SOURCE: "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," in The Antioch Review, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp. 5-39.

In the following essay, Carey compares Innis's theories of communication with those of Marshall McLuhan.

Commenting on the abstruse and controversial scholarship of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan is a rather audacious and perhaps impertinent undertaking. It is also a thankless task. McLuhan has often argued that the attempt to analyze, classify, and criticize scholarship—the intent of my paper—is not only illegitimate; it also represents the dead hand of an obsolete tradition of scholarship. I am sensitive to treading forbidden waters in this paper. But I am content to let history or something else be the judge of what is the proper or only method of scholarship, as I at least am uncomfortable pronouncing on such weighty matters.

Despite the dangers in scrutinizing the work of Innis and McLuhan...