Harold Innis and Our Time

The cold vision of a forgotten Canadian scholar.

Emperors of information at work, January 20, 2025.

“Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” So said Harold Innis during a lecture in Quebec City in 1947. His statement fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t something people were prepared to hear. Everyone took it for granted that communication and understanding were and always would be allies. Only Innis saw that they were becoming enemies.

Harold Adams Innis was in his day one of the world’s foremost political economists. Living in Canada, a country on the periphery of empires — first British, then American — he was a particularly sensitive analyst of the concentration of economic power and its social consequences. After the Second World War, he shifted his focus to the role of media and communication technologies in molding civilization and culture. New empires of information were forming, he saw, and they too were reshaping society to their own benefit.

Innis ran out of time before he could fully develop his ideas about communication. He died of cancer in 1952 at the age of fifty-eight. But his work, though largely unknown to the public, had a profound influence on the newly emerging field of media studies. In a foreword to a 1964 edition of Innis’s book The Bias of Communication, Marshall McLuhan wrote that his own recent book, the groundbreaking Gutenberg Galaxy, was “a footnote to the observations of Innis.” In a similar vein, my own new book, Superbloom, might be read as a gloss on that one sentence of Innis’s: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”

In “The Tyranny of Now,” an essay in the new issue of The New Atlantis, I offer a brief appreciation of Innis, with an emphasis on his prophetic sense that commercial and governmental “monopolies of communication” are engaged in “a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.” To maintain their grip on our attention, our new emperors of information are establishing a tyranny of “present-mindedness.”

Here’s a bit:

Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new—to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

The essay is out from behind the paywall at the moment. You can read it here.