Active primarily from the 1930s to the 1970s, the so-called Toronto School of Communication Theory was instrumental in drawing worldwide attention to the provocative idea that technological engagement plays a fundamental role in the structuring of human perception and culture.
The very development of communication and media studies as academic disciplines owes much to the formative Toronto School scholars Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan. Moreover, the diverse intellectual lenses afforded by the ‘Toronto thought’ has attracted a great many thinkers, both domestic and international, active in a wide variety of pursuits both academic and otherwise. Such thinkers include: Edmund Carpenter, Tom Easterbrook, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Carl Williams, Dorothy Lee, Walter J. Ong, Sigfried Giedion, Ray Birdwhistell, Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, Glenn Gould, Jane Jacobs, and Buckminster Fuller.
The mosaic of methodologies employed by the Toronto School reflects the eclectic diversity of the wider cultural impact of the core intellectual movement.
First described in the 1980s as a canonized ‘school’ of thought, the Toronto School might be conceived as an ‘invisible college’, a shared intellectual and creative approach which has gone beyond academia to have a lasting impact in art and culture.
With Innis entering the study of communication from the field of political economy, Havelock from classics, and McLuhan and Frye from literary studies, the Toronto School represents an approach to the topic of culture and technology practiced by a diverse range of scholars from across the humanities.
