Manuscripts after Printing: Affinity, Dissent and Display in the Texts of Wyatt's Psalms

Summary

Marshall McLuhan had all the press: he coined the smart phrases – ‘the medium is the message’, ‘global village’, and so on – that have continued to reverberate in the popular imagination, thirty years after. As McLuhan acknowledged, however, his own work, from The Mechanical Bride (1951) to Understanding Media (1964), by way of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), rested on the thinking of another Canadian (who was McLuhan's Dean at the University of Toronto at one point), Harold Adams Innis. Born in 1894, Innis is remembered chiefly as a political economist and, in Canada, as an early exponent of anti-imperialism in cultural affairs – in the Cold War period, inveighing against what he called ‘the jackals of communication systems’, for example, out ‘to destroy every vestige of [Canadian] sentiment toward Great Britain, holding it of no advantage if it threatens the omnipotence of American commercialism’. Innis turned to the history of communication and communications theory only in the last decade of his life, when, in the late 1940s, he began working with the hypothesis that McLuhan was to do so well out of in the 1960s, that the nature of the media of communication in use influences the nature of the information to be conveyed, thereby determining institutional structures and the course of historical change:

We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization.

‘Monopolies of knowledge’, created and fostered by dependence on particular media, grown inflexible and unresponsive, invite subversion: altern- ative media, alternative knowledge, and eventually new social order.

Monopolies of knowledge had developed and declined partly in relation to the medium of communication on which they were built and tended to alternate as they emphasized religion, decentralization, and time, and force, centralization, and space…. Concentration on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the civilization concerned either towards an emphasis on space and political organization or towards an emphasis on time and religious organization.