely vessels into which the bare facts and information available in books or in print could be poured. He felt that the emphasis on exams detracted from the ability to develop critical minds and deeper forms of understanding, which could in turn lead to the discovery of new truths and insights. in fact he argued that the emphasis on exams was in direct contrast to the process of real learning.