Konstantin Vekua
Associate Professor
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Georgian International University, Georgia
konstantine.vekua@giu.edu.ge

Abstract

Toronto School of Communication Theory is not only a success story but also a vision and practice of creating and building the country’s intellectual future. For decades, scholars at Canada’s leading university have contributed to their homeland’s original development, choosing the paradigm of orientation between economy and history, different from the development paths of the United States and Europe. Finding one’s niche in the world of ideas and innovations is a result of the need to overcome the challenges faced by society. For this purpose, collective intellect is one of the efficient tools that the illustrious representatives of the School of Communication Theory in Toronto offer. Multidisciplinarity, as a working method, has profoundly influenced the evolution of the concept of communication in the university environment, which contributed to the growth of contemporary political thought (and not only) in Canada and abroad.

Keywords: Communication Theory, Toronto School of Communication, Collective Intelligence, Communication, Medium.

The Toronto School of Communication Theory is an academic-intellectual reality that plays an important role in laying the foundations of a modern and highly developed Canadian state.

In the 30s of the XX century, Canada, like its largest city, Toronto, was a cultural and industrial periphery compared to England and the United States, which wanted to become a superpower. Stretching over a vast area, the newly formed state was rich in a variety of raw materials, supplying the world market, especially the US and the UK. As early as the nineteenth century, the process of connecting its sparse population and periphery to the center took on an intense form, marked by the accelerated construction of roads, bridges, canals, railways, and telegraphs. In the twentieth century, Canada was one of the pioneers in the field of television and radio broadcasting^[1]. The development of a strong infrastructure system was of great importance for the advancement of a state rich in natural resources, and the establishment of new media was crucial for the more productive management of vast territories. Especially, after the construction of the Trans-Canada telephone system was completed in 1932, when the opposite land frontiers of the country, located on the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, were connected for the first time.

 Such development of infrastructure and communication systems could not but leave its mark on the life of the country. The Canadian intellectual elite was faced with two choices: either to come under the influence of a powerful neighbor (USA) or to develop and achieve its independence in the key areas of public and social life. In parallel with their academic careers, several prominent Canadian researchers have themselves been involved in the country’s socio-economic and cultural advancement and sought to promote it from being a simple supplier of raw materials to the world market to a more profitable position, to make the country’s economy more autonomous. In particular, it was necessary to change and develop Canadian products and markets on their own, as well as to completely transform the political vision. From now on, the focus of Canadian political economy research is not on the extraction and transportation of natural resources or on studying the political and social network associated with them, but on the transition from raw material theory to communication theory, which mainly focuses on generating and communicating knowledge and ideas directly^[2]. If earlier Canada was associated with the prevalence of minerals over the human factor, from now on the country itself would have to redefine its history and its way of life, and resolve this issue with prudent immigration. From now on, minerals did not occupy a central place in the country’s life, rather the importance of their cultural use increased. Consequently, instead of economic history, a communicative approach to the economic and cultural issues of the country was prioritized^[3].

The University of Toronto and the academic community gathered there became one of the main centers of this process. The major part of this community was critical of the influence of modern European, and especially, growing American information empires. The development of this topic of communication, along with the complex approach to exploring it, became the main direction of the Toronto School of Communication, and it marked a significant turning point in the consciousness of the Canadian intellectual community. Research of the professors from different fields (Literature, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Archeology, Philosophy, Urbanism, Psychology, Physics, Economics, etc.) were grouped around a single discourse and relevant intensive collaboration began among the scholars, as well as among them and students. We should note a significant nuance that the daily dialogue process of teaching and collaboration carried out at the Toronto School of Communication was epistemological from the outset.^[4]

A completely logical continuation was the fact that, despite the limited resources of the University of Toronto at the time, it was possible to create an intellectual climate that created an excellent trend. If informational development in the U.S. was predominantly military-industrial and financial, Canadian technological nationalism was cultural from the outset. Years later, Canadian political scientist Arthur Kroker will say:

“The Canadian discourse was neither American nor European. But quite the opposite, intermediate between economics and history”^[5].

Together with the development of the media, all of this was the foremost and the most significant factor in the formation of the Toronto School of Communication. It originated as a school of thought. The main direction of its founders and prominent representatives was the study of the influence of media technologies, the process, and results of this influence on the formation of personality, society, and culture; Although the Toronto School was originally an informal institution, in the field of media and communication it gained such huge worldwide reputation that its importance was in no way inferior to that of the Frankfurt school or the school established by the followers of Freud^[6]. While well-known figures at the University of Chicago, such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Robert E. Park, were yet starting to explain the importance of communication and the prominent representatives of the Frankfurt Critical School gathered in New York were busy clarifying the institutional and cultural essence of the media, Toronto academic community was giving communication a central role in the development of history and civilization^[7]. The school’s interest in studying the impact of social, economic, and cultural change on cognitive outcomes and personality was much broader and more multifaceted than the narrow, short-term, and computational observations of empirical nature conducted by Columbia University in New York^[8].

The term “Toronto School” was coined by Jack Goody, a British social anthropologist, and then it was Donald F. Theall, a Canadian multidisciplinary literary and communications scholar, who first mentioned the Toronto School of Communication when he gave a lecture at the UNESCO Symposium dedicated to Marshall McLuhan in Paris in 1983. The model created by the greatest Scholars of Canada’s most important university, after some revision at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries is still relevant today; by its very nature, it is more perceptive than conceptual^[9] and consequently, because of the massive spread of the latest technologies or innovations, its practical importance increases.

The development of the Toronto Communication School was significantly influenced by the Cold War factor. In 1954, an agreement was reached between the governments of the U.S. and Canada to establish the “Distant Early Warning” (DEW) Line, aimed at the timely detection of a possible nuclear attack by the Soviet Empire. In response, the embodiment of the country’s growing cultural, technological, and economic independence was the fact that, after Moscow and Washington, official Ottawa was the third political entity to launch its satellite into space in 1962.

In addition, we should note one more factor contributing to the advancement of the Toronto School: the university’s strong aspirations for political and fiscal autonomy, both domestically and with international donors.

Eric Havelock, a well-known scholar of ancient culture, and Harold Innis, one of the most important political economists of the twentieth century, and a scholar of communication theory, were those legendary figures who gave origin to the Toronto School of Communications tradition. They were its first generation.

Havelock was the first to begin a fundamental study of the historical process of the transition from oral to written communication form in ancient Greece. Hence, the idea of ​​a medium (typical to the ancient world – clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, and in the post-industrial age – radio, television, and internet) as a means of communication.

Innis went on to expand the scope of research on the influence of communication technologies on the social organization forms, scientific revolutions, the rise and fall of empires (the role of radio first in the British Empire and later, within the US itself), of the relationship between media and time-space. It was no coincidence that due to the past interests of the Canadian political economist, his first fundamental research was on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). According to him, effective communication was how huge areas were managed; the papyrus spread from Egypt proved to be the best medium for the centralized rule of the Roman Empire, i.e. papyrus was categorized as a means of spatial control, whereas a more durable parchment was characteristic to the Middle Ages. Consequently, the latter was deemed as a religious medium exercising control over time. Hence the centralized nature of the space-controlling medium and the decentralized mode of action of the time-controlling medium. Modern empires used a variety of mediums of both kinds to dominate civilization^[10].

The attitude of this Canadian intellectual towards the categories of time and space differed from the interpretations of the same categories of the Chicago School: the idea of progress and future orientation was a priority for the latter. Whereas for Innis, of paramount importance was not the idea of ​​progress, but the balance between the media of time and space, historical memory and consciousness, tradition, sustainability, and history as a living experience in the present. The academic interest of the Canadian political economist was directed towards the past to promote development that is even more productive and advancement in the future.

In Innis’s worldview, communication technologies are an external manifestation of the mind and matter. Social constructivist, a Canadian political economist believes that technological change is shaped by the choices and strategies adopted by society itself; The society itself decides how to adapt written language to the oral tradition, to use media with spatial characteristics more often than media spread in time or vice versa. In this respect, technology itself is not the answer but is used as a medium with a strong impact on culture and society, and their development.

Along with the study of the influence of media technologies, the importance of communication itself was determined at the Toronto School of Communication, where it was noted that the impact of communication on civilizations led to changes in the forms of communication themselves and the resulting significant consequences. After economic schools recognized communication over money as a major factor in the advancement of humankind, based on the study of a huge number of sources, Innis concluded that the key to world history was to study the stages of communication development. Canadian history has also been viewed in this prism. In his study of the development of civilization, Innis relied on the studies of Alfred Kroeber, according to which the cultural development of humankind was determined by philosophy, science, literature, and the fine arts. The Canadian scientist adds communication to these factors as a meta-category that not only triggers change and accelerates it, but also takes the whole process to an important stage^[11]. Thus, the influence of Hegelian historicism is observed in Innis’s approach, where we move from the reflexive perception of history to the philosophical perception of history, where the former is the material for the creation of the latter. Harold himself has repeatedly called himself a philosopher of history.

Innis applied the dialectical approach to the relations between the media of temporal-spatial nature, as well as within the medium itself and the medium-cultural environment. If in Marxism there is a dialectical connection between the forces of production and the relations of production, the Canadian political economist follows the same scheme in the field of communication and media technologies. For Innis, too, the world chronicle is dialectical and is defined by categories focused on expansion in time or space, where at some point in history this or that society may belong to one or the other pole. At crucial moments, however, a conflict arises between these extremes^[12]. Society must find the golden means to lay the ground for balanced development through harmonious interactions between media technologies. However, it should be noted that Innis prefers knowledge sustainable in time^[13].

In addition, the concept of “monopoly on knowledge” belongs to Innis, according to which the spread and domination of this or that medium are accompanied by the formation of a narrow class of experts on its use, and the nature of the medium itself will determine its form of environmental impact. The advent of writing in the archaic period led to the emergence of the foundations of technocratic rule, with the resulting bureaucracy largely composed of writers and oracles. It is to this long period that the genesis of state institutions and nationalism belongs.

Despite the effectiveness of the media in overcoming temporal and spatial obstacles, Innis was still pessimistic about them. Seeing the manipulation of communication technologies by powerful groups in the neighboring superstate and forms of influence on society through them, he believed that the ruling industrial and financial circles of the United States were trying to extend their dominion with the centralized or decentralized means of control over time and space and expand monopoly on knowledge.

Harold Innis feared that Western monopolies would lead to a stalemate in both Canada and Western civilization in general, which could be deadly due to its spatial spread. The antagonism between the two great empires of the twentieth century and the Cold War were clear examples of this. Experimental science also flourished most in the military field, increasing the threat of the end of history.

By giving preference to the categories, which are constant in time, Innis’s research was kind of an alarm bell and call for civilization vigilance, which became relevant once again after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the financial symbol of space domination, the World Trade Center, was destroyed by continuing, but distorted religious tradition. This cataclysm draws a parallel between the destruction of the Twin Towers and the tower of Babel. The message of both buildings was:

“The whole earth is made up of one language and one kind of words.”^[14]

The result of their destruction was that individuals and people did not understand each other and lived according to their families, languages, and countries. The main warning and call of Innis was and remains to find a balance between the consciousnesses, characteristic of time and space, which will give the preconditions for stable development to human consciousnesses, types of communication, and societies.

According to scholars, Innis’s work lacks a well-established system, which at the time has led to few followers and numerous critics of his observations. Menahem Blondheim notes that if Innis was able to convey the intensity of involvement in working with the text, he failed to do so with an explanation of working with the text. Environmental and technical changes of the later period have been named as the reason for this^[15]. This is understandable in the context of media technologies and media that were contemporary with Innis. However, the interests of this Canadian scholar were so multifaceted that even today, they have not lost their importance, and it is this fragmentation that leads to an increase in attention to his thought, which allows research to be continued and interpreted in modern conditions^[16]. Consequently, working on Innis texts and formulating certain theories from there is still a hermeneutic process for any scholar interested in his work.

An attempt by Xiaoquan Zhao, an American scholar of Chinese descent at George Mason University, to use the tradition of the Toronto School of Communication to study the Internet as the most modern and complete medium to date, provides a new revision of Innis’s concepts, according to which Internet:

1. Is a medium in itself, because it also has physical characteristics and consists of cables, servers, etc. At the same time, spatial characteristics are surmounted through the Internet, as communication, the transfer of knowledge and information over long distances is maximally accelerated. The development of the Internet provides the preconditions for overcoming the pessimism of Innis caused by TV media, belonging to the spatial category, which is intended as a means of liberation from mechanized and linear time in the industrialized Western civilization.

2. The internet as a medium is connected with other media as well. Even though the greatest medium of modernity is still television, the global communication network encompasses television, telephone, movies, newspapers, literature, postal correspondence, and so on. Consequently, it has all the conditions to become a universal media one day that harmoniously blends both time and space media into its bosom. According to Xiaoquan Zhao, when this happens, impact and coordination media technologies will combine to form a unified media environment. This in turn will lead to fundamental changes in society – more engagement that is civic, freer time, destruction of monopoly over knowledge and greater access to information, more public control over it, and so on.

3. With the connection of the Internet to society, culture increases its interactive nature because, unlike TV media, it is not a means of only one-way transmission of information. Everyone can participate in increasing knowledge. In the developed Internet environment, the basis for the growing role of oral communication (which was so highly valued by Innis^[17]) is created, where instead of knowledge monopolies, there is a “multi-polarization” of knowledge and hence the spread of collective memory. That is why the sense of time, tradition, unity, and spirituality was of great importance to the peoples of oral culture^[18].

From the late 1940s, the Toronto School of Communication was followed by the following generation of scholarchs[19]: the famous Canadian philosopher and sociologist of communication theory – Marshall McLuhan, an important American anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, and widely recognized Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. They began their work with a more optimistic approach to media and communication technologies.

If the studies of Herold Innis’s time were more about social organization and civilization, the interest of his follower McLuhan was mainly concentrated around the psycho-physiological influence and interdependence of the means of communication on the individual. Unlike the founders of the Toronto School of Communication, the direction of McLuhan-Carpenter’s scientific work was primarily cultural. In 1952, at the University of Toronto, with funding from the Ford Foundation, they began an intensive course of lectures and seminars in culture and communication. These two new scholars from the Toronto School of Communication believed that this Canadian city was a convenient, “cultural island”; It would have been better to observe and research the most important information revolution of modern times, which spread itself like a huge “continent” before Toronto’s then still cozy but dynamic academic environment. For McLuhan, a turning point of similar resonance was the launch of a satellite into space in 1957 by the former Soviet Union. The official culmination of this scientific activity was the establishment of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in 1963 and the launch of the McLuhan program there.

Based on the study of primitive societies, Carpenter concluded that the creation of the environment itself, which was conditioned by the use of this or that media, was no less important factor along with the time-spatial aspect of the influence of the media on society. At the same time, based on the Oxbridge tradition and adoption of the worldwide scale by the English language, he believed that the language itself was a medium and that, from a given point of view, all languages ​​were mass media. According to this view, film, radio, and television are new languages.

Marshall McLuhan extended Eric Havelock’s thesis on the influence of the process of the coherent development of the means of communication on the change of oral culture in the ancient Greek world to the written one, which he tailored to the study of the main medium of the Roman period (papyrus), as well as the forms of communication of the later epochs (medieval parchment paper, Gutenberg’s Printing Revolution, the role of the radio in the New Age)^[20]. Considering the anthropological advances of his colleague Edmund Carpenter, regarding the language as the medium, McLuhan, having excellent literary knowledge, uses the methods of the trivium disciplines (grammar, logic/dialectics, and rhetoric) and forms the discourse that every medium has its grammar and that each medium works as a language. Therefore, different means of communication may have different effects on the human psycho-physiological structure, formation of values, giving different forms of perception, and various degrees of information clarity.

Both Innis and McLuhan paid great attention to the study of pre-technological mediums such as voice and gesture. The language composed of them creates the possibility of primary mediation. The written civilization was preceded by a culture of oral communication. The latter was dominated by the word emanating from the mouth, which was the medium of the heart. After the printing revolution, the printed word, which expands the vision of the eye, is the medium of the mind. The former is characterized by the dominance of religion and tradition in society, the latter – by the spread of specialized, technical knowledge, state structures, and imperial set-up^[21].

Technological innovations enable the creation of an environment that ensures the strengthening of public memory and the fitness of consciousness. According to the Toronto School of Communication, a creative person realizes and generates the means of connecting his or her biological data and the world around him or her. Individuals, the society should have mastered the peculiarities of the mediums of the past and the present and should not allow the distortion of communication technologies or their use as the means of their manipulation. To do this, according to McLuhan, a media ecology must be developed, which is nothing more than a process of ensuring media interaction, transparency, and spontaneity, and not the process of expelling one another^[22].

The need for media ecology is even more evident in the studies of Cambridge^[23] and the University of Toronto over the past decade, which point out the effects of British colonialists’ attempts to establish their written language on the social and cultural life of the Indigenous people of northern Ghana, Lodaga^[24]. It represents the oppression of one media technology by another. In this way, the traditions of the local people were boxed into the frames of English law. Whereas, as the British officer noted, there were no criminal norms among the people of Lodaga, conflicts were resolved through public discussions, and despite the difficult process, all disputes ended with an agreement^[25]:

“The use of writing has resulted in a series of misrepresentations:… culture became ethnicity, paths became roads, memory became history, scarification patterns became clothes, Earth priests became chiefs, god became God, noumenal knowledge became political power, arrows became summonses, cowries became coins, speech became writing, actions became words, practices became rules, conjugal payments became blood, and women became wives only^[26].

Towards the end of his life, regarding media and communications, Marshall McLuhan also got close to Innis’s pessimistic attitude. Despite many positive possibilities, media outlets, if used unconsciously, can lead to extreme irrationality. Especially post-industrial media technologies that have a deeper impact on the human nervous system and are a means of power. If, on the one hand, the Internet provides a relatively greater degree of freedom of speech and access to information, on the other hand, in the hands of technocrats, it can become a powerful technology of control.

Northrop Frye’s contribution to the development of the Toronto School of Communication is significant. While still an academician, working at the same university as Harold Innis, he came to many independent conclusions that first brought him close and then made him a well-known Canadian literary critic, the supporter of Innis’s legacy. It can be said that Frye is more of a direct intellectual successor to Harold than Marshall McLuhan.

Fry also uses a dialectical method concerning the theory of reality based on cognition and perception. Perception theory is central to Frye’s work. It distinguishes between two types of perception of the world: objective and subjective. According to the former, the real world itself is central, where the object that has to be cognized, represents an independent reality; while according to the subjective worldview, the main role is attributed to a person, based on subjectivity, imagination, and myth. The analysis of these two visions leads to the concept of dialectical vision^[27]. In some respect, Frye views dialectics somewhat positively, as confrontation and stalemate can be one of the determinants of social progress and creativity^[28].

The development of radio in the West in the 1920s was met with hope, and in Canada, which made the greatest contribution to its creation; it was seen as a powerful means of national and international harmonious cooperation. There have been attempts to determine which should be the universal language for the radio: English, French, German, Latin, or Chinese. However, the most successful was the artificial language of Esperanto created at the end of the last century. Unfortunately, radio soon became the most powerful channel for controlling and propagating the masses^[29].

Unlike Innis and McLuhan, Frye was not only a theoretician but also a much more pragmatic figure. During his membership in the Canadian Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the norms established the basis of broadcasting regulatory principles of taste, morality, and compassion. To avoid the dangerous prospects of censorship, Frye viewed the regulation with suspicion but made some exceptions to avoid panic and violent discourse, while advocating its decentralization for greater effectiveness. A Canadian academic saw criticism and agreement as the guarantors of regulation; while the former included ongoing debates in magazines, newspapers, and parliament and the scholarly field represented a dimension of communication development; the latter provided a stimulating factor for dialogue, new ways of thinking, creativity and the interconnection of the creators themselves.

Regarding the regulatory principles of broadcasting developed with his colleagues Rod Chiasson and Andrè Martin, Frye highlighted the difference between publicly beneficial and anti-social motivations for the transmission of information:

“The reporting of the news is in the public interest, the creation of the news is against the public interest. Covering a student riot is in the public interest, but inciting the student riot in order to have a more interesting picture, is against the public interest”,^[30].

Fry clarifies the interpretation of the oral tradition so precious to Innis, where oral communication is seen as the dominant form of the distant past and not the product of modernity, and in the post-industrial age, its ascent can creatively revive the past into the present and expand the present.

The main task of media and communication is to support society and its development. They are interdependent. Communication is a major driver of culture and is needed to build community, identity, and unity. Culture has its strategy, the formulation of which is related to Innis. The latter sees its origins between the opposing trend and the media, where it emerges during the struggle between media technologies:

• The emergence of a creative and imaginative culture during inter-media conflicts;
• The laws of its internal contradictions;
• The objectivity of erudition and scientific knowledge developed within universities.

In a country far removed from Marxism and with an anarchist consciousness, such as Canada, one of the hallmarks of identity is a contemplative position that gives the impression of a seemingly passive state. However, according to Frye, this sign indicates wisdom, because it means standing at a certain distance, rather than being cut off. In this context, culture is more regional, local, and not globalist and arises not through analysis but through concrete actions.

In a communicative context, Frye distinguishes between community and mass. Where society stands on dialogue and focuses on identity, mobs are driven by violence and superficial perceptions. Both are types of groups and the media can influence the origin of both, but in the former, it focuses on the group’s identity, and in the latter – on panic and hatred. Frye cited the American youth movements and totalitarian countries as examples^[31].

It is also noteworthy that as communicative media outlets provide the conditions for creating an environment that influences emotions, values, and the nature of individuals’ perceptions, a hyper-reality emerges between us and reality. There is a danger that this simulation of reality will take the place of reality itself^[32]. In an age saturated with schemes and faces, the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard pointed out the dangers of hyper-reality. For him, the whole reality is viewed through the prism of the media, where the symbol takes precedence over reality; the economy becomes the imaginary space, politics – the game, and war – the media event^[33].

   The influence of the Toronto School of Communication has spread around the world. A new generation of its followers are still active today and have shown their worth in many fields. Even the whole movement of “McLuhanism” was created on the American continent. An active interest in the theory of communication of Canadian origin is taken in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Israel, and the Far East. Particularly noteworthy is the recent research on media and communication technologies, which highlights the importance of discussions, forums, and conferences on the pros and cons of the Internet. Through the World Wide Web, it became possible to connect to the sea of ​​information completely free of charge, or for a small fee, to democratize it, to replace paper with digital format (however, this useful process took place in Norway in the 60s and 70s of the XX century, where popularization of television caused the decline of the partisan press) with the Internet, which is thought to be the fastest and alternative way of creating an image and gaining popularity. Against the background of these trends, the weight of a knowledge-based active society has increased even more^[34].

Among the most prominent representatives of modernity being linked to the traditions of the Toronto School of Communication, are the following: Derrick de Kerckhove, Donald Till, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Neil Postman, Pierre Lèvy, and many others.

Bibliography:

1. Babe, Robert E (2000) – Toronto Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto
2. Baudrillard, J. (1988) – Selected Writings, ed. Poster, M, Polity Press, Cambridge
3. Blondheim M. (2003) – Harold Adams Innis and his “Bias of Communication”. In E. Katz, J.D. Peters, T. Liebes, & A. Orloff (Eds). Canonic texts in media research: Are there any? Should there be? How about these? (pp. 156-190). Cambridge: Polity
4. Blondheim M. (2007) – “The Significance of Communication” According to Harold Adams Innis. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 53-81).
5. Blondheim Menahem and Watson Rita (2007) – Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 7-26).
6. Frye, Northrop (1947) – Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press)
7. Frye, Northrop (1982) – Introduction to Dispersal and Concentration. In Harold Innis – Dispersal and Concentration: Historical Aspect of Communications, edited by Northrop Frye (Chairman) in association with R.B. Chiasson, Andrè Martin, and Mary Wilson. Unpublished. Copyright: Innis Communication Corporation.
8. Hawkins Sean (2002) – Writing and colonialism in Northern Ghana: The encounter between the LoDagaa and “the world on paper”. “Toronto: University of Toronto Press
9. Innis, Harold (2007) – Empire and Communications, Toronto: Dundurn Press
10. Innis, Harold (1951) – The Bias of Communications, Toronto: University of Toronto Press
11. Katz Elihu (2007) – The Toronto School and Communication Research. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 1-5).
12. Kerckhove, Derrick De – “McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication” in the Canadian Journal of Communication, 14, no. 4-5 (December 1989) 73-9

http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/533/439

1. Kroker, Arthur – Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1984
2. McLuhan Marshall (2004) – Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. (MIT Press),
3. Olson, David. R. (2007) – Whatever Happened to the Toronto School? In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 354-360).
4. Shade, Leslie Regan (Director of Doctoral Studies at the Institute of Communications, Culture and Information Technology/UTM) – The Tradition of Canadian Communication Theory

http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_pdf/smythe02.pdf

1. Siegel Arthur (2007) – Northrop Frye and the Toronto School of Communication Theory. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 114-144).
2. Theall, D. (1986) – McLuhan, Telematics and the Toronto School of Communication’, Canadian Journal of Political And Social Theory X (1-2)

http://imfpu.blogspot.ca/2011/03/toronto-school-of-communications-by.html

1. Xiaoquan Zhao (2007) – Revitalizing Time: An Innisian perspective on the Internet. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem (pp. 199-214).
2. Yi Xin, Tong – The Media and Our Understanding of the World: From Toronto School to Situationism. Asian Social Science, Vol. 4, No. 10, October 2008

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^[1] Siegel Arthur (2007) – Northrop Frye and the Toronto School of Communication Theory. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem), p. 114.

^[2] Blondheim Menahem and Watson Rita (2007) – Innis, McLuhan and the Toronto School. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem), p. 14

^[3] Northrop Frye (1982) – Introduction to Dispersal and Concentration. In Harold Innis – Dispersal and Concentration: Historical Aspect of Communications, edited by Northrop Frye (Chairman) in association with R.B. Chiasson, Andrè Martin and Mary Wilson. Unpublished. Copyright: Innis Communication Corporation. p. xxvi.

^[4] Ibid, p. 19.

^[5] “The Canadian discourse is neither the American way nor the European way, but an oppositional culture trapped midway between economy and history”. Kroker, Arthur (1984) – Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant. (Montreal, New World Perspectives), pp. 7-8

^[6] Kerckhove, Derrik De – “McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication” in the Canadian Journal of Communication, 14, no. 4-5 (December 1989). P. 78

http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/533/439

^[7] Katz Elihu (2007) – The Toronto School and Communication Research. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem) p. 1.

^[8] Blondheim Menahem and Watson Rita (2007) – Ibid, pp. 8-9

^[9] Theall, D. (1986) – McLuhan, Telematics and the Toronto School of Communication’, Canadian Journal of Political And Social Theory X (1-2), p. 2

http://imfpu.blogspot.ca/2011/03/toronto-school-of-communications-by.html

^[10] Innis, Harold (2007) – Empire and Communications, (Toronto: Dundurn Press), p. 26

^[11] Blondheim M. (2007) – “The Significance of Communication” According to Harold Adams Innis. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem). p. 67.

^[12] Xiaoquan Zhao (2007) – Revitalizing Time: An Innisian perspective on the Internet. In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem) pp. 202-203.

^[13] Innis, Harold (1951) – The Bias of Communications, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 33

^[14] Blondheim M. (2007) – Ibid, p. 81.

^[15] Blondheim M. (2003) – Harold Adams Innis and his “Bias of Communication”. In E. Katz, J.D. Peters, T. Liebes, & A. Orloff (Eds). Canonic texts in media research: Are there any? Should there be? How about these? (Cambridge: Polity), p. 178

^[16] Xiaoquan Zhao (2007) – Ibid, p. 201.

^[17] Innis, Harold (1951) – Ibid, pp. 6-12

^[18] Xiaoquan Zhao (2007) – Ibid, p. 212.

[19] A scholarch (Ancient Greek: σχολάρχης, scholarches) – The head of a school in ancient Greece.

^[20] Theall, D. (1986) –Ibid, p. 2

^[21] Blondheim Menahem and Watson Rita (2007) – Ibid, pp. 3, 10-11

^[22] McLuhan Marshall (2004) – Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, Foreword by Tom Wolfe. (MIT Press), p. 271

^[23] Olson, David. R. (2007) – Whatever Happened to the Toronto School? In Watson Rita, Blondheim Menahem (Eds) – The Toronto School of Communication Theory, (University of Toronto Press, The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem) p. 358.

^[24] Hawkins Sean (2002) – Writing and colonialism in Northern Ghana: The encounter between the LoDagaa and “the world on paper”. “Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 229

^[25] Ibid, p. 240

^[26] Ibid, pp. 323-324

^[27] Frye, Northrop (1947) – Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press), p. 38

^[28] Siegel Arthur (2007) – Ibid, p. 142.

^[29] Ibid, p. 124.

^[30] Ibid, pp. 133-135.

^[31] Ibid, pp. 130-131.

^[32] Yi Xin, Tong – The Media and Our Understanding of World: From Toronto School to Situationism, (Asian Social Science, Vol. 4, No. 10, October 2008), p. 51

^[33] Baudrillard, J. (1988) – Selected Writings, ed. Poster, M, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 119-148

^[34] Babe, Robert E (2000) – Toronto Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). p. 87