Page 200 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Keeping the Portals Open: Poster vs. Innis 189

resources tend to dominate. Such political-economic dimensions are not, of
course, limited to mass media activities; among other nodal points of power
they encompass scholarship also. 61
Culturally, a monopoly of knowledge refers to how information is
processed. Ideas about what is realistic and unrealistic, imaginable and
unimaginable are generated through cultural norms and conventions (“bi-
ases”). Such norms are rife with political-economic influences and implica-
tions. The paucity of dialectical thinking in mainstream Western thought is
but one important instance of culture shaping acceptable/unacceptable ways
of thinking. Poster is naïve in his claim that communication mediated elec-
tronically negates socially constructed modes of processing information. He
overlooks, for instance, the educational system and the requirements of em-
ployers in supporting particular ways of thinking and acting.

Technological Optimism and Pessimism
The same electronic technologies that Poster views to be prospectively liber-
ating, Innis would have considered oppressive and potentially deadly. Innis
declared:

Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nul-
lity in time. The present—real, insistent, complex, and treated as an independent
system, the foreshortening of practical prevision in the field of human action—
has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy. 62

For Innis, the application of prospectively liberating technologies tends to
produce tragic results. Addressing the bias enacted through the contemporary
mechanization of knowledge 63 and modernity’s pernicious neglect of time,
Innis would have argued that the Internet accelerates the peripheralization of
reflexive thought. For him, an exponential growth of information would not
be the formula for a self-reflexive civilization. Quite the opposite: “Enormous
improvements in communication,” observed Innis, “have made understand-
ing [i.e. reflexivity] more difficult.” 64 For Innis, the Internet would likely
have been just one of many structurally biased mediators shaping how time
and space are organized and conceptualized. In their annihilation of time and
space, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and complemen-
tary structures would have been viewed as quite disturbing.
However, Innis would have examined new electronic technologies not only
in relation to a complex of mediating dynamics. He would likely have viewed
the poststructuralist preoccupation with identity and meaning as itself a kind
of medium—an academic discourse perpetuating the modernist myth of