Harold Innis - The Bias of Communication (1951)

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The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.

Harold Innis
Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.

Harold Innis
The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.

Harold Innis
The discovery of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century implied the beginning of a return to a type of civilization dominated by the eye rather than the ear.

Harold Innis
Industrialism implies technology and the cutting of time into precise fragments suited to the needs of the engineer and the accountant.

Harold Innis
The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.

Harold Innis
The full impact of printing did not become possible until the adoption of the Bill of Rights in the United States with its guarantee of freedom of the press. A guarantee of freedom of the press in print was intended to further sanctify the printed word and to provide a rigid bulwark for the shelter of vested interests.

Harold Innis
We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved.

Harold Innis