Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis, McLuhan, and Grant

Overview
Arthur Kroker traces a distinct Canadian intellectual response to modern technology by placing Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant in conversation. The narrative follows how each thinker diagnoses the cultural consequences of communications technologies and the political economies that shape them. Kroker reads their ideas as complementary lenses for understanding how technological media rearrange power, time, and communal life.
The book moves beyond biographical sketches to connect theoretical insights with historical pressures: empire and commerce for Innis, sensory and structural changes for McLuhan, and moral-political decline for Grant. Kroker treats their concerns as a coherent national intellectual tradition that resists simplistic celebrations of progress and champions critique of a technologically driven modernity.

Central Arguments
Kroker foregrounds the claim that technology is never neutral; it reorganizes social relations and determines dominant forms of consciousness. Drawing on Innis, he emphasizes the political economy of media, arguing that media embody biases toward time or space that shape institutions and empire. From McLuhan, Kroker takes the notion that media are extensions of human faculties and thus reconfigure perception and social organization. Grant supplies the ethical and philosophical alarm, highlighting the spiritual and civic losses attendant on technological expansion and cultural dependency.
Together these strands form a critique of liberal-modern faith in progress. Kroker contends that the Canadian mind articulated by these thinkers remains acutely aware of how technical systems channel power and erode local autonomy. He insists that their warnings about cultural homogenization, bureaucratic centralization, and the numbing effects of mass communications retain urgent relevance.

Innis, McLuhan, and Grant Compared
Innis is cast as the structural analyst who links media technologies to economic and imperial formations; his ideas about "time-binding" and "space-binding" media illustrate how communication infrastructures privilege certain social orders. McLuhan is presented as the stylistic provocateur with an ear for sensory shifts, showing how the shift from print to electronic media reconstructs human experience and creates a "global village." Grant appears as the moral philosopher who mourns the loss of communal traditions and warns against technological servitude and the assimilation of Canadian identity into American technocratic culture.
Kroker highlights tensions between them: Innis's materialist institutionalism, McLuhan's media-focused phenomenology, and Grant's ethical conservatism do not always align, yet their converging anxieties about technological dominance produce a shared intellectual resistance. Kroker interprets the differences as productive, each thinker filling gaps left by the others in a broader critique.

Method and Style
The tone combines scholarly exegesis with polemical commentary. Kroker uses close readings of key texts, historical contextualization, and comparative synthesis to reveal recurring motifs and philosophical commitments. The writing is assertive and occasionally provocative, aimed at recovering the urgency of Canadian critique for contemporary debates about media, culture, and sovereignty.
Kroker also foregrounds interdisciplinary links, moving between political economy, media theory, and moral philosophy. This approach situates the three thinkers not as isolated eccentrics but as interlocutors whose ideas speak to emerging fields like media ecology and communication studies.

Relevance and Legacy
The account anticipates later concerns about globalization, digital media, and cultural imperialism. Kroker's reading underscores how technological infrastructures can undercut democratic deliberation and local autonomy, themes that resonate in debates about platform power, surveillance, and cultural homogenization. The synthesis of Innis, McLuhan, and Grant remains a resource for scholars interested in the political implications of communication technologies and in a tradition of Canadian critical thought.
By recuperating a national intellectual tradition attentive to technology's moral and political stakes, Kroker invites renewed reflection on how societies might contest technological directions and preserve spaces for civic and cultural difference.