A Study On Harold Innis's Critical Thoughts Of Communication

As the American communication scholar E.M.Rogers said in the History of Communication Studies,anyone involved in a new river would like to know where the water came from and why it flowed like this.As the founder of the Toronto School,Harold Innis is also the important ideological founder of the Media Environment School.His historical position has risen and fallen over a long period of time.Today,with the highly developed information technology and the influence of the media,people's consciousness almost coexists with the media.With the development of time,the status of Innis' s communication thought,which is based on media technology and social concern,has been paid more and more attention by scholars at home and abroad.However,compared with his famous "imperialism" and "biased theory",Innis' s profound dissemination of critical thinking lacks due theoretical consideration and has not received enough attention.This paper attempts to describe a systematic and complete picture of Innis' s critical thought of communication and arouse people's attention to the value of his critical thought through three aspects: the background and ideological origin of his times,the composition of his critical thought content and the modernity of his critical thought.Firstly,in terms of the background and ideological origin of the times,Innis' s growth experience and learning path stimulated his interest in economy and communication.The wave of civilization research in the 20 th century inspired Innis to embark on the research path.In terms of ideological origin,Veblen and Marx's economic studies have exerted great influence on Innis in their research methods and key concepts.Dewey,Cooley and Parker of the Chicago School of Sociology laid the foundation of Innis' communication thoughts in terms of the social status of communication,pan-media theory and its functions,the relationship between communication and democratic politics,and Mumford's technical stages and texts.The anxiety about the imbalance of the Western world has become one of the main nourishments of Innis' s humanistic concern.Secondly,this paper divides the main body of Innis' s critical thought of communication into three parts: the theory of knowledge monopoly,the theory of media imperialism and the theory of crisis of Western civilization.In the theory of knowledge monopoly,Innis inspected the relationship between knowledge and power in the history of civilization development,revealed and criticized the monopoly and mechanization of knowledge and the loss of ideological status of universities;in the theory of media imperialism,with examples of newspapers and broadcasting,revealed the essence and internal causes of the expansion of media imperialism in the United States;in the theory of crisis of Western civilization,Innis faced the reality.The unbalance of social bias and the frequent occurrence of social problems call for a return to the state of "Nothing in Excess" in ancient Greece and the return of humanism,which sounds the alarm bell for Western civilization.Finally,Innis inherited the Chicago School's recognition of communicating social values and the influence of communicating on social progress,but at the same time,he stood in Canada's position and surpassed the Chicago School.Innis' s communicating thought was born to the contemporary communicating circles,especially Marshall McLuhan and Neil Pozman.It has a great impact,and today it has important practical significance.In macro,it can make people alert to hegemony in the era of digital capitalism,and in micro,it can prevent meaning from giving way and anxiety from overflowing.Of course,there are also obvious shortcomings in Inis' s communication thought: for example,the internal break of thought and the ambiguity of views,the nationalism tendency is more prominent.