Blog Post #2 - Marina Florencio

The movie Pontypool tells the story of a virus that is spread through language – more specifically, the virus is transmitted when one says English words that have been contaminated. The importance of this movie to CS400 is its depiction of language as a virus. Once someone gets infected by the virus, they repeat the (infected) word many times. Think about it, have you ever said a word so many times that the word lost its meaning? In Pontypool, that is what happens to people once infected – words lose their meanings and people start repeating these words over and over again, damaging their meaning more each time.   

Harold Innis argues about mediums of communication, particularly, time bias versus space bias of media forms. Here, one may say that the vector of infection of the language virus in Pontypool is an example of space bias. That is because language/communication can be easily transported through time and space. In this movie, the main characters interact with people through radio broadcasting. In doing so, they can reach a larger audience and spread more knowledge on the virus – this also illustrates how easily language can travel. Unlike time bias media forms, which are challenging to move (e.g., stone and clay), however, as Harold Innis states, time-based media tend to be more durable. 

The media forms in this movie (radio, telephone, and electronic amplification) exemplify orality/oral traditions. As stated by Professor Herman (2023), “ Through these practices [dialogue and story-telling] oral knowledge becomes a form of wisdom that is elastic, supple, and durable over time (even though speech is ephemeral).” Though Innis claims that oral cultures (ones that rely on speech) are primarily time-based, he explains how speech is ephemeral. In the case of the movie Pontypool, speech is mainly spread through the use of radio broadcasting and cell phones.