HAROLD ADAMS INNIS

ANNOTATING– Harold Adams Innis, Empire and Communications, 1950

Harold Adams Innis’ Empire and Communications (1950) built a media theory around the division between the oral and written traditions. In the chapter that deals principally with this issue, The Oral Tradition and Greece, Innis stated: “The task of understanding a culture built on the oral tradition is impossible to students steeped in the written tradition.” [Po 59J] In this reading “media bias” (a term that originates with Innis) is inherent to any analysis of literacy’s Other. The oral tradition, characterised by poetry and the authority of the gods, died with Socrates (who manages the transition between the oral and literate traditions), and was replaced by the rationality of Plato. In Innis, media are understood as technologies which shape and define the subject, which, in the case of writing cultures, produce the modern individual. The great divide between oral and literate cultures was a feature of media theory as it developed through the 1950s and 60s (with Havelock, Goody, McLuhan and Ong as its notable adherents )(55)

Note: Here media theory is bound to anthropology

Note: in Lacan, via Hegel and Levi-Strauss, Psychoanalysis is bound to anthropology.