The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)

As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!)

[S]ome media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.

[…]

The story of civilization since the invention of writing several thousand years ago is, among others, a story of changes in writing materials. Even though writing itself might be said to be a time-biased technology, as it allows a record of events and thoughts to persist independently of the lives of the observer and the thinker, innovations in writing media have been aimed mainly at extending information’s reach, often at the expense of its durability. Stone and clay tablets were supplanted by more portable but still cumbersome papyrus scrolls and parchment codices, and those in turn were supplanted by lightweight paper documents. As city-states and nation-states sought to extend their territories and influence, the spatial transport of information took precedence over its temporal transport. — Nicholas Carr, The Tyranny of Now