PhD thesis,
Pioneers in Communication: The Lives and Thought of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan
University of Toronto, Toronto, PhD Thesis, (1980)
Abstract
Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) and Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911- ), as encyclopedic weavers of perception, are the proper parents of Canadian intellectual history and communications study. Despite their respective specialized backgrounds in political economy and English literature, Innis and McLuhan approached the inter-disciplinary terra incognita of 'communications' during World War II and the immediate years which followed. Having chosen the antithetical academic traditions of Cambridge University humanities and the University of Chicago social sciences, the two thinkers first published contrary philosophies in The Dalhousie Review of 1936. More than a decade later the young Professor McLuhan was to request from Dean Innis a grant to cover publishing fees. By 1948 the two explorers were to converge upon each other and upon the same subject matter–advertising and newspapers–from differing political, academic, and religious views. Despite the infrequency of their discussion and correspondence, each man's thinking was significantly influenced by his colleague. A number of important Toronto academics joined Innis and McLuhan in the interdisciplinary 'Values Group' seminars of 1949. Following Innis' death in 1952, McLuhan uniquely treated Innis' major themes and interpolated a synthesis of other thinkers with his own topical perceptions. The boyhood backgrounds of Innis and McLuhan reveal striking similarities such as talented and industrious mothers and fundamentalists values. Yet the outstanding differences in age, disposition, experience, and method render these 'two men on a collision course' most unlikely co-creators. Innis' hidden tradition of dialectics, as opposed to McLuhan's chosen tradition of rhetorical grammar, posits the primacy of materialism, realism, and empiricism. McLuhan, conversely, must be understood within the tradition of spiritual, satirical, and oratorical aesthetics. The multi-disciplinary methodology of each man is unique. Nevertheless, there exists sufficient parallel between the two appoaches to speak of an Innis-McLuhan effect in popular thinking. The themes and appoaches common to Innis and McLuhan make possible a new understanding of specialized fields: Chapter Ten offers a streamlined model of how such a perspective might be applied to the study of drama and cinema. The underlying biases of Innis and McLuhan are part truth and part opinion. Men create technology and not technology men. Nevertheless, the staples thesis of Innis, transformed by McLuhan into 'the medium is the message,' has numerous valuable implications and applications. In Chapters One and Two, mere appetizers, the 'unknown' personalities of Innis and McLuhan as informal human beings behind their more formal images are introduced. In Chapters Three and Four, their formative years of training are placed within the larger context of Canadian cultural change and global technological transformation. The contributions of Innis and McLuhan to their fields of specialty are simplified in Chapters Four and Five. In Chapters Five and Six the actual Innis-McLuhan collision and the birth of communications studies are introduced while in Chapter Seven McLuhan's debt to Innis and independent development in the 1960's is explored. Chapter Eight is essentially a condensation of and commentary upon the thought of Harold Innis as is Chapter Nine a cataloging and clarifying of McLuhan's dominant probes. The summary chapter provides a scrutiny of the implications, applications, and veracity of each man's thought.
