Babe - Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky meet Harold Innis : media, power, and democracy

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Babe, Robert E.

Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky meet Harold Innis : media, power, and democracy / Robert E. Babe.

pages cm. -- (Critical media studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-2368-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4985-0682-3 (electronic)

1. Innis, Harold Adams, 1894-1952. 2. Schramm, Wilbur, 1907-1987. 3. Chomsky, Noam. 4. Mass media--Social aspects. 5. Economics--Sociological aspects. I. Title.

HM1206.B33 2015

302.23--dc23

2015001563

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To James Winter and Edward Comor, esteemed colleagues and friends
and
For every man, and woman, for all seasons

If a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

Robert Louis Stevenson

To love truth for truths sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world and the seed of all other virtues.

John Locke

A history of the past is worthless except as a documented way of talking about the future.

Kenneth Burke

This book has benefited from the detailed critical scrutiny of Professors Edward Comor and James Winter, and from the work of my intrepid editor, Mike Babe, who helped author the final chapter. The book has benefited from suggestions and commentary by Mary Innis Cates and Anne Innis Dagg regarding the early chapters, and from Lexington Books anonymous referee. For all errors and omissions, of course, the author bears sole responsibility.

Appreciation is extended to Anne Innis Dagg on behalf of the Innis estate for permission to quote from Political Economy in the Modern State (The Ryerson Press, 1946).

Appreciation is extended to University of Toronto Press for permission to quote from the following chapters of Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, copyright Canada by University of Toronto Press 1951: Minervas Owl, The Bias of Communication, A Plea for Time, The Problem of Space, Industrialism and Cultural Values, The English Publishing Trade in the Eighteenth Century, Technology and Public Opinion in the U.S.A., and A Critical Review. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Harold Adams Innis (18941952) was originator or co-originator of two schools of thought. In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, he co-founded and became the most prolific expositor of the staples thesis of Canadian economic development, also known as the Toronto School of Economics. Then, in the last decade or so of his abbreviated life, he inaugurated medium theory,

Watkins is far from alone. John Bonnett enthuses that Innis is among the most profound thinkers Canada has ever produced,

Rarely is high acclaim unanimously given, and Innis certainly has had detractors. Foundational mainstream media scholars in the United States particularly were prone to dismiss Innis curtly as a media determinist British scholar, Richard Collins, likewise detected little merit in Inniss work, declaring:

[Innis] does not link his magpie collection of fascinating facts with his major propositions, does not demonstrate to the reader the necessity of his conclusions.... For a skeptical reader, Innis offers only a set of take or leave it dogmas, the arbitrariness of which is camouflaged by a thick frosting of sparkling informationfacts lining the nest of an intellectual magpie and concealing the fundamental intellectual disorderliness of Inniss system.