Arjun Appadurai

Vancouver Olympics Freestyle Skiing Gold Medal Winner, Alexandre Bilodeau

Notes from north of 49ºN

I’ve been immersed in Canadianess on several fronts this week. There’s the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, of course, and I went to an innovation talk by the CEO of Porter Airlines, an emerging Canadian success story, at MaRS here in Toronto.

I’ve heard about some backlash about Canada’s “Own the Podium” programme, which I’ve dubbed “pwn the podium,” but I find the whole spectacle fascinating. The first Olympics I remember, which will date me, is Montréal-1976. I remember watching, on a B&W TV in the kitchen, Nadia Comăneci dazzle the world, as well as Gilda Radner’s impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live. I remember the US hockey gold medal in 1980 and the US-led boycott of the summer games in Moscow. I was in Westwood near UCLA during the 1984 Olympics in LA and still recall the pastel iconography and the feel-good pervasiveness that just didn’t jive with my own brand of teenaged angst. Over the years, I’ve followed the Olympics, as I’m interested in spectacle in the Debord sense, but not soooo cynically. So much hinges on the dramas, albeit often hyped by the media. Although, the story of the first Canadian to win gold on Canadian soil, Alexandre Bilodeau, is quite compelling. Alexandre took up skiing, as his mom wanted her kids to take up a more family-oriented sport, which could include his older brother with cerebral palsy, Frédéric.

The coverage of the Olympics is a perfect example of mediascapes, as described by Arjun Appadurai::

“‘Mediascapes’, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.”

So, what made me laugh out loud was Salon.com reporting they got hammered for the snarky remarks made by writers on their site on articles on the Olympics . Oh, Salon, desperately trying to be relevant by stirring the pot, which I find it often does with gendered issues—oh cruel fates, why can’t Roman Polansky get arrested monthly?! Salon writers are like ironic hipsters who aren’t quite clued in to how planting “tongue-in-cheek” with one’s writing doesn’t preclude you from looking like an idiot for missing the forest for the trees.

Heather Havrilesky and Steve Almond both poked fun at Vancouver Games. Heather’s “D’oh, Canada!” piece was a play-by-play on how the opening ceremonies were cheesy, boring, and with poor production values—a colossal fail. She ends with a reiteration of her take on how the bland NBC is, along with how they are complicit in not accurately depicting the ceremonies as an embarrassing mess::

“And do Costas and Lauer acknowledge what a big mess it is? Hell, no. Instead they’re happily prattling along as Wayne Gretsky rides to the real outdoor Olympic cauldron in the rain. Why didn’t they just have one cauldron? Sadly, this outdoor one looks just like the malfunctioning heap inside.

Oh, Canada. You may among the friendliest and most welcoming people on earth, but sometimes friendliness, politeness, and “making it be” just isn’t enough.”

Almond went through the various gaffes and SNAFUs of the first few days of the games. Bitch bitch bitch. He concludes with this trenchant observation::

We’re really sorry it had to go this way, Canada. We love your health care system and your uncomplaining tolerance of sub-freezing weather and your almost freakishly low-key attitude. But when it comes to mindless, over-hyped spectacles of late model capitalist excess, you should probably leave the driving to us.

While NBC provides a mainstream mediascape, Salon is providing a cynical, urban-liberal hipster variant, slathered in a fatty gravy of pseudointellectualism and punctuated by cheese curd five-dollar-turns-of-phrase, like so much poutine.

In my opinion, this is nothing to get in a lather about, since it’s so utterly predictable. Mediascapes are all about persuasion, promotion, and, in Salon’s case, pageviews. Their depiction of Canada as bumbling bumpkin cousins to the north is really just the flipside of NBC’s mainstream message of pro-US feelgood candy. Hand in glove. I can just hear George Peppard say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Salon should have more compassion for Canada. Salon has spent 15 years trying to be an über-hip West coast New Yorker, but are still just bumbling bumpkin cousins to the West.

BTW:: The idea that Canadians are polite. Ha! It’s another myth.

Twitterversion:: Salon.com pwned 4 snarky #Olympics articles. Urban uberhipster liberalism just flipside 2 mainstream NBC feelgood candy. @Prof_K

Song:: The Smiths-“William It Was Really Nothing”

Cover of Douglas Coupland's Souvenirs of Canada

Notes from North of 49ºN

I’ve been thinking more and more about the concept of nation, of late.  In summers past, the 4th. of July, Independence Day in the United States, meant being in northern California and perhaps heading to Point Reyes and seeing the tug-of-war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach.  The past three years, I have observed Canada Day, celebrating when Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, and Ontario became a federation, a dominion with ties to the UK.  Two adjacent countries, which appear to have similarities, but have key differences.  Population is one differentiator. At confederation in 1867, the US population was around over 10 times that of Canada, 38,558,371 to 3,625,000 {1870}.  The twentieth century would see the rise of American dominance, not only in terms of economics, but also in terms of media and culture.

American culture is readily evident in Canada.  On television and in major cities like Toronto, with the prevalence of brands like Starbuck’s, McDonald’s, and Subway.  A quick scan of the TV listings shows how popular US television content is in anglophone Canada.  Canada is aware of this and requires broadcasters to show Canadian content {Can con}.  The CBC, the Canadian national public broadcaster, is a flagship network of the nation, where, through its mandate, the network’s goal is to be a cultural touchstone for the nation.  I’ve blogged about the future of the CBC television on this post:: Will Globalization Kill or Make the CBC Relevant Again?, which touches on how the CBC is struggling to remain viable and relevant in the shadow of big media players in the United States and fending off challengers within Canada.  Unlike the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster, which is funded through household television licences, the CBC gets funding from the government, but also is subject to market forces through selling ad time, both sources being historically uneven.

The question I have is whether the role of a national broadcaster is even important.  I don’t see the United States as having the equivalent of the CBC, let alone the BBC.  PBS and NPR are, in my opinion, a loose confederation of programming, as opposed to a network with a strong identity, let alone an entity fostering a conceptualization of the United States as a culture or a nation.

The ideas of Arjun Appadurai and Benedict Anderson come to mind.  Appadurai speaks of globalization in terms of flows.  Flows of finance, ideologies, technologies, people and media, each with the suffix scapes.  Mediascapes have two components::

  1. The flows of capacity to produce and disseminate electronic information
  2. The images of the world created by these media

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities discusses nation as an abstract entity, where meaning is shared within and the mass media address its citizens as a public.

Borders are often permeable under globalization and Canada has seen flows of media flood across its southern border, but what has this done to Canadians’ notion of nation?  Can Canadian content policy and the CBC help to reinforce the imagined community of Canada?  Does nation even matter?  Is Canada to Canadians “our home and disparate land,” as stated in today’s Vancouver Sun?  What about shared Canadian experiences such as Hinterland’s Who’s Who::

I think we need to remember that the context here is capitalism.  Media is flowing, media full of American meanings and ideals, as entertainment content to generate revenues.  In light of this onslaught, I think it is important for Canada to preserve its identity by creating content that increases Canadian cultural knowledge and awareness.  Why?  Without a national identity, i.e., an imagined community of Canada, meaning becomes increasingly derived from imagined communities of brands.  If our Diderot unities reduce to the constellation of brands we surround ourselves with, can we be citizens or are we just consumers?

I think nation does and should matter.  In Benedict Anderson’s words, nation::

“…is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the inequality of that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep. horizontal kinship.”–p.7

I feel that the CBC should be a symbol of Canadian community, one that communicates and is interactive with all electronic media.  I see it as a part of the cultural infrastructure and one of the few entities that can actively bridge the country’s east-west divide, but I’m an idealist.

Song:: Dreamer – Jenn Grant {Halifax, NS}

Video::

Video Extra:: jPod clips of “Cowboy” aired on CBC, Winter 2008.

Twitterversion:: #Canada, national identity, & #Media. Globalization blurs borders, but does #nation matter? #Appadurai #BenedictAnderson http://url.ie/1xu6 @Prof_K