Public opinion for Innis is best defined by the great pains he took to make it known that his own ideas about public opinion were, by definition, distorted: “since the student is so completely influenced by the phenomena he describes. Objectivity may be improved by considering (public opinion’s) development over a long time but even a description of this character must register the results of an astigma adjusted to present environment.” 1 This is the defining feature of public opinion: it is made up of individuals who are subject to bias.
Public opinion is at the foundation of government and changes in government, and so Innis wonders how balanced systems come about. He traces incredible histories, doing his best to shift through and stitch together unbelievable stretches of time, seeking an understanding of how public opinion becomes oriented toward balance, equality, and creativity or toward violent control. “As force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military of governments as well as to the most free and popular.”2
All states are related by the fact of their existence over time to some kind of acceptance of them by the public. So Innis questions the conditions of that acceptance.

In a section of “Innis, the Environment and New Media” entitled ‘Delusion’ Robert E. Babe quotes Innis in one of his most threatening modes: “the conditions of freedom of thought” Innis says “are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology, and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, Western Civilization.” 3 In a monopoly of knowledge an idea is articulated to a media, spreads quickly, and obfuscates the reality of limitations and violent contradictions in the present. According to Phillip Massolin “Monopolies of knowledge were, for Innis, institutionally sponsored manifestations of partial truths and tainted information, products of a world concerned with short-term objectives such as winning military battles and solving economic problems.4” The conditions of freedom of thought are endangered by monopoly of knowledge formations.

A monopoly of knowledge is a shape public opinion can take. It is a psychological framework, an ordering of public opinion, that increasingly justifies a material reality that benefits a small section of society. When a monopoly of knowledge is made with, and vastly disseminated by, centralized media, then the danger for civilization is exponentially increased: “one-sidedness seems to lead to monopoly and to general corruption and bureaucracy to the point that it is eventually burned out … The problem seems to be that of working out a sustained attack on the factors responsible for the one-sidedness”5 .

The question Innis asks in “The Crisis in Public Opinion” is: how do we build complex systems that include the great clamoring ‘us’ with all our different opinions? How do we design a knowledge-building, opinion-registering system that will compensate for bias? Innis implies that this sharing of perspective from different places in what Doreen Massey will come to call the “power geometry6” will allow us to compensate for one another’s blind spots, or astigmas, over time.