vga256Feb 24

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

Show threadbetahumanFeb 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.
Show threadbetahumanFeb 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.

Show threadvga256Feb 24
@betahuman okay. those are among the problems. what do you see as solutions to making canadian content more accessible on the fediverse?
Show threadbetahumanFeb 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.
Show threadvga256

@betahuman as far as i'm concerned, all of that begins with everyday human beings. no outside force is going to swoop in and do the heavy lifting for us. that's the whole point of opening up a conversation like this.

again, i'm not hearing any solutions here. just defeatism.

Feb 24 at 6:58pmWeb