Innis, Harold

1894–1952

Canadian Media Theorist

Harold Adams Innis pioneered the study of media by writing an economic history of communication. He enunciated the first systematic medium theories about how media can bias the quality and quantity of information—how a living society communicates, who controls information in the living society, and what we remember of the society after it collapses. He provided the intellectual foundation for the Toronto School of Communication, influencing Marshall McLuhan, James Carey, and others, and generating some of the first ideas about how a medium of communication can affect the dissemination of ideas over time and through space.

Innis was born near Hamilton, Ontario, and graduated from McMaster University shortly before World War I. After fighting on the front lines in France, Innis studied political economy at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation that, like many of his early works, explored the economic history of Canada. After World War II, he began to investigate the history of communication, producing two important manuscripts—Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951)—that describe how knowledge and power were stored and projected as civilizations rose and fell.

Innis made three important contributions through his excruciatingly detailed accounts of how communication tools can shape culture. First, he argued that the use of a particular communication tool would define the quality and quantity of knowledge communicated and preserved. Second, since new media always seemed to help new forms of social organization to emerge, he thought that a civilization would be constrained by its dependence on a single dominant medium, growing culturally stagnant and inflexible. Third, he illustrated how our knowledge of dead or culturally distant societies depended largely on the character of their media.