The Creative PhD by Brabazon Tara;Lyndall-Knight Tiffany;Hills Natalie;

Author:Brabazon, Tara;Lyndall-Knight, Tiffany;Hills, Natalie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION

A key major historical concept and theory emerged late in the career of the Canadian professor Harold Innis. He was born in 1894 and died in 1952. He lived through the change from newspaper culture to television culture and the development of a national communication system that could move ideas beyond borders and into international audiences. There was a social and political context for the development of Innis’s ideas. The educational system into which Innis was educated and worked was dominated by British born and educated academics who demeaned and displaced Canadian scholars and research. The colonization that continued through the twentieth century rarely revealed the brutalizing violence of the previous century, but instead was insidious and corrosive. Similarly, Canadian academics had to manage the expansive and chaotic power of a burgeoning United States over the border (Creighton, 1978). Innis was the first Canadian academic who valued the university system and Canadian research voice on its own terms, rather than as a second rate, faded British duplicate, or as a shadow of the United States (Creighton, 1978).

In his own time, Harold Innis was a famous academic. He was a distinguished historian and political economist through almost all of his career and he researched important and earnest – if boring – topics (Innis, 1956). He explored the building of the Canadian railway system, considering how the large spaces and intricate landscape of the nation could be managed. His other major research projects included Fur Trade in 1939 and The Cod Fisheries, published in 1940.

This is a conventional scholarly tale. But what makes the tail of Innis’s career remarkable is that he had, to cite Edward Said, a “late style” (Said, 2007). His tail had a scorpion lash. At the point where most academics would remain in a research area where they had respect, reputation and credibility, he moved away from economics and started to study communication (Christian, 1980). His project was expansive and powerful, investigating the relationship between the medium of communication and the configuration of identity. Suddenly, he became interested in incredibly large social variables: time and space. He also became focused on the notion – that became a conceptualization – of “bias.”3 The commonsensical interpretation of bias involves politicians, journalists or citizens expressing a staunch and blinkered view of the world. Innis’s interpretation was distinct. He argued that each society has been dominated by a different medium of communication through history: clay, papyrus, parchment and paper. His argument could be updated with ease to include digitized screens as the contemporary end of that list. Innis demonstrated that each medium creates a different monopoly of knowledge. Knowledge and power are differently constituted depending on the dominant medium of the era, and its bias to space and time. Furthermore, he argues that a society that balances space-oriented media (the platforms that move ideas through the landscape) and time-oriented media (the platforms that move ideas beyond a singular era) will be successful in space and time.

This tale continues through Innis’s student.

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