Only knowledge that conformed to the concerns and cultural predisposi-tions of the dominant medium would persist. In a written tradition, knowledge must be technical, secular, and future-oriented for it to be defined as legitimate or recognized as valid

Innis wanted to know what, in general, determines the location of ultimate authority in a society and what will be recognizd as authori-tative knowledge. His answer was this: That media of communi-cation, depending on their bias, confer monopolies of authority and knowledge on the state, the technical order, and civil law or on religion, the sacred... See more

A stable society was possible only with the development of mechanisms that pre-served both temporal and spatial orientations, that preserved compe-tition between religion and the state, and that preserved independ-ence and tension between the moral and the technica