mass-communication-theory

230 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field
technological
determinist
A person who
believes that all
social, political,
economic, and
cultural change is
inevitably based
on the development
and diffusion
of
technology
popularity among academics in the United States, a time when most American
communication researchers regarded macroscopic theory with suspicion, if not outright
hostility. In the humanities, it was a time when the high-culture canon still
consisted largely of “classic” work (European novels, symphonies, serious theater)
produced by, white, Anglo-Saxon males, now dead. McLuhan’s focus on the cultural
role of popular media quickly posed a challenge both to limited-effects notions
and to the canon.
McLuhan and his ideas are again in vogue. It is no small irony that McLuhan,
hailed (or denigrated) in the 1960s as the “High Priest of Popcult,” the “Metaphysician
of Media,” and the “Oracle of the Electronic Age,” to this day is listed as
“Patron Saint” on the masthead of Wired magazine, the “Bible of Cyberspace.”
McLuhan, featured on the March 3, 1967, cover of Newsweek, graced the cover
of the January 1996 Wired, twenty-nine years later.
McLuhan’s “theory” is actually a collection of lots of intriguing ideas bound
together by some common assumptions. The most central of these, “All media,
from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man [sic] that cause
deep and lasting changes in him and transforms his environment” (1962, p. 13),
argued that changes in communication technology inevitably produce profound
changes in both culture and social order.
Even though McLuhan drew on critical cultural theories such as political economy
theory to develop his perspective, his work was rejected by political economists
because it failed to provide a basis on which to produce positive social
change. McLuhan had no links to any political or social movements. He seemed
ready to accept whatever changes were dictated by and inherent in communications
technology. Because he argued that technology inevitably causes specific changes in
how people think, in how society is structured, and in the forms of culture that are
created, McLuhan was a technological determinist.
HAROLD INNIS: THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION
Harold Innis was one of the first scholars to systematically speculate at length about
the possible linkages between communication media and the various forms of social
structure found at certain points in history. In Empire and Communication (1950)
and The Bias of Communication (1951), he argued that the early empires of Egypt,
Greece, and Rome were based on elite control of the written word. He contrasted
these empires with earlier social orders dependent on the spoken word. Innis maintained
that before elite discovery of the written word, dialogue was the dominant
mode of public discourse and political authority was much more diffuse. Gradually,
the written word became the dominant mode of elite communication, and its power
was magnified enormously by the invention of new writing materials (specifically
paper) that made writing portable yet enduring. With paper and pen, small centrally
located elites were able to gain control over and govern vast regions. Thus new communication
media made it possible to create empires.
Innis argued that written word-based empires expanded to the limits imposed
by communication technology. Thus expansion did not depend as much on the
skills of military generals as it did on the communication media used to disseminate
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