Did you ever stop to think about what we are leaving behind in the way of tangible communication? Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform on ancient clay tablets, the Rosetta Stone, and even Paleolithic cave paintings preserved information from past eons thanks to their rocky media. Today, however, we bombard each other with PowerPoint presentations, emails, text messages, and vlogs that live only in the electronic ether.

It seems only our past is worthy of imprinting on long-lasting material like monument stones. Why aren’t people chiseling Snoop Dogg lyrics onto bricks or blasting the word “McLovin” on the side of a quarry face?

If they knew about Harold Innis, they may start doing just that. Harold was a well-respected political economist from Toronto via the University of Chicago, who in the later, more cynical years of his life took a stab at mass media analysis. He probably hung around with people like Marshall McLuhan, drinking Latrobes, soul searching at Wrigley Field, and dreaming up fun titles for their dry books like The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Nevertheless, Harold made an interesting assumption: When communication is conveyed using durable materials like tablets of stone, they will be preserved over time and disseminated through an intimate if not respectful community that has access to view the information first hand. This is “time-biased” or “time-binding” media. Paper and electronic media, conversely, are light and fast, meant to be distributed over a larger community more quickly; this gives way to the theory of “space-biased” or “space-binding” media.

Harold went on to propose that space-biased media is the media that builds empires because the institutions of politics, religion, and commerce are influenced by the organization and vast distribution of information and hence create a social bias of the time-space continuum. In other galactic terms, time=no space, space-time=power, and power=a two-dollar hot dog at Wrigley Field.

What does this mean? I am not sure, but I think when something is written in stone, we trust it’s wiser than the moment in which it lives. We think it needs to be preserved in hard media, but it’s really only a sign for the times. Today, we let the legion electronic personal devices convey and capture every scrap of information so that everyone knows everything about anything. This numbs us to the authorities and institutions that bind us to their will. Depressed yet? Just wait…realize tombstones are a time-binding media, and make sure your epitaph inspires anyone who comes to visit. Oh, and don’t worry about launching empires.