Description: Exploring how social order changes as the means of communication change, this volume makes widely accessible, for the first time, three extant chapters from Harold Innis's History of Communications-a legendary manuscript known of by many media historians, but seen by very few.
Brief description:
PAUL HEYER is Associate Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Review Quotes: This is a very lightly edited version of three chapters of Harold Innis's vast, unpublished, fact-packed manuscript on the history of communications. Innis (1894-1952) was a major 20th-century economic historian, known for his 'staple theory' of Canadian economic development. Fewer people know that in the last decade of his life, he pursued a study of the history of the pulp-and-paper industry that involved researching the history of humankind's communication activities back to ancient times. Materials (paper), technologies (printing), and the effects of communication (advertising) on society are what interested him. Presented here are the 'Coming of Paper' and chapters on 15th- and 16th-century printing--work the editors thought would interest today's scholars of book history. The content represents material that is not well reflected in Innis's Empire and Communications (1950), The Bias of Communication (1951), and Changing Concepts of Time (1952). The editors are professors of communication studies and economics in the US and Canada. Their added notes cover some of the work done since 1952 on the history of printed communications that is not reflected here. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty.