700 words reading response with conections

2

Class two, Jan. 13, 2020

 

The title: innis uses the word bias in a special way most of the time. He doesn’t mean a preference or prejudice- the usual meaning of the term. He means bias in a more ‘objective’ sense: as the ‘tilt’ or colouring that a particular thing, like a medium of communication, lends to whatever it’s discussing or communicating. It’s comparable to focussing the lens of binoculars or a telescope at a certain distance, like 100m, so that you will clearly see only objects at that distance, others will be fuzzy and you will be more likely not to pay attention to them because you know they're not what the device is set for. That’s the sense of bias in his book’s title: The Bias of Communication. He felt the biasses of technologies of communication- his term most of the time for what we call media- affected both empires and individuals. And he felt it was possible to become more aware and see more clearly by knowing the biasses of the media that were ‘tilting’ our view of things. He occasionally uses bias in the more common sense: when, for instance, he refers to his own bias for the oral versus the written tradition. He means he has a personal preference for what the oral tradition contains, but it doesn’t mean he fails to appreciate the values of the written.

p. 3 minerva’s owl image. The owl of minerva only takes flight in the gathering dusk. from the philosopher, hegel. minerva was the greek/roman goddess of wisdom. the point of the image is that wisdom appears late in the careers of societies or individuals, including innis himself. there are some important matters, like what you should do with your life or who you should spend it with, that you can’t possibly have enough information or experience on, at the time you must make the decision. it’s only much later that you’ve learned enough to know whether it was the best direction to take. the same can be true for the self-awareness of entire civilizations. toward the end of his career innis looked back and wondered whether his own civilization had made the best choices, such as increasingly relying on the power of print as a form of communication, to the exclusion of oral forms, after the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. his conclusion was that the effect of the domination of print (books, newspapers etc). as the main way of communicating, versus oral communication, had to some extent led to disasters like the two world wars.

 

Preface:

innis’s own professor of philosophy, james ten broeke, asked his students to write an essay on the question: why do we attend to the things to which we attend. this question stayed with innis all his life and suffuses his approach to media. what are the reasons we- not so much as individals but as members of our society- pay attention to some things and not to others? it isn’t simply that some things are there and others aren’t, because we focus our attention on some of the things that stand before us in our field of perception and largely ignore others. innis wonders why that happens, and what role media play in drawing certain things to our attention more than others. what role have the dominant media played in inclining us to notice certain aspects of reality and paying less attention to others. in a preliterate society for example, where the main ‘medium’ is the Oral Tradition- the handing down of knowledge and wisdom through myths, rituals, storytelling etc.- there tends to be more attention to things which seem eternal or permanent: like the cycles of the seasons, heroes and ancestors who left lasting instructions to their descendants, religious practices that focus on questions of morality and divinity. our society by contrast tends to pay attention to change, either in historical or natural upheavals and revolutions, or even in gossip and new inventions. examples would be celebrity gossip, awards shows or major news stories like terror attacks. In our society, people tend to focus on matters that are fast, fairly superficial and often sensational. innis argues that this is at least partly due to the ‘bias’ in the media through which we receive most of our information: written and print-based media, in which he includes not just books and newspapers but also electronic media like radio and television. he classes these as extensions of the written tradition, even though in some cases they come to us through sight and sound, because they lack the element of live presence and back-and-forth communication which is found in the oral tradition. even in clearly serious matters, like wars or natural disasters, our media tend to present them in factual terms, as opposed to vaguer or more open-ended discussions about causes, remedies and the disastrous effects involved- because those are harder to present in our unidirectional, fact-oriented media formats.

innis was unique in the way he divided all ‘media’ (or communications technologies) into two basic strands: the oral tradition and the written tradition. no other media theorist has started with this basic distinction. the oral tradition is slow but penetrates to the depths of issues. it is better for dealing with questions of meaning, justice and longterm values. the written tradition is far quicker and easier to spread information with, but it doesn’t deal as well with longterm and ethical issues because it doesn’t allow for questions or debate. when reading and writing, there is relatively little opportunity to ponder and question, compared to oral communication which can be slow and laborious but gets to the bottom of things precisely because of the care and time it takes, and the opportunity to raise questions and receive responses to them.

note that by the oral tradition innis does not mean simple speech or conversation. speech and language are not a medium, they are just the way that the human mind operates. language underlies all forms of communication. but the oral tradition is a ‘technology’ by which preliterate societies passed on their forms of knowledge and wisdom, through story telling, religious rituals and gatherings etc. which retold things that they considered important and which needed to be transmitted to the entire society, and to future generations. In our society we tend to use books and other versions of print, including online, to transmit the ideas and information which we deem as important. In a preliterate society, there would be great value placed on people with good memories, since they were the storehouses of information and attitudes that the society had determined were important to its welfare and its future. but however good their memories were, there were limits to what they could keep in their minds and pass on. the capacity of writing and print to contain and pass on information and facts, are far greater.

innis (p.9) says it is impossible to clearly recreate a sense of the oral tradition because of course it was not written down. it is only ‘revealed darkly through the written or printed word,’ as they remain in our possession. the oral tradition wasn’t a form of literature since literature only exists once the written tradition arrives. as another writer, walter ong, put it: thinking of the oral tradition as oral literature which had not yet arrived, is like thinking of horses as cars without wheels. the oral tradition was thick with meaning in its own ways, since it employed not just words but all the apparatus of live communication: tone, gesture, glances, reactions between people, dramatization, hesitation. for these reasons oral communication was more nuanced and ‘dense’ than the written. the written is relatively simplified compared with the oral. The oral always had a bodily component, as even today, oral communication still does: when people speak on their cellphones, they gesture with their hands and use facial expressions. Innis expressed the idea (p.11) that the written tradition “implied a decline in the power of expression” even though we tend to think of writing and literature as a higher and more creative form of expression than conversation or speech. He challenges that prejudice of ours by making us take into account the richness and complexity of speech, with all its gestures, interaction, tone etc. print by contrast is relatively thin and lacking such richness. if you actually wanted to record everything that gets expressed in a normal conversation, it might take hundreds of pages in print.

Innis did not reject or wish to eliminate the written tradition and written forms of expression, that would have been insane given the power of the written and the fact that innis himself had grown up with it and was a very successful writer himself. the written tradition of course had its upside. For instance, it contributed to developing critical thinking and the ability to question. How? Because when something is written down, you can go back over it and think about whether you agree or disagree. That’s much harder to do if you only hear it, and then it’s gone. so that's a plus for the written tradition. What innis always sought was a balance between the values found in the written tradition and those in the oral, what he lamented was the loss of that balance when the invention of the printing press meant that written forms of thought and expression began to overwhelm oral forms. As an example of the shift between oral and written, consider the way a classroom of kids changes when the teacher tells them to put their heads down and start reading. The sense of a cohesive unit that can delve into many matters together, disperses into completely isolated individuals

p. 10 innis reveres the ancient greek philosopher plato because he lived during the transition between the oral and the written traditions and combined them in ‘dialogues’ he wrote portraying the philosopher socrates talking with his students about ‘big’ issues like justice or the immortality of the soul. plato didn’t write books in our sense: as complete things in themselves. he wrote in order to convey in written form the sense of living conversations between socrates and his students. He tried to convey the oral in written form, so he combined the strengths of the oral and the written. for that reason, innis thought, plato ‘dominated’ the intellectual history of the west for 1500 years.

what innis admires in plato is the balance between the virtues of the oral and the written traditions. It lasted about 2000 years. this balance was destroyed, innis thinks, by the invention and the success of the printing press in the mid 1400s. until then, writing was found in manuscripts and was limited to small groups who were literate like scribes and priests who could then pass on elements of the written tradition in oral form to largely illiterate populations, for instance during bible readings and sermons at weekly church services. so before the rise of print, the written retained an ‘oral’ character, it was still closely linked to oral forms. When the written tradition only existed in manuscripts, not in printed texts, before the invention of the printing press, it was more closely linked to the oral even in its form. For instance, manuscripts do not have capital letters, punctuation or even spaces between words. They lack titles and chapter headings. They are continuous, the way speech is. In speech for instance, it’s hard to say what a word is, because speech is a continuous flow of thought. but print changed this. it made the written tradition available to huge numbers of people and overwhelmed oral forms of knowledge. as an example of this transition from writing to print, we looked at a page of talmud, jewish religious texts which contain discussions of bibilical laws and ideas by different generations of religious scholars or rabbis, over long periods of time. on a single page of talmud, in typographical form, you can see an attempt to duplicate in print, a sense of dialogue and conversation between differing scholars and generations. This was a sort of effort, like plato’s dialogues, to keep the balance or connection between written and oral ways of expression, but the power of print eventually overwhelmed the oral approach. today the oral tradition, to the extent it exists, is often considered marginal or quaint, like storytellers at street festivals or to indigenous societes that are not yet literate. but it was once the dominant way that a society transmitted its core beliefs and imperatives.

print also created the sense that words are separate, even that they are things, which can be contained in ‘boxes’ that are books, with covers. These are things we take so much for granted that it’s difficult to think about them. 

Innis declared his own bias for the oral tradition (190) especially as it was found in ancient greece and for trying to recapture some of its spirit. That is: he was not in favour of the impossible- going back entirely to the oral tradition, but he wanted to restore some balance where the oral tradition would also play a role in the modern world.

he explains his sense of what has been lost by saying (p. 191) the oral tradition was “overwhelmingly significant where the subject matter is human action and feeling, and it is important in the discovery of new truth but of very little value in disseminating it”- he means that the oral tradition can only reach those within earshot so it is only of limited effect in spreading ideas and information while the written tradition, especially in printed form, can reach vast audiences. yet on the plus side, ‘the oral tradition inherently involves personal contact and a consideration for the feeling of others and it is in sharp contrast with the cruelty of mechanized [eg, printed or broadcast] communication and the tendencies we have come to note in the modern world.’ print and electronic media like radio and tv are ‘cruel’ in the sense that they can’t respond to individuals, since they involve no interaction. They ‘address the world rather than the individual’ (p. 191) because they communicate in only one direction: from writer or broadcaster to reader or viewer. No book ever talked back to a reader or was able to answer questions addressed to it, or had a sense of the individual who was 'reading' it, the way a living person can do, that’s what innis means by cruel. It’s true that tv viewers might feel ‘the connection’ personally when they watch oprah (or at least when they used to) but if so it’s a delusion, and might be considered (at least somewhat) sad

 

regarding the limits of the written, innis (31) said that ‘enormous improvements in communications have made understanding more difficult.’ At first sight that might seem odd. but what improvements in communication do is increase information, not understanding. those improvements came mainly through the written tradition which is very good at transmitting information swiftly and efficiently- like strings of facts, or chronologies that describe what order things occurred in, or even recipes- but it lacks the ability of the oral tradition to carefully and painstakingly raise questions and deepen understanding through the back and forth of conversation and dialogue. in the written tradition, writers and readers cover a great deal of ground and may have the impression that they now ‘know’ more, but they also understand far less than they are able to from a lengthy discussion or conversation that doesn’t cover much material. you can cover far more pages reading alone than in a discussion, since no one interrupts or slows down your progess', but how 'much' you have learned depends on how you take into account the depth of what you have covered.

We discussed ways in which innis might have viewed the internet. Is it part of the oral or the written tradition? It is largely printed which makes it part of the written, but it is interactive, which is a symptom of the oral. The interactions on the internet are mostly written, which means you have a chance to consider what you’re going to say before you say it, which is not the way interchange happens in direct conversation. Is the internet some kind of hybrid? There are no straightforward answers to these questions. The value of innis is he opens up questions and ways of thinking about the internet- even tho he died long long before anyone could envision anything remotely like the internet. (you could say he wanted to restore emphasis on the value of thinking itself, versus simply on the knowledge that can come out of thinking) Even the internet itself is more than one thing. So some of it may be oral, some written, some a hybrid. It could be one, the other, neither or both. How is it like and unlike live exchange? No matter how lifelike (with the emphasis on ‘like’) the images and texts become, they are still images, versus live actual human presences. Does that matter? If so, in what ways? Also: does communication on the internet evolve through generations, so that it can become more ‘oral’ as it becomes more a part of people’s communication? is texting the same as talking, or can it be?

what about radio, tv, film, or recorded music? are they in the written or the oral tradition? innis seems to have felt that radio, film and television (which barely existed at the time he died) fell in the written tradition, not the oral. even though they were visual and/or spoken, because they were one-way forms of communication and did not involve interactive responses between the speaker and the audience. this interaction and response was the real essence of the oral, not the mere fact that it was spoken aloud. (this, by the way, is something mcluhan, innis's successor, who admired him greatly) seems to have misunderstood).