ABSTRACT
Harold Innis (1951), whose sage views on communication and culture we have already encountered in our grand tour, observed in a pre-computer age that media tend to extend communication either across space or time, but rarely both in equal balance. Thus, paintings on cave walls and hieroglyphics on tombs convey their messages across millennia, but travel nowhere in space; they are classic time-extending media. In contrast, the alphabet on papyrus or paper, far easier to write on vehicles easily capable of transport, is a space-extending medium par excellence; but whether burned in the Library of Alexandria or subject simply to toll of decay, its earliest examples are long since gone. Of course, alphabetic media can be treated as time-extending devices, and accorded special care as they were until the introduction of the printing press. They can be hoarded and treasured and conserved for future generations, rather than disseminated to the world at large; but this was clearly an imposition of a human social order upon the medium, not something intrinsic to the medium itself.
