Search

Background: Internet scholars are uncovering and connecting histories of early internets across the globe, but the Canadian context remains underexplored. Drawing on unpublished and declassified documents of the Canadian Armed Forces at Ottawa's Directorate of History and Heritage, this article investigates the history and significance of SAMSON (Strategic Automatic Message Switching Operational Network), an early Canadian internet that experienced a series of setbacks beginning almost immediately at its advent in 1965, until the project was completed in 1984. Analysis: Canada's internet infrastructural techno-politics are examined through Brian Larkin's framework of examining technical ways through which the political is constituted. Conclusions and implications: This paper shows how this early internet was a techno-political system that shaped and was shaped by Canada's pursuit of its national identity amid fears of U.S. influence and rising demands for self-determination within the Québécois and Indigenous nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines tobacco sponsorship advertising in 18 college and university newspapers in Canada from 2002 to 2004. It documents the financial value of tobacco advertising in the year before the federal ban on this form of advertising, which began in October 2003. Tobacco spending formed nearly half of these newspapers' national advertising revenues. The paper examines advertising revenue and publishing output in the year following the ad ban. While national ad revenue fell 28% in 2003-04, this did not adversely affect newspaper operations: the newspapers published 1.4% more pages-and more issues-in 2003-04 than in the previous year. In accounting for this anomalousfinding, the paper discusses the sui generis nature of campus newspapers, which embody elements of commercial and non-profit media, while remaining an under-researched and under-theorized area of communication studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1990s, the Government of Canada launched a string of initiatives to usher its citizens into the "information age." Recently, the federal government has announced "mission accomplished" in its pledge to become a "model user" of information technology, recognized around the world as the country most connected to its citizens. This paper interrogates the term "model user" as a marker of the changes occurring to techniques of government in our expanding information society. It proposes that the "model user" represents ways to negotiate the changing relationship between nation, state, and citizen associated with economic restructuring and signals a new civilizing discourse for citizen conduct amid the dynamic flows of information and ideas. Further, the "model user" suggests an emphasis on innovation that is implicated within larger discourses of economic globalization and the premium placed on adaptability and creativity. Finally, this paper makes vivid the connections between the "model user" and emerging discourses of Canada as a "model democracy" and Canadians as "model citizens" within the global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain how crime victims have become increasingly visible in the criminal justice system and in media portrayals of crime by looking to the U.S. victims' rights movement and its strategic mobilization of a particular construction of "crime victim" into the public sphere. Through analysis of the movement's documentation of its media strategies and new forms of victim-oriented journalistic practice, the paper demonstrates how the movement portrays crime through its construction of crime victims as a class of citizens without rights, through which the families of murder victims become proxy-victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 12, 1943, Harold Innis delivered a speech entitled "The Crisis in Public Opinion" at the annual luncheon of the Canadian National Newspapers and Periodicals Association, held in Toronto. The address has survived in transcript form in the Innis Papers collection at the University of Toronto Archives. Our paper can best be seen as a companion piece to the edited transcription of Innis' original speech, which follows in this issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication. Emphasizing the performative nature of the speech, we contextualize "The Crisis of Public Opinion" by examining the correspondence leading up to and following the speech. We argue that Innis' views on the "crisis of public opinion" in the print media indicate that he understood this particular issue as part of a broader public crisis related to the decline of political and juridical institutions and to shifts in power and influence. His commentary on media in Canada was bound up with his effort to promote collective engagement as a corrective to the biases in power that he had detected. The 1943 speech is thus significant not simply as a "missing link" between Innis' writings on Canada and his later work on communication theory; it is a clear and compelling distillation of the engagement, enactment, and performance that were the abiding features of his work as an intellectual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the corporate restructurings that took place in the Canadian news industry in 2000, using findings from website analyses in 2001 and 2003 that assessed the impact of the changes on the provision of online news. The paper shows that despite their stated commitment to convergence, the restructured companies only selectively exploited the interactive potential of the Web, and that they tended to operate under traditional news and revenue strategies. It also documents a continued shift in Canadian regulatory policies toward neo-liberal conceptions of news and the public good framed in terms of private ownership, free markets, and consumer choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the genesis and evolution of Canada's French public broadcaster's foray into online news (OLN). It examines how Radio-Canada's online news service has been integrated with radio and television newsrooms, how it contributes to expanding the public sphere, and the manner in which it differentiates itself from the competition. The paper concludes by reviewing the challenges facing the public broadcaster in an era where pressures for civic-minded journalism are engendering a set of participatory practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication studies as an academic field had a relatively late start in Canada. The first college-level communication studies department was only established in 1965. Since then, the number of departments has grown rapidly across Canada as the field has become wildly popular among Canadian students. This article presents information related to a conference, which was held in April 2003, to bring together communication scholars within Ontario and nationwide to present and discuss their research. The call-for-papers for the conference, titled "Revisioning Boundaries," attracted many submissions from scholars. This issue includes several contributions from the conference, including an expanded version of professor John Durham Peters' keynote address. The papers invite one to re-examine old ideas as well as to explore extensions to communications research. John Durham Peters' paper is at once a paean to the Canadian tradition of communication studies and an extension of it. He begins with reflections on the experience of time and space in the history of civilization.

This paper offers an account of the life and work of Mary Quayle Innis (1899-1972), the wife of Harold Innis, and a figure largely unknown in the Innis scholarship. Using material taken from her writing, archival sources, and interviews with two of the Innises' children, this paper provides background on her contributions to Canadian culture as a writer and editor. The paper also speculates on her possible influence upon Innis' political economy and media research, and suggests that in understanding Mary Quayle Innis better, puzzling features of Harold Innis' own work are illuminated. A full bibliography of works by and about Mary Innis is attached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Canadian reporting on suicide and the ways it changed over 150 years. Archival research on the reporting practices of two long-standing newspapers presented here shows that suicide was not always taboo in the media. In fact, the silencing and tip-toeing around reporting on suicide only began in the mid-twentieth century. Early newspaper accounts frequently included reports on suicides, both local and far removed, including details on the exact manner of death. As public perceptions of suicide, and the laws surrounding it, gradually shifted from considering the act a crime to an aspect of psychiatric malady, reporting on suicide changed. Once suicide became an untouchable subject in newsrooms the stigma became entrenched, making it hard to address in any meaningful way for decades [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2012, the Canadian Heritage Minister announced that the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country's largest and most popular museum, would be renamed the Canadian Museum of History. In addition to the new name, three strategies—a strategy of engagement, a strategy of authority, and a strategy of expansion—were elaborated by museum and government officials as part of the transformation. We examine these three strategies as an example of the Harper government's attempt to "brand" Canadian identity and history in its own image, arguing that the strategies were designed expressly to paper over near-unilateral changes in the museum's mandate and transformation. Ultimately, these changes have problematic implications for the democratic management of cultural production in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges assertions made by business magazine editors that the business press plays no role beyond reporting on women's executive advancement—or lack thereof. The study begins with the latest reported statistics on women's leadership roles in corporate Canada and a summary of the most common explanations for these numbers. The second half of the paper goes on to examine the Canadian print media coverage of Annette Verschuren, a woman who defied the executive odds. It argues that although Verschuren is prominently featured in the business press, gendered stereotyping, which has been identified as a major obstacle to women's promotion, is reinforced in that coverage by both the framing of her story and the language and imagery used to describe her and her accomplishments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses narrative development and audience interactivity in reality television, with a particular focus on the "format franchising processes" involving Canadian Idol. The staging of media events, recruitment of semi-professional performers, and immersive online environments emphasize the complexities of reality format adaptation, which involves the localization of global media texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the 2006 season of the reality television show Canadian Idol and the manufacturing of Canadian identity. Our analysis looks specifically at the way Canadian identity was articulated in the production of the show, the comments of the judges to contestants, the comments in news releases, and the viewers' discussions on the message board accompanying the show. We argue that the show produces a version of Canadian identity that sustains a logic of regional difference, with a key point of distinction between urban and nonurban Canadians. However, we also indicate that this representation is ruptured by the viewers' debates on their feelings of Canadian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of a pilot project that examines the perceptions of English-language TV news among two racialized groups: self-identified Iranian-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians. This research indicates that, according to participants, mainstream Canadian English-language TV news does not necessarily offer racialized immigrant audiences a space through which to see themselves reflected accurately as part of Canada's rich social life beyond the celebration of ethnic events and festivals. Participants explained that they appreciated Canadian English-language television news, with important caveats. They would like to see the Canadian English-language television news media create spaces in which they could see their own ethnic, racial, cultural, and immigrant identities reflected within the backdrop of the Canadian multicultural state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Canadian government shifted to a neo-liberal policy regime, social service delivery was "contracted out" to community organizations such as the Riverview Centre. The outsourcing objectives were to keep delivery costs low and to build in efficiencies by relying on new technological systems. This paper shows the problems arising from the Riverview Centre's inadequate technology system when interfacing with advanced government networks to report on employment services provided to clients. These advanced networks centralized control of social-service labour through digital Taylorization practices. Electronic reporting tasks have been standardized and routinized such that labour processes are shaped by the digital technology systems. The delivery of employment services conceals the dual aspect of the commodification of the social workers' labour through contract employment and technological means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three Canadian wireless network projects that demonstrate that Wi-Fi technologies, like landline telephones, radio, and hydro, can be used to bring services to local communities. It is our position that despite the strengths and weaknesses of Fredericton's eZone, Montréal's Île Sans Fil, and the Lac Seul network in Northern Ontario, these three highlighted Wi-Fi networks demonstrate that a public information utilities model is still a useful lens through which to understand the development and implementation of telecommunications in Canada. Through our case studies, we have observed that in order for municipally based and community Wi-Fi networks to successfully take root in a community, it is advantageous to build on existing technological infrastructure. Moreover, municipal and community needs must be considered in the project. Finally, a cohort of interested advocates from the region is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the days that followed the Montréal Massacre at the École Polytechnique, December 6, 1989, the Canadian mass media became a discursive battleground regarding violence against women. In response to this phenomenon, I released a half-hour documentary in 1995 entitled Reframing the Montreal Massacre: A Media Interrogation. Designed as a feminist tool for media literacy, the tape deconstructs six key moments in the media coverage of the Massacre. This paper serves as an extended artist's statement to accompany the project's re-release on the Internet, while simultaneously exploring aesthetic and representational strategies that shape the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While current mainstream media stories oscillate between Canadian troops in Afghanistan attempting to restore safety and democracy and the imminent threat of a war on terror on domestic soil, a sorely neglected story concerns the continued war on women in Canada. In this paper, we look at one site of this war--the case of missing and murdered women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Employing a frame analysis, we analyze 128 articles from The Vancouver Sun published between 2001 and 2006. We argue that prevailing and historically entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work continue to demarcate the boundaries of 'respectability' and degeneracy, interlocking in ways that situate these women's lives, even after death, in the margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the key legitimating role of communication and the media, and the role of taming-labour, in constructing the Ontario neo-liberal hegemonic project in 1995. Media-content analysis and examination of the communication strategies of the Ontario government in the 1996 public-service strike show that the government relied on constructing the perception of a hegemonic crisis and framing labour as oppositional to the public interest of resolving the crisis. The government's general strategy of quick-attack communications offensives curtailed media and opposition scrutiny, increasing the likelihood of policy success and media dependence on its framing of issues. A strong challenge to the government led by labour and social justice groups failed in the face of state public relations, media silence, and internal dissension. Examination of a second strike in 2002 suggests that even without a crisis, the government continued its attack on labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada, as elsewhere, introspective and nostalgic views of community and nation-state are being challenged by the impacts of globalism and cosmopolitanism. The impact of these transformations is acute in the context of Canada, where a liberal multiculturalism is transmuting into a hybrid pluralism. Current strategies of identity formation have to accommodate a hybridity that is being fostered by an ever-increasing diasporic population for whom "lived-in places" exhibit transnationalist connections. Too often, established mnemonic tropes relate to past iconic values and norms of the nation-state, even though they are no longer connected with emerging new values that search for new modes of expression. This paper discusses the crucial role of the arts and heritage in this local anchoring of the transnational polity, arguing that symbolic landscapes become sites where new values are contested and traditional iconic values are challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (The Massey Commission, 1949-1951) is widely seen to be Canada's most important position paper on national cultural policy. This article explores the relation of this significant document to UNESCO and its characteristic discourse of "cultural relations." Not only did UNESCO appear in the terms of reference for the Massey Commission Report, but it also was a repeated touchstone for submissions to the Commission. This overlooked international aspect of the Massey Commission underscores the connection between politics and culture in Cold War Canada providing a clear case of how international political language becomes entangled with--and helps to legitimize--artistic and cultural endeavours. The combination of the discussion of education and culture with that of development and trade allowed Canada to reconsider its position on public funding for the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents emerging findings based on 35 semi-structured interviews conducted with children and youth from the research project Children, Young People, and New Media in the Home. The objective of this research is to examine young people's use of the Internet by focusing on the overall media environment at home. Our study indicates that while children and young people are active and intrepid Internet surfers, they use the Internet to extend their local and school-based social ties, and that they have very little concern for offensive or illegal content issues. We argue that these experiences of children and young people need to be considered an intrinsic facet of Canadian Internet policy development treating children and young people as valid and active citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a study on virtual communities of practice (CoPs) in Canada and highlights the main consequences of these new modes of communication, work organization, and knowledge creation through two case studies,' which are analyzed in detail. The two case studies reveal the different effects observed and offer possible explanations for the variations in the results. Several factors explain the success of one community of practice and the relative difficulties involved in the other. In the first case, the participants were all volunteers and showed high levels of engagement and motivation to attain their objectives. In the second case, the participants were appointed and their project was somewhat more diffuse; the CoP experienced a turnover in leadership, contributing to a lesser degree of motivation and little interest in cominunicating with each other as a means of creating knowledge. This analysis contributes to organizational literature by highlighting some organizational conditions that lead to different effects in "virtual," or telecommuting, communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions about the social shaping of technology are explored by com- paring direct broadcasting satellite policy in two very different countries. Canada has a vast geography, low population density, extreme ethnic and linguistic diversity, and close proximity and long-time cooperation with its neighbour, the United States. South Korea is centralized around Seoul, has a high population density, is relatively homogenous culturally and ethnically, and has a history of conflict with the country sharing a common border. The specific goals set for satellite broadcasting arising from these differing national contexts are explored. The paper also compares services and audiences in South Korea and Canada, and it asks what these cases can illustrate about the relationship between industry, policy, audiences, and the shaping of a new media technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless E9-I-i is an interesting case in the capacity of industry voluntary efforts to meet public interest obligations, in part because the CRTC has largely forborne from regulating the wireless sector under current competition policy. Results to date are mixed: despite successful technical trials in the early stages, deployment of the service was slow and uneven, and proceedings came to be plagued by uncertainty and fractious debate between stakeholder groups. Evidence suggests that selective regulatory intervention in the wireless sector may be necessary in certain cases to ensure that public interest obligations are achieved in a timely manner. This paper examines wireless E9- 1-1 as a keystone standardization initiative, drawing upon a layered policy model and the concept of interconnection space to structure its analysis of the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cocaine and tobacco occupy opposite ends of a legal continuum that is narrowing due to diminishing acceptance of cigarette smoking and increasing restrictions on tobacco sales, use, and promotion. This paper compares Canadian newspaper coverage of the two drugs with reference to the main themes, information sources, and policy positions presented in the late 1980s and late 1990s. Further content analysis, of 1998-2002 opinion-editorials, documents recent developments in print media representations of the debates around use and control of these substances. Most notably, in contrast to earlier drug panics, the authors find a more sophisticated range of perspectives encroaching on the moral-legal distinctions and distortions that mark public discourse on all drugs. Lécart entre la manière dont la loi traite l'utilisation de la cocaïme et celle du tabac est en train de diminuer à cause de l'acceptation réduite du tabac et des restrictions croissantes sur sa vente, son utilisation et sa promotion. Cet article compare la couverture des deux drogues dans les journaux canadiens en indiquant quels en étaient les thèmes principaux, les sources d'information et les prises de position à la fin des années 80 et 90. Une analyse de contenu supplémentaire, d'éditoriaux datant de 1998-2002, recense le développement dans la presse écrite de débats entourant l'utilisation et le contrô1e de ces substances. Les auteurs remarquent notamment un éventail de perspectives qui sont plus sophistiquées par rapport aux paniques suscitées par la drogue dans le passé et qui commencent à déplacer les distinctions et distorsions morales/légales typiques du discours public sur toutes les drogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telework is seen as a way to reduce traffic congestion and urban pollution, as a new mode of work organization, and oftentimes as a way of balancing work and family. Our research not only provides a picture of teleworkers in Canada, but also goes beyond the non-gendered percentages which are more frequent in the analyses. This reveals an interesting fact, which we call a gendered segmentation of telework or telecommuting. In this paper, we stress the gendered differences in the type of work done, differentiations in tasks, in the autonomy of the decision to telecommute, as well as differentiations in work organization. We show that work organization and tasks are differentiated according to gender and we will see that while the practice of telework is gendered in types of task and time spent at home, the motives for telework, advantages and disadvantages, are similar for men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]