The Bias Against Communication: On the Neglect and Non-publication of the "Incomplete and Unrevised Manuscript" of Harold Adams Innis

Abstract

Harold Adams Innis' "A History of Communications" has attained almost mythological status within his oeuvres, and is widely recognized as an important repository of his ideas. Yet the work (numbering some 2,400 pages) has never been published, and its significance for understanding Innis' scholarship has yet to be assessed. This paper examines why a number of efforts to publish the work met with failure, giving particular attention to a venture supported by the CRTC in 1969-70, as viewed through the eyes of Mary Quayle Innis and those advising her (particularly Northrup Frye, Donald Innis, and George Ferguson). The paper concludes with an overview of the manuscript's contents, along with some of the organizing principles that underpinned the empirical material that Innis presents. Such an exercise, I argue, is essential if one is to address whether the document merits publication in some form.