A Commonplace Book

With information flooding in from near and far, people were falling victim to "present-mindedness." They were so busy consuming new information that they had no time to step back and view the information in a broad historical and cultural context. Overwhelmed by immediate concerns and diversions, they shunned the hard, slow work of interpretation.

The rapid commercialization of communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the attendant expansion of media into telecommunications and broadcasting, exacerbated the problem. In seeking a return on large capital investments, the companies building and operating media empires -- in television, radio, and publishing -- had a strong financial incentive to keep their customers in the flux of the new. Slowing down the mind, broadening a person's view beyond the moment, was bad for business. As Innis wrote in Changing Concepts of Time, his last book, he feared that large media companies were becoming "monopolies of communication" engaged in "a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."