V Series Recommendations: Standards for Data Communications over the Telephone Network Book

Innis writes socio-economic historiography like Hemingway fiction. Sentences are spartan in the book's main sections while footnotes and appended scribblings vy for the position of shortest syntactically incomplete semantic units. Comes with a downright silly bibliography -- a roughly estimated average of four works cited per page. Sometimes obtuse (which has mostly to do with syntax, in some cases with terminology) and always dispassionate (an attitude McLuhan in the foreword calls "a lack of a fixed point of view; ie a mosaic approach" (speaking of which, the later chapters of the book feel very familiar to any reader of McLuhan's and show clearly where the latter got his self-admitted inspiration)). Innis casts a rock in the historical pond by putting communication (technology) in the limelight and tracing its development throughout and influence on pivotal moments in human history (mostly limited to the ancient mediterranean cultures plus the west) and while even the more critical reader can't but be thankful for a recalibration taking into account historically underlit elements, one can't help but wonder if tackling such a huge subject (ie the evolution of human society starting from Mesopotamia all the way to the early Cold War) with such an obsessive lens (namely, comm tech) isn't leaving any other angle -- potentially even móre important -- unseen.

Nevertheless, astounding in scope and erudition and frequently eye-opening in conclusions/interpretations (such as recasting the American civil war as essentially newspaper-driven, pointing to the lawyer class as a de facto synthesis of aristocracy and clergy and naming monopolies of knowledge, the intellectual chasms they irrevocably open w/r/t the public at large and mass culture as the biggest enemies of the West (or any culture, for that matter)), Empire and Communications is a challenging though potentially rewarding read, remaining for the most part totally accessible to amateurs such as myself.