Improvements in communication...make for increased diff iculties of understanding.

—Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

Binding time: Harold Innis and the balance

of new media Chris Chesher,, Sydney

Examines the extent to which Innis’s concepts about media still apply today.

This paper

November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952 University of TorontoCanadian economist and communications theorist And the author of seminal works on Canadian

economic history and on media and communication theory

Innis's communications writings explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.

Approach to understanding the social significance of all kinds of media

How different media relate to space and time

Harold Innis

Space-binding

Time-binding

Dimensions of time and space to various media

Space-binding mediaExtend influence of

meanings over distances, helping to build empires, and develop cohesion across space

Example: newspaper, commercial printings, the telegraph, radio…

Influence cultural patterns in duration

Examples: saga, poems published, books, archives, university…

Two dimensions of media

Time-binding media

Time-binding media include clay or stone

tablets, hand-copied manuscripts on parchment or vellum and oral sources such as Homer's epic poems. These are intended to carry stories and messages that last for many generations, but tend to reach limited audiences.

While time-binding media favour stability, community, tradition and religion,

are more ephemeral. They include modern media such as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers which convey information that is meant to reach as many as possible over long distances, but will not last long in time.

Space-binding media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire.

Space-binding media

To what extent is historical knowledge not merely preserved, but shaped by the archive and its means of selecting, storing and presenting information?

Properties of media substrates: media materiality

Encoding conventions: language and genreSocial and political arrangements using

media for particular purposes

Three layers of media

Different substances have distinctive properties that support different styles of communicating and, most importantly, each tends to have a bias towards either space or time.

Media which emphasize time are those which are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture.

Media which emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper.

Media materiality

Innis examines a second level in the patterning of media in the languages, scripts, and genres of content

Language and Genre

Innis argued that the predominant media of a civilization both cause and so provide evidence of, the distinctive character of that society. Each medium is selected and developed because it suits particular interests within that society. These choices of media reinforce, and sometimes transform that society.

Civilisation can be measured by their balance between managing time and controlling space.

Civilization

How has computers changed this balance in

our own culture?

Digital Media on the experience of SpaceAccelerating

globalization Shifting boundaries

between work and home life

... …

Structuring our relationships with both the future and the past

Computers and digital ageDigital media on the experience of Time

Digitized artifacts can seem to be largely virtualized

Materiality of media

The relation of digital media to space and time

The material status of computers is more complex

Virtual reality

Instant feedbackResponsive environmentSocial interaction

What makes virtual worlds immersive and involving?

Interconnected components comprised of many different material—metals, paper cards, magnetic surfaces, semiconductors, radio, and optical wavelengths.

The physical storage media deteriorate quite quickly making data unreadable within only a few years.

1) Floppy disks are unreliable after 5 years 2) Hard disk after twenty or thirty years 3) Optical media such as CD-rs and data

DVDs not much longer than that

Digital Media Materiality

Web2.0:

Blogs Social networking Media sharing Wikis and collaborative writing Make distance events and historical texts

present in everyday life

The relation of digital media to space and time

In each case, while there is present-mindedness, there is also a time-binding record of the present being created

1. the dominant time-binding media of our ‘civilisation’ operates paradoxically to both diversify and homogenise cultural patterns over time.

2. cultural practices such as calculation, writing, photography, play, and moving image were gradually appropriated by digital media.

3. the digitisation of many cultural records has made many archives ubiquitously accessible.

4.the invention of computers has been a response to concerns about the neglect of time

Conclusions