Mastodawn

i have a weird idea that i'd like some input on from fellow canadians specifically about mastodon/the fediverse. boosts very much appreciated!

i grew up in the 80s and 90s canada. there were rules about the % and types of "canadian content" broadcasted on tv/radio.

partly because of that, and federal-provincial funding credits, i got to grew up with canadian-produced tv series like the Beachcombers, The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup, The Raccoons, North of 60, The Elephant Show, Degrassi Jr/Sr High. it's a big list, and i'm sure you remember a lot more. some of it was great. some of it sucked. but all of it was very weird and canadian.

there was nothing i was fiercely prouder of than being canadian, because it was all around me.

and the in the 2000s some of that changed. cancon weakened. american productions got a huge foothold here, and suddenly we became inundated with american pop tv and music. i watched teens/adults become infatuated with US pop lifestyle, mostly because - i think! - we just didn't produce anything worth watching or listening to. even cbc.ca is 50% american headlines now, and it's painful

here's where mastodon comes in. i'm seeing that process happen again on masto. canadians posting endlessly about american politics and pop culture. i just checked the live feed of the largest masto instance in canada, and it was 100% american news opinions.

what i don't see - and please correct me if i'm wrong - is a cancon-oriented masto instance or fedi presence. one that *specifically* is organized around boosting/organizing/frontpaging canadian stories with canadian people in them.

i want to talk about our utterly unwatchable modern canadian tv series. or just how lame cbc radio 1's pop culture interviews are. or how heartbroken i was to see the team canada women's team lose a nailbiter.

i love that the fediverse was built around internationalism, but i've watched two generations of kids grow up with weak ties to their local weirdo canuck culture. they deserve a place where canadian stuff is front-and-centre, even if it sucks and we know it. i want to know the local news in coal harbour and fort st john and churchill.

what would that look like on the fediverse? would it be a masto instance? or something else?

feel free to reply here, or just write something up and tag with #canadaverse

#canada #fedizen #canadaverse #yeg #alberta #bc #saskatchewan #manitoba #yukon #nunavut #quebec #novascotia #ontario #newbrunswick #newfoundland #nwt

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 We Canadians have a fairly unique problem when it comes to demarcating our own culture: we share it with the US, and they share ours (although they often don't know it), and they produce much, much more culture than we do by virtue of size alone. Walk into a bookstore in Canada, and you see books from authors from all across the Angloshphere - of which we make up about 11%. And we're just not isolated enough to distill much culture that feels distinctly ours out of the blend.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 (Quebec is a bit of a different story, but a decent argument can be made that they are, at least culturally, noticeably their own thing.)

By contrast, walk into any bookstore in Japan, and every book in the place is in Japanese. Any foreign books published for the Japanese market have to be translated and - to a surprising extent - localized. Whereas we can absorb US- and UK-generated cultural artifacts with relatively little friction, and vice-versa.

We're just not different enough.

@betahuman okay. those are among the problems. what do you see as solutions to making canadian content more accessible on the fediverse?

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Like Glenn said, Canadian Culture is what Canadians care about, and like you said, that shifted a fair bit after both 9-11 and, I would argue, the widespread proliferation of internet access. That shift was real, and my thesis is that it would take some equally powerful, transformative phenomena to shift us back toward the cultural protectionism that defined the Canadian media landscape until the turn of the century.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 The internet was the gradual, inevitable harbinger of this change. Various piracy options arose that broke the gatekeeping power of Canadian broadcasters; and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find too many Canadians who long to see that power restored, outside of a clique of mediocre Toronto bigshots. To the rest of us, this unprecedented freedom meant, above all, never being forced to endure Canadian Content by government fiat, ever again.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 The perennial argument about whether CanCon sucked because the governing bodies were corrupt, or underfunded, or both, became a moot point. CanCon would now have to compete with everything else in the Anglosphere, for good and ill.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Simultaneously, after the US reaction to 9-11, and the insanity that ensued, Canadian identity went from "Not quite Britsh, not quite French, and not quite American" to a much more strict "Not American" - in a moderately successful bid to distance ourselves from US hegemony while simultaneously ignoring our status as the greatest secondary beneficiary of that hegemony. The experience of maintaining this particular cognitive dissonance is now the only nearly-universal Canadian Experience.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 My thesis here is that CanCon was always an artificial category outside of Quebec; and Canadian identity is, on the whole, not a particularly meaningful concept in the broader world except insofar as we are somehow Not-American - an identity we cling to because it diminishes the guilt we feel by association.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 But to define oneself purely in opposition to something requires knowing it better than we know ourselves; hence the obsession with US policy. By this argument, Canadians are now more concerned with Canadian Culture (i.e., contrasting ourselves against Americans) than ever - it's just that Canadian products are now an even less significant portion of that culture than ever. And this is not a problem that I think social media of any kind can really help with.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 I do think that reaching out as you have is probably the best you can do. Reach out long enough, and you'll be able to find people who care about Hockey, Forever Knight, Lost Girl, and Mr. Dressup - albeit maybe not all in the same place. In the late 90's and early 00's, the internet was that place, and I don't think we can go back, much as I might long for it.

@vga256 TL;DR: To get the desired effect, you need either a server or a tag that somehow explicitly excludes direct discussion of the US. Moderation efforts on such a thing, if even possible, are probably more trouble than they're worth.

@betahuman i agree. i have no idea if there's an appetite for a canadacentric mastodon instance, but i'm willing to try!

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 That's amazing, and I hope you find some semblance of what you're looking for! There must be at least a few things that unite Canadians strongly, aside from our non-American-ness and the fact that none of our ancestors loved us enough to move somewhere with a nicer climate.

@betahuman i think letting canadians figure out amongst ourselves what unites us is part of the solution. i'd rather see people arguing about which bad canadian sitcom was shittier, than which taylor swift album is the best one

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Just curious: have you always lived in Alberta?

@betahuman I grew up in the northwest territories and gaspésie

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Small world: ages 0-5 spent in High Level, AB and Dalhousie, NB. Not entirely dissimilar. When CBC was all we got, that had to have a profound impact, eh? I used to have a feeling that "being Canadian" really mattered, in a way that it never really did and never will again, which is now lost forever.

@betahuman omg, high level! 😆 i grew up in hay river, so i have MANY memories of passing through HL in the 80s. my mom used to get my sister and i to collect (steal) spilled grain from the railroad tracks/elevator there for our chickens and horses.