 In his final chapter, Harold Innis traces the rise of mass media beginning with the printing press in 15th century Europe and ending with mass circulation newspapers, magazines, books, movies and radio in the 19th and 20th centuries.He argues that such media gradually undermined the authority of religion and enabled the rise of science, facilitating Reformation, Renaissance and Revolution, political, industrial and commercial.For Innis, space-biased and mechanized mass media helped create modern empires, European and American, bent on territorial expansion and obsessed with present-mindedness.