Media theory pioneer Harold Innis saw it 70 years ago:
Some cultures and ideas are built to spread across SPACE.
And some spread across TIME.
It’s the tension between space and time that lead to the rise and fall of societies and cultures, and they’re worth understanding.
Clay tablets, household traditions and local governments persist over time. But they don’t travel widely.
On the other hand, newspapers, radio broadcasts and memes are ephemeral. They’re fast, they go wide, and then they often fade away.
The Greeks were an early culture that used both, which Innis argues is part of their longevity. And the Bible and Quran are books (time based) that were propelled by cultural forces to also be space based.
As you’ve probably guessed, TikTok is the speedball of moving ideas across space. The ideas are often as long-lasting as a hot pizza, but they can reach millions.
Innis would argue that many of the dislocations and painful collisions of modern culture are being caused by the abrupt shift to space-focused ideas. We’re starting on a second generation of people, worldwide, who are day trading their emotions and confronting ideas that have no past and little future.
Systems under stress expose themselves, and when you feel the stress, it’s worth looking for the juxtapositions that are causing it. In this case, it’s worth asking whether the idea that’s changing things was built to last or built to spread.
And what about the biggest shift of our lifetime–how does AI fit into this? Does a platform like Claude deal in time or space?
Claude and I discussed it, and my theory (Claude is giving me full credit) is an LLM of this sort is not a communications medium at all. There’s no way for a human to put a new idea directly into it and no way to send that message to another human. Instead, my take is that Claude brings us everything it knows, and that its function is to help us go within, not across.
This gives people a different sort of agency than the manipulative algorithms at TikTok or the manipulated ones on social media platforms.
Innis (like Doctorow) was very clear about the perils of media monopoly. If a communications medium has a middleman, that middleman will seek to create short-term profit, often at the expense of the users of the system. The phone company doesn’t care what you say on the phone, but modern media platforms are optimized to push the ideas that will spread to spread, regardless of their cost to the rest of us.
We’ve been indoctrinated from a young age to avoid agency, even in our media consumption. To wait and accept the next idea when it arrives. To not change the channel, to go to the big movie of the moment, to listen to the top 40, to parrot the talking points of the boss.
And now, perhaps for just a brief moment, there’s a chance to take back agency and go within.
The self-publishing revolution gave everyone a chance to write a blog, publish a book or record a song. A few took advantage of this to build ideas optimized to go across space or time. Most people, though, sank back into long-trained rhythms and simply became consumers instead, sheep with more grass.
I’m not sure how many more moments of maximum agency will present themselves, but right now we have a rare chance to go within, to discover and connect and lead, and then to publish. To publish not just across space for the quick hit of a like or a view, but for the long-haul benefit of changing our culture over time.
[Thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for introducing me to Harold Innis. All errors are mine.]
