Last Call from Harold Innis‪.‬

RICK SALUTIN, a novelist, playwright, and journalist, teaches culture and media each spring at the University of Toronto. His play, The Farmer's Revolt, is being remounted at Toronto's Theatre Passe-Muraille. He writes a weekly column for The Globe and Mail. In a time when communications media loom very large, and we get what seems to me pretty shabby, shallow interpretations of them, it is nice to go back to Harold Innis. He took a technological approach to the analysis of historical and economic issues, in part to supplement and counter the devotion to sheer statistics and what he called "accountancy," which seemed to dominate the profession even then. But it seems to me that Innis' interest in a technological form of explanation grew out of a deeper soil, intellectually and autobiographically. In the preface to his final book, The Bias of Communications, he says all of what follows is by way of a response to a question put by his professor of philosophy, James Ten Brooke, when Innis himself was an undergraduate. The question was, "Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?"