Hardback : $280.00
Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canada’s most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Innis’s writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and future trajectories. In the United States, meanwhile, Innis’s media and communication writings have been quite neglected and even denigrated.
Drawing on Innis’s less frequently cited work, including his long neglected Political Economy in the Modern State, Robert Babe opens up Innis’s media scholarship as a whole, unfolding it in startling critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways. By comparing Innis’s media scholarship with Wilbur Schramm's and Noam Chomsky's, moreover, Babe tests the claims, positions, and modes of analysis not only of Innis, but also of the other two celebrated scholars as well, casting new light on their works and allowing the reader to imagine what sort of discourses might have been possible had the three been in conversation together. Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis provides comparative insight into foundational media scholarship in the United States and Canada, and explores in some detail the relevance of Innis for twenty-first century digitized society.
Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canada’s most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Innis’s writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and future trajectories. In the United States, meanwhile, Innis’s media and communication writings have been quite neglected and even denigrated.
Drawing on Innis’s less frequently cited work, including his long neglected Political Economy in the Modern State, Robert Babe opens up Innis’s media scholarship as a whole, unfolding it in startling critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways. By comparing Innis’s media scholarship with Wilbur Schramm's and Noam Chomsky's, moreover, Babe tests the claims, positions, and modes of analysis not only of Innis, but also of the other two celebrated scholars as well, casting new light on their works and allowing the reader to imagine what sort of discourses might have been possible had the three been in conversation together. Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis provides comparative insight into foundational media scholarship in the United States and Canada, and explores in some detail the relevance of Innis for twenty-first century digitized society.
I: Introducing Harold Innis
1 Foundations
2 Staples Thesis and Medium Theory
3 Time, Space, and Medium Theory
4 Political Economy, Medium Theory, and Existentialism
5 Media and Scholarship
6 Media and Public Opinion
II: Wilbur Schramm Meets Innis
7 Beginnings
8 Media Process and Effects
9 Media History, Education, Free Press, Democracy
III: Chomsky and Innis Meet
10 Meet Noam Chomsky
11 Visions and Strategies
12 Propaganda and Democracy
IV: Conclusion
13 Innis and the Network Society
Robert E. Babe is professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario.
Babe shows his scholarship especially as an Innis expert.
*Communication Research Trends*
"An original, insightful and thought provoking book on the roots of
communications studies by an established scholar. The linking of
Noam Chomsky and Harold Innis is a fascinating and rewarding book
within a book."
*Mel Watkins, University of Toronto*
"Lucid and perceptive."
*Mary Innis Cates, Daughter of Harold Innis*
“Robert Babe's latest book is a tour de force; it provides a
complex, original, and highly readable comparison of three giants
of communication in North America. Babe makes a powerful case that
Innis has been insufficiently understood or appreciated, and that
his work provides indispensable resources for understanding the
digital revolution. This is mandatory reading for communication
students and scholars."
*Robert McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign*
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