binding time harold innis and the balance of new media
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Improvements in communication...make for increased diff iculties of understanding.
—Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication
Binding time: Harold Innis and the balance
of new media Chris Chesher,, Sydney
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Examines the extent to which Innis’s concepts about media still apply today.
This paper
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November 5, 1894 – November 8, 1952 University of TorontoCanadian economist and communications theorist And the author of seminal works on Canadian
economic history and on media and communication theory
Innis's communications writings explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations.
Approach to understanding the social significance of all kinds of media
How different media relate to space and time
Harold Innis
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Space-binding
Time-binding
Dimensions of time and space to various media
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Space-binding mediaExtend influence of
meanings over distances, helping to build empires, and develop cohesion across space
Example: newspaper, commercial printings, the telegraph, radio…
Influence cultural patterns in duration
Examples: saga, poems published, books, archives, university…
Two dimensions of media
Time-binding media
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Time-binding media include clay or stone
tablets, hand-copied manuscripts on parchment or vellum and oral sources such as Homer's epic poems. These are intended to carry stories and messages that last for many generations, but tend to reach limited audiences.
While time-binding media favour stability, community, tradition and religion,
are more ephemeral. They include modern media such as radio, television, and mass circulation newspapers which convey information that is meant to reach as many as possible over long distances, but will not last long in time.
Space-binding media facilitate rapid change, materialism, secularism and empire.
Space-binding media
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To what extent is historical knowledge not merely preserved, but shaped by the archive and its means of selecting, storing and presenting information?
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Properties of media substrates: media materiality
Encoding conventions: language and genreSocial and political arrangements using
media for particular purposes
Three layers of media
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Different substances have distinctive properties that support different styles of communicating and, most importantly, each tends to have a bias towards either space or time.
Media which emphasize time are those which are durable in character such as parchment, clay and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture.
Media which emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper.
Media materiality
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Innis examines a second level in the patterning of media in the languages, scripts, and genres of content
Language and Genre
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Innis argued that the predominant media of a civilization both cause and so provide evidence of, the distinctive character of that society. Each medium is selected and developed because it suits particular interests within that society. These choices of media reinforce, and sometimes transform that society.
Civilisation can be measured by their balance between managing time and controlling space.
Civilization
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How has computers changed this balance in
our own culture?
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Digital Media on the experience of SpaceAccelerating
globalization Shifting boundaries
between work and home life
... …
Structuring our relationships with both the future and the past
Computers and digital ageDigital media on the experience of Time
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Digitized artifacts can seem to be largely virtualized
Materiality of media
The relation of digital media to space and time
The material status of computers is more complex
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Virtual reality
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Instant feedbackResponsive environmentSocial interaction
What makes virtual worlds immersive and involving?
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Interconnected components comprised of many different material—metals, paper cards, magnetic surfaces, semiconductors, radio, and optical wavelengths.
The physical storage media deteriorate quite quickly making data unreadable within only a few years.
1) Floppy disks are unreliable after 5 years 2) Hard disk after twenty or thirty years 3) Optical media such as CD-rs and data
DVDs not much longer than that
Digital Media Materiality
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Web2.0:
Blogs Social networking Media sharing Wikis and collaborative writing Make distance events and historical texts
present in everyday life
The relation of digital media to space and time
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In each case, while there is present-mindedness, there is also a time-binding record of the present being created
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1. the dominant time-binding media of our ‘civilisation’ operates paradoxically to both diversify and homogenise cultural patterns over time.
2. cultural practices such as calculation, writing, photography, play, and moving image were gradually appropriated by digital media.
3. the digitisation of many cultural records has made many archives ubiquitously accessible.
4.the invention of computers has been a response to concerns about the neglect of time
Conclusions
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