2) Communication: History and Theory:

Defining Society:
● Society is the body of instruction and relationships within which people live.
● Society can also be an abstract term for the conditions in which such relationships are
formed
● Canadian society is comprised of cities, neighbourhoods, different levels of government,
systems of law, education, health care, transit, corporations, voluntary, not-for-profit,
and religious organizations…and media
● So media and communication technologies are part of – but also shape and influence –
Canadian society
○ Those Technologies itself are important in driving forward society

Defining Culture:
● Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
● defining culture has proven to be more complicated than defining society
● Raymond Williams: there have been three major meanings of culture outside of the
natural sciences
● There is an old English variant of the term culture drawn from an agricultural usage,
where it meant “the tendon of something, basically crops or animals”.
○ This notion of tending, growing, or developing was transferred to people so that
culture became thought of as developing one’s mind; in particular, “a general
process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development”
● “[Culture is] the best that has been thought and said in the world….”
○ –English cultural critic Matthew Arnold
● a question to which we will return later in the course is whether popular entertainment
and commercial media today can be considered “the best that has been thought and
said” by humankind

● Culture can be intellectual, artistic, or otherwise creative works and activities

○ Ex: symphonies, ballet, classic literature, and Shakespeare’s plays
○ these examples of high culture have often been contrasted with popular culture,
like television, film, and pop music
○ Folk culture represents yet another kind or dimension of culture and generally
refers to traditional or ethnic practices and arts, such as storytelling, singing,
carving, weaving, dance, and traditional costumes.
■ both high culture and popular culture have been contrasted with and
related to folk culture
 ● The third definition of culture has its roots in anthropology and is generally used to
indicate a “particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in
general”
○ i.e., morals, beliefs, laws, customs, tastes, etc. unique to a group or period of
history (but distinct from concept of society, which can have many cultures)

● Canada is one of the most geographically diverse and territorially expansive countries in
the world
○ regional differences between provinces and territories can be profound (e.g.,
tensions with prairie provinces, Quebec, First Nations communities)
○ media have often been tasked with the role of generating a common identity
and understanding across such differences
● this is why there have been so many government policies, regulations, and support
programs to ensure Canadian media reflect Canadian experiences and perspectives
○ concerns persist about foreign media influence and penetration of Canadian
markets, leading to Canadians knowing more about foreign countries and
histories than their own – especially American
○ e.g., surveys consistently suggest that many Canadians believe citizens have
Miranda rights (like the right to a lawyer during police questioning) when
Canadian courts have ruled otherwise
○ of course, Canadians believe they have these rights because they watch mostly
American legal dramas and crime procedurals
○ others suggest that exposure to U.S. media leads to debates that dominate
American politics (e.g., gun control) becoming hot-button issues here, too

Roles of Media:
● political role
● economic role
● individual role

The Political Role of Media:

● media, esp. news media and journalism, are vital for democratic political life
● serve to inform citizens about what issues they should be concerned with as well as
what positions they should take
● provide forum where individuals, groups, and parties can debate and argue in order to
convince fellow citizens
● Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarfeld: communication scholars who developed notion of two-
step flow of communication
○ theory that media don’t influence the public directly but rather indirectly,
through opinion leaders and experts
○ e.g., public interest and news programs like CBC’s At Issue or Power and Politics
that present knowledgeable talking heads

● Jurgen Habermas: celebrated German philosopher and social theorist

○ argued that the public sphere was integral to modern democracy
○ while the roles of well-functioning markets and governments are recognized for
their importance to democracy, the public sphere has not always been seen as
critical
■ during the democratic revolutions that brought us modern liberal
democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries, the public sphere was realized
in political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies, pubs, coffee houses,
and meeting halls
■ there, reformers and revolutionaries would gather to debate what
needed to be done to change society
● “The coffee houses present yet more singular and astounding
spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant
crowds are at the doors and windows, listening…to certain orators
who from chairs or tables harangue each his little audience…”
○ –Arthur Young, visiting Paris in July 1789, the year of the
French Revolution

■ today, spaces like city squares, parks, demonstrations or rallies in streets,

etc. allow citizens to confront and discuss matters of general concern
with one another
■ but Habermas and other critics worry that commercialization of public
spaces, and alienation of people in general, might spell the end of the
public sphere
● E.g., in many public spaces (pre-coronavirus), it is common to see
people staring at their phones, never interacting with one
another. Some smaller restaurants and coffee shops have toyed
with policies that prohibit the use of mobile devices during certain
times of the day (to promote a more lively atmosphere).
 ○ media, esp. news media and journalism, also helped to constitute the public
sphere
■ e.g., op-ed columns, letters to the editor, call-in segments on talk radio
shows – all provide opportunities for citizens to engage and discuss public
issues with one another
■ but growing concentration of ownership in the news industry may be
limiting range of opinions and views permissible in news publications
■ also, governments around the world (including liberal-democratic ones)
have increasingly sought to control public opinion and stifle discussion
■ Both in the U.S. and Canada, political representatives and governments at
different levels have expressed increasing hostility towards the news
media, in some cases refusing engagement altogether.
● E.g., in the U.S., President Donald Trump’s abrasive press
conferences, in which he has frequently clashed with reporters;
last year, here in Ontario, Premier Doug Ford was not taking
questions at all from reporters at some of his pressers.

○ some observers believe the Internet and social media may be reviving the public
sphere, allowing people to express and publicize their opinions in popular
forums
■ e.g., this is why Facebook articles and YouTube videos attract hundreds of
comments, and text-based platforms like Reddit and Twitter are popular
○ These “virtual public spheres” allow people to engage in the kinds of exchanges
that are no longer possible offline. Their popularity also attests to an appetite
from the public for dialogue and discourse.

The Economic Role of Media:

● media also play significant economic role as some of the largest industries and
businesses in the world
○ industries like newspapers, radio, and television generate huge revenues and
employ thousands of people
● perhaps more importantly, media are the larger purveyors of advertising; almost all of
the ads we are exposed to appear in mass media
○ in this way, media not only raise profile of businesses and governments, but
promote consumerism and consumer culture
● for these reasons, media – and esp. information communication technologies – have
been seen as vehicles of globalization
 ○ some argue that this is leading to emergence of an information society, where
production, distribution, and consumption of information are the defining
economic activity

The Individual Role of Media:

● media are important not just politically and economically but also for shaping our
desires, needs, interests, and identities
○ media like television and film contribute to how we see the world and ourselves,
and what we desire and want for both
○ Our understanding of our place in society—who we are, along with our likes,
dislikes, desires, fears, and loyalties—can be thought of as aspects of identity
● commercial media and advertising are particular important for identifying satisfaction of
our needs, desires, and interests with consumption in the market
○ Ex: This product will change my life
○ “What advertising does is create a worldview that is based upon cynicism,
dissatisfaction, and craving. Advertisers know full well that the more depressed
and anxious we feel, the more we will shop.”
■ – media critic Jean Kilbourne
● Raymond Williams: advertising is like “magic”
○ ads for products and services make fantastic claims about being able to
completely remake people’s lives, bodies, etc.

The Toronto School:

● Canadian scholars of media and communication who sought to understand how media
and communication technologies affected development of society
● Harold Innis: Canadian communication theorist who argued different communication
mediums have different biases that establish how societies function
○ media could either have a time bias or a space bias
● some forms of communication are designed to carry message through time (e.g., the
Paleolethic-era paintings on the walls of the Lascaux caves in France)
● some forms of communication are designed to carry messages through space (e.g., print
leaflets dropped by the British behind enemy lines to persuade German soldiers to
surrender during WWI)
● McLuhan: Canadian communication theorist who argued that to understand how
knowledge and culture are produced in our society, we need to consider the mediums
through which they are communicated
○ content of a message is less important than technology used to convey that
message
 ○ “The medium is the message.”
■ –Marshall McLuhan
● McLuhan: all new mediums of communication are just extensions of human being’s
natural physical and nervous systems
○ language extends our inner thoughts and feelings
○ the wheel extends our feet
○ the phone extends our voice
○ TV extends our eyes and ears
○ the computer extends our brains
● McLuhan: media can be characterized as either “hot” or “cold”
○ Hot Media:
■ rich in sensory perception (albeit usually in regards to just one sense),
leaving little to the imagination
● require little participation from the audience
● optimized for brief, intense experiences
○ e.g., a movie
○ Cold Media:
■ engage multiple senses (but provides less input or detail for each)
● requires audience’s active involvement and creative
interpretation
● lends itself to longer, more sustained experiences
● e.g., comic books or television (at the time)

● McLuhan believed media were becoming less “hot” and more “cold”
○ the Internet in many ways fulfilled McLuhan’s predictions as a “colder” medium
requiring more creative input and involvement – but also incorporates “hotter”
elements like high-definition video and sound

Media and Social Form:

● oral society
● literate society
● electronic society
● Both Innis and McLuhan believed that societies could be defined by the kinds of media
and communication they had available to them.
○ Sp whereas an economist might define a society as capitalist or socialist or
industrial or post-industrial, Innis and McLuhan believed that it could also be
categorized according to the dominant form of media and means of
communication.
Oral Societies:
● pre-literate societies depended upon oral communication and traditions
○ these were close-knit, interdependent communities that had to stay together to
preserve themselves and their ways of life
○ e.g., ancient Greece, indigenous societies, hunter-gatherer communities
● knowledge was maintained and preserved by certain members of society,
○ e.g., heads of family, religious authorities or community leaders
● led to reproduction of values and outlooks, over long periods, so oral communication
had time bias
● interruptions to intergenerational transmission of knowledge and tradition threatened
long-term existence
○ E.g., as the textbook notes, the tragedy and violence of the Canadian residential
school system, whereby First Nations children were removed from their families
and placed in residential schools, was precisely that it disrupted this temporal
reproduction of indigenous communities. “Removing the children from these
communities broke the chain of learning and, as a result, knowledge of
traditional languages and other cultural elements was severely weakened” (p.
45).

Literate Societies:
● rise of written forms of communication led to literate societies, e.g., Rome
● writing encouraged more clear, ordered, unambiguous, systematic forms of thought,
as well as more binding forms of law and obligation (after all, a written contract is
usually more demanding than a spoken agreement)
● As the textbook notes, an oral exchange or conversation with someone can be
“dialogical”: the interlocutors can respond to one another and change their ideas or
opinions as a result of their exchange. “One cannot question or reason with a written
text in the way one can with a living person” (p. 46).
○ There’s a reason I have to specify the course requirements in the syllabus at the
outset, rather than just telling you them orally.
● writing involved static representation of ideas (on paper or parchment, etc.), which
made it easier to compare those ideas with one another, as well as abstract from
individual cases to general rules or laws
○ led to more abstract ideas about universal citizenship and rights, and natural
law and justice that all human beings could claim, regardless of who or where
they were
 ● on the other hand, writing had less democratic implications as well: oral discourse
required at least two people to discuss and interpret
○ written communication imposed one “silent,” authoritative perspective upon
everyone
○ as such, literate societies tended to be more hierarchical and bureaucratized

● as medium of communication, writing has space bias because it made possible

recording, communication, and transport of messages across vast distances
○ Roman empire could not have been possible administratively without medium of
writing for its governance
○ Writing and the portability of texts led to a spatial bias in literate societies (e.g.,
they allowed the Roman Empire to expand significantly). The conveyance of laws
and rules to outposts of the empire from Rome required written forms of
communication that helped imperial administrators apply those laws and rules
uniformly to particular situations and individuals elsewhere; laws written down
on parchment could be brought from Rome to a conquered land and consulted
and applied there, with the same rigour as they were in Rome.

Electronic Society:
● emergence of electronic forms of (both written and oral) communication has extended
visual, aural, and other senses of individuals
○ people can now be aware of what is going on around the entire world and share
and exchange with others in real-time
● phones, email, social networking, video streaming, and other technologies (along with
means of travel) have virtually eliminated geographical distance between peoples
○ the world can now be seen as a “global village” that reproduces the intimacy of
the preindustrial town on an infinitely larger scale
● people on one side of the world experience goings-on from the other side as if they
were there themselves
○ leads to intensified sense of intimacy and connection across the world
● not only are electronic media leading to end of geography but also, increasingly, to
inter-group “eavesdropping”
○ e.g., former boundaries between generations and genders, adults and youth,
men and women, etc., are dissolving as each constituency is exposed to practices
and experiences once reserved for the other
● televisual media also encourage more performative style of representation where news
and information have to be dramatized and turned into spectacles
 ○ making it increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from image (as witness
popularity of satirical news shows and publications like The Daily Show and The
Onion)

● Henry Jenkins: the Internet and social media are producing a kind of “collective
intelligence”
○ pooling together the limited abilities and knowledge of thousands or even
millions of individuals to produce incredible resources like Wikipedia, Quora
answers, fan wikis, etc.
○ “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we we can
put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.”
■ - Henry Jenkins

● Innis and McLuhan’s ideas are often criticized as technological determinism

○ according to critics, these approaches overstate role of technology in shaping
society and history
■ e.g., China and Korea both had technologies of movable type long before
Europe but experienced no such radical transformations