Page 91 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

80 Chapter Two

category, amplificatory, bears on communication over space, and durative re-
lates to communication through time. On the other hand, Williams’ distinc-
tions were premised on whether media extend (through space or over time) di-
rect emanations of the message sender—his or her voice or image—or whether
the messages are worked upon or processed (coded) prior to transmission as
with writing and print, television news clips and interviews, feature films, and
so forth, thereby requiring specialized encoding and decoding skills such as lit-
eracy, photography, and media literacy. This distinction related, of course, to
Williams’ desire to increase democratic communication in the face of central-
ized control. The connections with Innis in this regard are closer than they
might at first seem. Innis wrote extensively on “monopolies of knowledge,”
aspects of which were special skills required for encoding and decoding mes-
sages. For example, in describing the biases of clay tablets and cuneiform
script as used in the civilization along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, Innis
drew attention to the monopolizing consequences of special skills:

Dependence on clay in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris involved a spe-
cial technique in writing and a special type of instrument, the reed stylus.
Cuneiform writing on clay involved an elaborate skill, intensive training, and
concentration of durable records. The temples with their priesthoods became the
centres of cities. A culture based on intensive training in writing rendered cen-
tralized control unstable and gave organized religion an enormous influence. 126

A similar point is made with regard to Chinese pictographs, a highly complex
symbol system consisting of tens of thousands of characters that necessitated
the emergence of “a learned class” that denigrated traditional knowledge.
Moreover, Williams and Innis were agreed that popular media (Williams) and
the vernacular (Innis) enable elites to connect with common people, and in our
day that means spreading the ideology of individualism/consumerism
(Williams) or present-mindedness (Innis). Both writers bemoaned tight concen-
tration of control over our contemporary media—for Williams because concen-
tration offsets the democratic potential inherent to widespread reception, and for
Innis because it reinforces the neglect of time and inhibits two-way interaction.
In addition, Williams and Innis were dialectical writers. The contradiction
or tension highlighted in Williams’ work was democracy vs. autocracy, or
some variant (such as working class culture vs. elite culture) while tensions
between centralization/decentralization, and hierarchy/leveling of authority
figured prominently in Innis’ writings. 127 Both writers, of course, were op-
posed to tyranny, and both saw unmitigated market forces as tyrannical. One
of the means of avoiding, or redressing, tyranny, Williams and Innis agreed,
was for elites to loosen their grip over the means of communication. For
Williams, that meant removing large portions of media from commercial con-