4. From Medium Bias to Balance: A Conceptual Framework
4.1 Brief Introduction to Medium Theory
This subchapter presents the main aspects of medium theory. Despite being called medium theory, for some scholars it is not so much a theory but rather an approach to studying the implications of communication media.390 Describing what a medium theory approach is, like Meyrowitz, who used it to study the influence of the television on role change, made an appeal to an analogy between media and rooms, suggesting that they function in similar ways:
“…different media are like different types of rooms – rooms that include and exclude people in different ways. The introduction of new media into a culture restructures the social world in the same way as building or removing walls may either isolate people into different groups or unite them into the same environment. Media that segregate situations will foster segregated behavioural patterns. Media that integrate situations will foster integrated behavioural patterns.”391
This somehow describes the approach of medium theory, but its interests are not limited to behavioural implications. As already mentioned, medium theory can be applied to a variety of
389 This has been discussed in subchapter 5.1.1 in this dissertation.
390 Paul Heyer, Harold Innis (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2003), 102.
391 Meyrowitz, “Medium Theory,” 62.
topics and at different levels of analysis. It is sometimes used interchangeably with media ecology, a concept introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.392 As explained by Mathew Fuller, media ecology is some sort of environmentalism; ecology and environment are not differentiated, with the former often replaced with the latter; and the focus falls on media as environments or ecologies, understood as dynamic systems sustaining human culture in a similar manner to the natural environment.393 In contrast to medium theory, media ecology more clearly illustrates the perspective that the medium is perceived like an environment, yet the difference seems to be mainly terminological because scholars belonging to the media ecology movement are also classified as medium theorists.394 Eric Havelock, Neil Postman, Walter Ong, Lewis Mumford, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Edmund Carpenter, next to Harold Adams Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz, are just some of the most influential scholars.395 Some of these researchers focused on the impacts of the shift from orality to literacy and showed how this change influenced knowledge and consciousness, yet also social organization.396 Other researchers focused on the impacts of the printing press,397 or those of the telegraph,398 while some analysed the influence of the television on erasing generational borders.399 However, Harold Innis and McLuhan stand out among medium theorists due to the breath of history and the types of media covered.400 Indeed, Innis, who is of main interest in this dissertation, covered four thousand years of human history in his analysis, showing how different media - ranging from clay tablets to the radio - have been influencing cultures, occupying a central position in the organisation of societies and determining the types of knowledge disseminated.401 To provide some examples, Innis showed that the development of
392 Lance Strate, “A Media Ecology Review,” Communication Research Trends 23, no. 2 (2004): 4.
393 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Massachusetts, London, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 4.
394 E.g. A special issue of a quarterly review of communication research published by the Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture dedicated a 2004-issue to a review of media ecology. The authors that are being discussed in that issue are the authors presented by others as medium theorists. See Strate, “A Media Ecology Review”. For an overview of different uses of the concept “medium ecology” see Fuller, Media Ecologies.
395 For a compact overview of the major media ecologists see Strate, “A Media Ecology Review”.
396 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word, 3rd ed. (London, New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005).
397 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Eisenstein analyzed the effects of the printing press on religion, science and scholarship. According to Derrick de Kerckhove, Eisenstein actually set herself to prove McLuhan wrong regarding the impacts of a medium but after almost twenty years she admitted that he was right. See Derrick de Kerckhove, “McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication,” Canadian Journal of Communication/Special Issue 14, no. 4 (1989).
www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/download/533/439
398 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York & London:
Routledge, 1989), especially chapter 8 entitled “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph”.
399 Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place. He argues that television’s accessibility has lowered the boundaries that separate generations, genders, classes, etc.
400 This remark was made by Meyrowitz, “Medium Theory,” 52.
401 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
libraries in Babylon favoured the power of monarchy; in Ancient Greece, papyrus facilitated the development of democratic organisation, literature and philosophy; Christianity maintained power by exploiting parchment; and printing brought the rise of the Reformation.402
Sometimes the reference is not to medium theory but rather more narrowly framed to the Toronto School of Communication Theory, given that the main scholars that initiated the type of research called medium theory - Harold Innis, followed by Marshall McLuhan - were based at the University of Toronto in Canada.403 In their analysis of the Toronto School of Communication Theory, Blondheim and Watson note three main themes that characterise this perspective: an interest in communication as a process, as a “seamless circuit linking people through media and their messages”;404 the focus on the effects or consequences of communications, broadly conceptualised in terms of economic, social and cultural change to cognitive consequences and influences on personality;405 and the focus on the technology of communication, or the medium - clay tablet, printed page, film, video - representing the substrate of communication, and thus moulding the overall process and its consequences.406 In order to extract these themes, Blondheim and Watson made brief comparisons with other schools of communication research concerned with what can be called “media effects”.407 For example, they contrast the focus of the Toronto School on broad changes triggered by a medium with the focus of the Columbia School, whose focus was on “short-term measurable effects of mass mediated messages on opinions, attitudes and behaviours of individuals.”408 Several scholars proceed in this manner, comparing it with other schools such as the Frankfurt School, for example with scholars such as Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin;409 or they place it on the same level as major schools of communication research, including those
402 Innis, Bias, 31.
403 de Kerckhove, “McLuhan and the Toronto”.
404 Blondheim and Watson, “Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School,” 8.
405 Blondheim and Watson, “Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School,” 9.
406 Blondheim and Watson, “Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School,” 10.
407 For a comprehensive overview of theories concerned with media effects and examples of their application see Robin L. Nabi and Mary B. Oliver, The SAGE Handbook of Media Processes and Effects (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2009).
408 Blondheim and Watson, “Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School,” 9.
409 Judith Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan and the Frankfurt School. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).; See also Elihu Katz, “Foreword: The Toronto School of Communication Research,” in The Toronto School of Communication Theory: Interpretations, Extensions, Applications, eds. Rita Watson and Menahem Blondheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 1.
mentioned above, and additionally the Chicago School and the Cultural Studies.410 However, unlike the Toronto School, other communication theories did not focus on the medium of communication and thus are not of main concern within this dissertation.411
Nevertheless, it is useful to briefly point out how the Toronto School differs from Shannon’s theory of communication, which was noted in the previous chapter as having influenced perspectives in library and archival sciences. In fact, Blondheim and Watson mention this theory in their explanation of the Toronto School, although their opinion is questionable, since they state: “…much like their contemporaries Shannon and Weaver, both Innis and McLuhan saw communication as a seamless circuit linking people through media and their messages.
Their scope, however, was much larger and richer than Shannon and Weaver’s reductionist approach.”412 It is possible to agree that the focus of both Shannon and Innis was on the medium of communication, yet their understanding of communication and medium differed fundamentally. Shannon did not really see communication as process linking people, and as explained in the previous chapter, his was a cybernetic approach, defining communication as transmission of messages from a sender to a receiver. For Innis, communication was indeed a process linking people, yet this is exactly what sets him apart from Shannon. Seeing communication as a process linking people Innis’ interest was not simply in the transmission of messages, but rather in the human interrelationships that were established by this traversal.413 Furthermore, this influenced how the medium was defined. Whereas for Shannon, the medium was the technology that performed the transfer of messages, for Innis it was the substrate that underlined and conditioned, not just the messages but also the human interrelationships, which it enabled and sustained. However, Innis’ perspective can be best understood against his research background and theoretical orientation, which are presented below.
410 For an overview of the main texts that represent each of the above named schools see Elihu Katz et al., Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? (UK: Polity Press, 2003).
411 Walter Benjamin is perhaps an exception. A brief discussion has been provided in subchapter 7.2 in this dissertation.
412 Blondheim and Watson, “Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School,” 8.
413 For this interpretation see Ian Angus, “The Materiality of Expression: Harold Innis` Communication Theory and the Discursive Turn in the Human Sciences,” Canadian Journal of Communication 23, no. 1 (1998).