Page 199 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

188 Chapter Eight

technologies which, for the most part, are structured to serve the spatial (i.e.
“market share”) interests of corporations and, in some cases, governments.
Hence, for Innis, contemporary political-economic relations generally are
sustained through the widening and deepening of historically structured rela-
tions involving, in the case of commercial applications, the immediate grati-
fication and individualist biases normalized through mass media. Because
bias can never be assessed in isolation of the historical, dialectical whole, the
deleterious implications for the temporal conditions of life—for collective
memory, for sustainable practices, for long-term considerations—constituted
Innis’ primary political concern.
For Innis, holistic, historical, and dialectical ruminations produced a pes-
simistic outlook when assessing the age of electronic communication. Efforts
to control space could lead to a general and systemically replicating neglect
of time. Rather than assessing a given medium as itself enabling or disabling
some ways of thinking and acting relative to others (as with Poster’s affilia-
tion of decentered cultures and liberated identities), Innis focused on the bal-
ance or imbalance of a given society’s constituent biases. In a way, Poster’s
political hopes relative to the Internet and related electronic media ironically
reflect the progressive sentiments of the modernist social scientist as opposed
to Innis’ premodern, indeed classical emphasis on tension and balance. While
Innis emphasized the dialectics of human action and its limits in terms of eco-
logical and holistic contexts, Poster’s veiled modernist bias asserts itself
through his focus on individuals and marginalized communities.

Information and Knowledge

Poster argues that individuals in the electronics era are now finally experi-
encing the opportunity of liberation from Enlightenment-style grand nar-
ratives through the heightened possibility of subjective interpretations. In
Poster’s back-and-forth between an explicit subjectivist individualism and
an implicit technological determinism, however, the cognitive processes
lying behind the interpretation of information and experiences are neg-
lected: he does not address, for instance, the forces, structures, and
processes that help determine what information and experiences are avail-
able for interpretation, nor the pressures which guide interpreters. Innis, in
contrast, assessed these issues directly using monopolies of knowledge and
time/space bias as constructs.
Structurally, a monopoly of knowledge implies powerful forces at work in
the production, distribution, and use of information. In a capitalist market sys-
tem, in which the public service model is on the policy periphery and wealth
is the primary determinant of who gets what information, those with financial