By Marcus Ray
When was the last time you read the newspaper or watched a television? Compare that now to the last time read an original manuscript. It’s probably been a long time if ever. Time-binding media has seen better days, and in the 21st century, it doesn’t even seem like there’s time to look back.
Harold Innis, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, was one of the first to argue that the Western world is in danger as it quickly loses grasp of the difference between time and space. Space-binding media is what has brought us to this position by quickly eliminating characteristics that communities need to thrive upon.
With thousands of mass produced books, magazines, newspapers, radio shows, and television programs to watch, we lose our sense of permanence. Tradition is at stake along with our entire sense of time. Innis states that the Western world is suffering from an “obsession with present-mindedness.”
There is a loss of cultural and communal balance as more new advertisements and ideas are quickly introduced to the world everyday. Advertising in the Western world simply doesn’t take traditional aspects of society serious. Space-binding brings into homes the ideas that would never be brought up a few decades ago. Television has been the leader of showing no remorse for women, religion, the elderly, homosexuals, and thats just to name a few.
Knowledge itself is a victim as everything is brief wherever you go. Magazines and newspapers are attempting to create brief articles including large pictures, so that people can read them on the go (People Magazine, Metro, and 24 Hours to name a few examples). Radio will never play long shows because they want to get the attention of the listener, who is usually headed somewhere in a car. Billboards show short, bold messages to try and capture our attention while we walk past. Everything I see on a regular day is lacking in something extremely important that few people realize on a daily basis. They lack knowledge, and the ability to give my brain something to work on. In today’s society thinking almost has to be forced upon us.
So because of space-binding media, we’re hanging on to what ‘was’ important by a thread. With culture, knowledge, and communities at risk in the quickening spawn of advertising and media, North America needs to stop for a minute and realize that we’ve gotten ourselves into.
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