From the Annals of Science- a lost citation?

[jbridel1]

I'm pretty new to this, but has anyone considered Harold Innis' " A Plea For
Time" a paper that was presented to the University of New Brunswick in 1950.
In it, Innis forwards the notion that information mediums, and their
institutional masters, control time conceptions.  The more immediate the
medium, the more immediate the priorities of the society it works within.
The past is a programme on the History Channel and atrophes away, the
present  (day trading nowadays, or whatever) is everything. He contrasts
this with the priorities of older societies (Hellenistic, Byzantine as
examples) that viewed the maintenance of its institutions far more
importantly than the benefit of immediate society or the trends that arose
in it. He then relates this to the developments of new forms of media
(hieroglyphs, cuneform, papyrus, moveble type, pulp paper, radio etc..) and
how these have shortened the length of time it takes new information to be
delivered.

This can be found in Innis' work "The Bias of Communication", (Unversity of
Toronto Press, 1951)
Innis was a contemporaty of Marshal Macluhan ( love 'im or 'ate 'im) and saw
media progressions as conjoined to the progressions of the West.
----- Original Message -----
From: jporter <jp4321 at IDT.NET>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 11:50 PM
Subject: From the Annals of Science- a lost citation?


> This may be rather old hat for some p-listers, but it was new to me. In
> 1978, six years before Pynchon's luddite/C.P.Snow article appeared in the
> NYTBR, Daniel Simberloff- while Professor of Ecology at Florida State
> University, published in the journal: _Perspectives in Biology and
Medicine_
> an article entitled:
>
>     Entropy, Information, and Life: Biophysics in the Novels of Thomas
>   Pynchon
>
> The article begins:
>
>     "In 1959 C.P. Snow wrote, 'A good many times I have been present at
> gatherings of people who... are thought highly educated and who have...
been
> expressing their incredulity at the illliteracy of scientists. Once or
twice
> I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could
> describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was
> also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scienctific
> equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'  Even if Snow's
> efforts left the gulf separating scientist from humanist intact, Thomas
> Pynchon's novels- V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow- have
> informed a later generation of some elementary thermodynamics. This paper
> shows that Pynchon's work develops a complex biophysical metaphor which
> originates in the relationship between thermodynamics and information and
> proceeds to incorporate the thermodynamics of life."
>
> And, the article goes on to do just that. It's fascinating not only in
that
> respect, however, but also because of the reference to Snow's "Two
Cultures
> and the Scientific Revolution" article six years prior to the publication
of
> "Is It O.K. to be a Luddite," while at the same time specifically linking
it
> to the works of Thomas Pynchon.
>