Page 168 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Time and Space 157

demolish “the intellectual and moral order of the Western world” as nothing
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is thought to remain the same; thereby they have helped initiate the severe
environmental problems we experience today.
For Suzuki, we in the west are beset by what Innis called present-minded-
ness. We think little of the past and have few concerns over what may tran-
spire in the distant future. Rather, he writes, the “bottom line is often a weekly
paycheque or an annual return on investment. Political reality is dictated by a
horizon measured in months or a few years.” Indeed, “linear time underlies
our most cherished notions of ‘progress’—our collective faith in the inex-
orable, incremental refinement of human society, technology, and thought.” 31
This explains why it is difficult to mesh economic and political deadlines with
nature’s time needs.
Not only are David Suzuki’s pronouncements on time consistent with In-
nis’ media thesis, they fill a gap in Innis’ work. Although Innis certainly was
familiar with North American indigenous cultures, as evidenced by his book
on the fur trade, his analysis of the biases of oral communication, in the opin-
ion of Paul Heyer, “ultimately suffers from the exclusivity of constructing a
model based on one source: the ancient Greeks.” Heyer explains that Innis’
work “evidences no discussion of the phenomenon as evidenced in the
prestate societies of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the New World.” 32
Suzuki, therefore, can be regarded as, in a sense, completing or fulfilling this
aspect of Innis’ work.
Suzuki is also Innisian when he assesses the time bias inherent to modern
media. When Suzuki first became a broadcast journalist, he hoped that
through his craft he would enable viewers to experience nature in a way that
would inspire them to love it. Later he understood that this could not be so:
“Now I realize that my programs, too, are a creation, not a reflection of real-
ity. . . . Back in the editing room, hours of this hard-earned film are boiled
down to sequences of sensational shot after sensational shot.” He continues,
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“What’s missing in the filmed version of nature is time. Nature must have
time, but television cannot tolerate it. So we create a virtual reality, a collage
of images that conveys a distorted sense of what a real wilderness is like.” 34
For Suzuki, the “time distortion” of modern media is not trivial. By instill-
ing an impression that nature can move quickly, media cause people to har-
bor unrealistic expectations: “Fish, trees or soil microorganisms don’t grow
fast enough for our speedy timeframe. But if the programs we create give an
impression of a hopped-up nature, we might expect it to be able to meet our
ever-faster needs.” Suzuki suggests that although our rates of extracting re-
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sources—trees, fish, top soil, clean water—are harmonious with the speed of
our information technologies and the economy, they are certainly “not in
synch with the reproductive rates of natural systems.” He concludes: “More