| In some ways, it’s easy to understand why Canada has quickly become one of the most wired and Internet-savvy countries in the world – it’s bloody big and freaking cold, which favours communication over transportation.
But it’s still a bit jarring when we’re reminded of how much the Internet has become simply another part of life in this country. Perhaps that’s because Canadians are born seeing themselves not as technophiles banging away at keyboards, but as winter fur-trappers huddled with our Hudson’s Bay Company blankets, removing our mittens only to bring Timbits to our mouths. Regardless, two recent events illustrate the extent to which technology has become an integral part of our lives.
Case 1: The recent discovery of (potentially) new origins of the game of hockey after a Web surfer casually searched a Canadian history site and discovered a note from doomed Sir John Franklin making mention of his crew strapping on skates and hitting the ice with tree branches in hand. That discovery pushed back the origin of hockey by nearly 50 years and seemingly (but probably not realistically) ended the contentious debate over where the first game of hockey was played.
The note was found when a part-time history buff entered a search for the word "ice" and "hockey" into an online database of digitized Canadian historical writings called Early Canadiana Online (canadiana.org). There are several such sites in Canada (including the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project at www.OurFutureOurPast.ca), which will never again be seen as purely academic exercises – hockey and Franklin in the same story! It’s a future Heritage Moment in the making.
Case 2: CBC’s pet Internet project, CBC Radio 3, cleaning up at this year’s Webby Awards by taking home two of the most prestigious Internet awards in the world, the best broadband site of the ear and and a People’s Voice award.
Two years ago, the Webbys nominated CBC’s 120 Seconds (120seconds.com) for an award, which, in some ways, was akin to Fubar getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The Web site didn’t win, but its nomination alongside heavyweights such as Heavy (heavy.com) and Yahoo Finance Vision (financevision.yahoo.com) seemed to give the fledgling arm of the crown behemoth a boost of confidence.
Since then, CBC launched two sister sites, New Music Canada (newmusiccanada.com) and Just Concerts (justconcerts.com), which were originally envisioned as a new national radio station geared towards young people, but were re-directed because of logistical problems.
Then, earlier this year, CBC Radio 3 was repackaged and relaunched (cbcradio3.ca) with a slick new design that brought some of CBC’s other "youth" programming under the same banner, such as the Web site of CBC Radio 2’s Brave New Waves and CBC TV’s Zed.
The repackaged site is a winner, at least according to the Webby victory. And when you factor in the major network’s latest little experiment, called Home Delivery (CBCHomeDelivery.com), which downloads a selection of full-screen CBC radio, TV and Web content to your computer every week or so, CBC is operating some truly interesting and important Web projects.
Not to rain on CBC’s parade while it basks in its Webby afterglow, but critics bash both CBC initiatives by saying they are simply prettifying everyday CBC content in a way that adds no substance – Home Delivery, for example, often delivers content from CBC radio with a slick page design. It looks nice, but you’re still listening to a radio program.
Those are valid complaints (as are those about a government-funded institution proliferating alleged monopolistic industry practices – Mac users can only view back issues of Home Delivery because the downloading software is only PC compatible), but when you compare what CBC is doing online to the country’s other national broadcasters, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch looks like Steve Jobs circa 1984. And the global recognition that will come with the Webby victory will only, assumedly, spark more innovation from the public broadcaster (CBC’s five-word Webby acceptance speech was sure to include "Support public broadcasting:")
The point to all of this (yes, there is one) is that both cases indicate how integrated digital culture is becoming in Canada.
Most of the news coverage surrounding the discovery of Franklin’s pond hockey looked at the discovery itself, rather than taking a gee-whiz approach to the technology behind the find. CBC R3’s Webby nomination shows that Canadians have, nonchalantly as always, become a major part of the international Web community.
These examples may be metaphors more than arguments, but they seem to indicate that Canadians (or the media, at least) have gotten over the concept of the Internet as a path to a technological future and come to accept it as the everyday tool it really is. |
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