Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis Media, Power, and Democracy [Paperback]

Babe shows his scholarship especially as an Innis expert. An original, insightful and thought provoking book on the roots of communications studies by an established scholar. The linking of Noam Chomsky and Harold Innis is a fascinating and rewarding book within a book. Lucid and perceptive. Robert Babe's latest book is a tour de force; it provides a complex, original, and highly readable comparison of three giants of communication in North America. Babe makes a powerful case that Innis has been insufficiently understood or appreciated, and that his work provides indispensable resources for understanding the digital revolution. This is mandatory reading for communication students and scholars. By comparing the scholarship of both Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky with that of Harold Innis, and by making detailed use of Inniss neglected writings, including particularly Political Economy in the Modern State, Inniss media and communication scholarship is unfolded in new, startling, critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways.Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis is an original, critical, in-depth analysis of the media and communication thought of Canadas most highly acclaimed scholar, Harold Adams Innis. Even in Canada, however, Inniss writings until now have been only partially cited and interpreted: Innis is usually stereotyped as being merely an economic historian fixated on previous civilizations, whereas in fact he was an astute analyst whose main concerns were with present problems and future trajectories. In the United States, meanwhile, Inniss media and communication writings have been quite neglected and even denigrated.Drawing on Inniss less frequently cited work, including his long neglected Political Economy in the Modern State, Robert Babe opens up Inniss media scholarship as a whole, unfolding it in startling critical, yet ultimately appreciative ways. By comparing Inniss media scholarship with Wilbur Schramm's and Noam Chomsky's, moreolâ