ABSTRACT
This chapter considers media theory in the light of a support-bargaining and money-bargaining process carried on by reference to an information interface created as part of the same process. The influence of technology on output and the facility with which different technologies can be controlled by governments is not unique to media technology. In Harold Innis it is the characteristics of the media – papyrus, parchment, paper, print, radio – that determine the nature of a society. Supply characteristics of media such as papyrus and stone and the complexity of writing lent themselves to monopoly of information provision. The nature of media is more apparent in the context of the codification of ideas and their transmission in codified form than through temporal and spatial characteristics. Innis' central thesis is that media have either a time bias or a spatial bias, and the predominance of a medium of one type or the other has effects on the society concerned.
