What does it mean, to be Canadian?
What does it mean to be Canadian? There does not seem to exist one absolute criterion that could easily define this nationalistic sentiment. One may inquire into its social, political and historical events as a country; the defining attributes of its people; the significant contributions of its leaders; its relationship within a global context or its collective hopes, dreams and aspirations that have come to define itself culturally. In referencing the Canadian identity, one may ask to see a passport or look at its national colours (red and white) as referenced by its flag and the symbol of a maple leaf or speak of hockey and beavers.
One may even look to the history of the Inuit and the First Nations people, or Quebec’s quest for Sovereignty or how Laura Secord (of ice cream fame), helped stave off an evasion by the Americans in 1812.
All these fragments could be construed as integral parts that make up the Canadian identity—but would it bring us any closer to what a Canadian is?
One may further reference the Canadian identity as something that came into existence by default, as an extension to what had come before. Canada during its colonization period simply acted as a supplier of raw goods to England and France [01]. With the advent of the Industrial Modernist age, the railroad helped define a quasi-independent political system called Canada by uniting its geographical boundaries [02].
During the early sixties, Postmodernism came to Canada transcribing its idea of multiple worldviews within the nation’s psyche and triggering Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and Trudeau’s multicultural policies and constitutional reforms. All this could be construed as Canadian, but again not that unique within a global context.
Canadian Legacy
In 1964, a relatively unknown Canadian sociologist by the name of Marshal McLuhan would proclaim to the world that The Medium is the Message. [03] This seemingly ambiguous and irrational insertion would represent a radical new way of understanding socio-political infrastructures and the identification of one’s national identity in relation to what McLuhan called the global village. [04]
His theories would trigger a re-evaluation in the referencing of identity not through an ethnocentric based Modernist’s singular worldview or a Postmodernist’ multiple worldview ideologies, but as a societal based dynamic whole.
McLuhan likened this idea of the medium as message to that of Cubism: “in other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole” (McLuhan 13).
Canada, with its expansive landscape and sparsely populated regions contribute to an illusionary perception of isolation and existential existence. Its inability to grasp a sensory awareness of its whole has contributed to its perceived lack of identity. In the past, Canada has depended on industrialized mediums of communications such as the telegraph, telephone and print media to keep itself centralized. With the rise of the new electric mass media technologies such as television, McLuhan points out “thus ends space as the main factor in social arrangements” (McLuhan 103).
Such a shift within the Canadian consciousness sets the stage from one dependent on externalized referencing of identity i.e., geographical, racial and cultural heritage, to one of internalized dialogue – who am I in relationship to myself?
There exists a symbiotic relationship between our own identities, our socio-political environments and that of mediums. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man McLuhan states that:
“in a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology”. (McLuhan 7)
Identity vs Medium
Mediums – be they technological, philosophical, political, social, cultural, religious or artistic – do extend our reach, but also redefine our reach, our perceptions and interactions in relationship to them.
What is most troubling about mediums as extensions is the fact that they in turn convert all formulations into an objectified form of themselves, creating a nostalgic referencing to the idea of progress.
For example, photographs of one’s ancestral heritage, the first Mac computer, or the rotary dial telephone, all at one-time innovative medium extensions of ourselves – now lie dormant in a mythic nostalgic underworld. [05]
Inherent with the use of mediums is this need to extend and identify ourselves, either by continuously recreating the medium or extending it through a hybrid of two or more mediums. These evolutionary processes of mediums, is triggered largely by our relationship to our socio-political environment and how this in turn identifies the self in order to re-establish an illusionary sense of progress.
There is a tendency to become enamored by the idea of a medium’s contextual ability to transfer the message but to ignore the fact that by using the medium, it in itself redefines the original intent of the message.
Mediums tend to be transitory and illusionary and that all messages referenced through mediums, be they technological-based such as the print media, the photograph, the radio and television; or socio-political ideologies such as Capitalism, Marxism, Modernism, Postmodernism, contain inherent biases “ encodings – skewing the message’s intent.
Post Identity
The Postmodernist movement – an ideological medium used for the deconstruction of the Modernist worldview – is a good example of this.
Postmodernism succeeded to a certain extent in the demystification the Modernist’s notions of originality, class structures, and to engage us in the possibility of multiple worldviews, which in turn would create a sense of liberation by forging new understandings regarding racial, gender and class biases. [06]
Yet, Postmodernism would ultimately degenerate into what Ken Wilber has called aperspectival madness. [07]
By appropriating the very attributes of the Modernists to criticize it, Postmodernism failed to transcend the issues it hoped to address. Within a visual arts context, we find the Postmodernists incorporating the same visual vocabulary and means of dissimulation i.e., galleries, museums, collectors as used by Modernists, even though postmodernists would argue that it was within a different context. In essence postmodernism became just an appendage to Modernism rather than creating its own identity or multiple worldview identities – as it had intended to do. [08]
What postmodernists failed to realize was that because mediums are encoded they predetermine the context of the message itself.
In utilizing a specific medium’s message is, predatorily defined from the start, by that medium’s attributes. Therefore, if mediums are predetermined or encoded with specific attributes, how does one transcend or make a transition towards defining a message or identity, more specifically a Canadian identity?
- The first stage would have to be an awareness that mediums carry within them specific limitations or biases and therefore are limited in their power to inform and transform.
- Secondly, one would have to define what these specific attributes are in relationship to the specific medium and how these attributes inform and alter the perception of the message that is being engaged.
- Thirdly, mediums being transitory and singular in their interpretive ability should be utilized as multiple elements, combined as McLuhan stated, as a Cubist collage in trying to define the totality of the intended identity.
In seeking to define or understand the Canadian identity one must look to how mediums have played a role in extending one’s identity. More importantly, how these mediums have influenced the arts in Canada, which in turn reference our cultural identity.
Canada, Colonialism and Art
When reviewing the arts in Canada, one does not find a distinctly Canadian voice – only remnants of European and American influences. The arts in Canada unfortunately are, in a matter of speaking, the Canadian Achilles heal. Why is this? Is it that Canada lacks the imagination, the will or the ability to create art that defines it as a unique identity?
One could argue that the Canadian identity is represented within the visual arts by the works of the Group of Seven, the Painters Eleven and the Automatists or in literature by Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence and Mordecai Richler; or even by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Glen Gould in the field of music.
Yet, though all these artists may be associated to Canada in some way, their messages define an ethnocentric based Modernist sensibility of universal truths, originality and a singular worldview that do not offer that sense of – yes, this could only originate or be experienced in Canada.
One may further argue that there exist Postmodernist artists referencing multiple worldviews of gender, race and class, which also uniquely define the Canadian identity and experience. Yet one finds that such artistic observations are singular in context or part of an easily interchangeable identity within other western cultural experiences, i.e., feminism, racial and gender identity.
One may argue that within Canada’s pre-colonialist heritage of Inuit art, First Nations’ sculpture or traditional folk songs, there exists a Canadian identity. Yet one would find that the original intent of these works has been reconfigured using other mediums, and that our experience and understanding of them has turned into one of mythic and nostalgic referencing.[09]
Even though a Canadian artist’s intent may appear distinctly Canadian, their choice of mediums pre-empts the context of their message. It is impossible to reference painting, literature and music without the encoded identification of the medium’s ethnocentric past and more importantly how such mediums decimate the ideological referencing of appearances.
Art and Power
In Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, Roy Ascott, who is himself an artist and theorist points out that:
The overarching concern with appearance and representation that has hitherto characterised Western art has made it the servant of ideologies of both church and state. Its concern with appearance has kept it in line with classical science, looking no further into things than their outward forms allow, making of the world a clockwork machine of parts whose movements are regulated by rigid determinism, and seeing man as little more than a material object (Ascott, 280).
As Ascott points out, there exists an ideological encoding within a culture, a “rigid determinism that has directed the artists intent”. It is no surprise then, that artists tend to critique the existing power structure of their time, and with each successive generation the process begins again.
Therefore, McLuhan’s insights into the medium is the message, opens up the possibility of overriding Ascot’s point regarding cultural determinism. The possibilities to enact a new reality lie in the new technological mediums of video, digital and telecommunications technology, which do not owe anything to the past and have inherent within them powerful attributes to break through social, political, ideological, psychological and physical determinism.
Art and Machine
In Primary Devices: Artists Strategic Use of Video, Computers and Telecommunications Networks, Tom Sherman reiterates this idea that:
“An intellectually acceptable methodology for using communications technologies does not include a behavioural lexicon of theatrical gestures or anti-communications techniques… In many cases, these primary devices are format-technologies, technological devices taken off-the-shelf and used without modifications. The artist forms a relationship with a particular class of machine for the purpose of confronting the problems and opportunities these machines were designed to address (Sherman 163).
Sherman’s insight offers a powerful understanding of these new mediums within a socio-political context. Unlike the accepted and traditional forms of artistic mediums such as paint, print or photography, that require a certain degree of skill, discipline and high-brow intellectualism in order that they be assimilated and effect any change, these new mediums allow for ready-made, non-contextualized content and reaction.
For example, with video one points, shoots, and has created an instantaneous impression, which can be played back immediately. The medium’s inherent speed and spontaneity in which the act is performed, has immediate implications in altering the referencing of the artist’s experience and/or that of other viewers who may be present during playback.
The pre-formatted attribute of the medium in essence transcribes the viewer’s knowledge of their experience. [10]
This holds true for all digitally based technologies that offer this immediate interaction such as computers and digital still cameras as well as with telecommunications technology such as cellular phones, satellite transmissions and the internet.
Therefore, it is within these spontaneous, pre-formatted attributes of today’s technological mediums that the socio-political context of global identity and more specifically, the Canadian identity is undergoing changes not experienced since the introduction of the printing press.
Canadian Identity in Flux
In referencing the Canadian identity, one can no longer look to singular mediums as extensions or traditional art forms. For every click of a digital camera; for each video defined second of recording; for every jpeg or text message generated and transmitted via internet, satellite and cell phone; the Canadian identity shifts accordingly.
The Canadian identity is from this point on, intertwined within a time space continuum, where singular differentiation in the perceptions of space and time are diminishing. This is in turn is eroding the traditional geographical, social and political boundaries once used to reference the Canadian identity.
Hot and Cold
McLuhan observed that a medium’s characteristics could be classified as hot or cool according to the totally of information being transmitted by that specific medium. McLuhan explains:
“There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, ‘high definition.’ A cartoon is ‘low definition,’ simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation.” (McLuhan 24)
McLuhan’s idea of hot and cool was not only limited to technology. McLuhan implied that Nixon lost the 1960 Presidential campaign because he was a ‘hot’ person in a cool medium such as television whereas Kennedy is ‘cool’ was more effective. [11]
Based on McLuhan’s theoretical premise of hot and cool, one could argue that Canada remained overall a ‘cool’ identity for its lack of ‘high definition,’ especially when compared to Europe.
Historically, a culture alternates between hot and cool periods depending on its socio-political climate, influenced by internal and external factors such as war, economics and ideology. Such shifts are then reflected within that culture’s medium extensions. Therefore, it was no coincidence that hot mediums such as print, photography, and film originated from Europe – a hot culture, whereas the telephone, television and digital technologies from America – a cool culture.
One could also reference the rise of Modern Art with its distinctive hot, high definition art movements such as neoclassicalism, romanticism, realism, impressionism, fauvism, and cubism, with the rise of the hot cultural revolution of the Enlightenment in France. [12]
With Modern Art’s arrival to the USA, one suddenly finds a cooling down of the art medium towards a low definition art form of abstract expressionism, minimalism and conceptual art.
Later this cool period would begin to heat up from the early sixties onwards with the Cuban Missile crises, the start of the Cold War, Vietnam and up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the US was elevated to the status of a superpower.
The rise of Postmodernism, a hot ideological movement would also follow these timelines of ca. 1960 -1980. [13]
In contrast, until the late 60’s, Canada was still under the hot iron grip of British Imperialistic ideologies. It would not be until 1982 that it would seek its own constitutional independence from Britain. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Modern Art – as an American cool medium – had little or no significance in shaping Canada’s cultural identity.
Due to Britain’s deterministic influence, Canada for the most part extended its identity by using hot mediums or by trying to reconfigure a medium’s inherent attribute from a cool to a hot by nationalizing them. Examples of this were the NFB (National Film Board), the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), The Canada Council of the Arts [14] as well as other predominate ethno-based hot mediums such as print media and literature.
It would not be until 1968, with the election of Pierre Elliot Trudeau that Canada would begin to enter its cool period with one the most cool leaders of the 20th Century.
Trudeau’s presence on television and his utilization of the mass media’s potential was unparalleled and only matched by that of President Kennedy in the early sixties.
Trudeau meteoric rise in popularity came to be known as Trudeaumania; likening Trudeau’s popularity to that of the Beatles. Yet Trudeau failed to recognize the cooling down of the Canadian identity at this time; believing that his hot postmodernist ideologies would direct Canada towards its own unique identity and independence through constitutional reform, bilingualism, multiculturalism and Quebec’s right as a distinct society. Yet others had different ideas as to defining the Canadian identity. The FLQ’s push for sovereignty through terrorism would lead to the October Crisis (October 5 – December 28, 1970) and the enactment of the War Measures Act. [15]
McLuhan once pointed out that the thing about television is that “the cool TV medium promotes depth structures in art and entertainment alike, and creates audience involvement in depth” (McLuhan 340), and in so doing the very phenomenon that had made Trudeau accessible to the Canadian public, would also work against him.
We have so far covered two of the three contributing factors relating to McLuhan’s medium as message and how this references the Canadian identity.
- Firstly, we explored how mediums carry within them specific limitations or encoded biases limiting their ability to inform and transform.
- Secondly, the original intent of the message will be either misunderstood or ineffective if the encoded bias of the specific medium is not taken into consideration.
In the third stage, we will look at how a medium manifests a message as a singular phenomenon, denying any possibility for the imagination to pre-empt or reinterpret the message.
The Event Horizon
The inherent attribute of digital technology is the sequencing of the digits 1 and 0, which in turn manifests in constructs of sound, word and still or moving images. These constructs in turn relay the message.
Such messages would appear to transfer the intent of their creator – be it from a Modernist, Postmodernist, Marxist, or Capitalist point of view – onto an observer. The observer would then decode the message through a predisposed and learned understanding of such a construct.
Yet, as McLuhan implied, this singular predetermined relationship to mediums creates an ever spiralling fragmentary understanding of our experience, which in the end will implode upon itself.
McLuhan observed that: “after three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding”. (McLuhan 03)
One can liken McLuhan’s idea of an implosion to the scientific phenomenon regarding the death of a star. When a star dies, it implodes creating a Black Hole. The only way to then reference this black hole is through what is referred to an Event Horizon.
NASA defines an Event Horizon as:
The event horizon defines the boundary of a black hole behind which nothing, not even light, can escape. Consider an event (a given position at a given time) in spacetime. Now imagine that light rays shoot out in all directions from this event. If none of them can escape to an infinite distance then that event is inside the event horizon. If any can escape, that event is outside the event horizon. )
Therefore, a medium can be likened to a Black Hole, and its message to that of an Event Horizon. A medium, as with a Black Hole will absorb all information that is directed to it, but will not allow the total context of that information to be referenced back. What an observer of that message sees is a processed and predetermined construct of the message, that is of the medium’s Event Horizon.
Therefore, this relationship between the medium and message can be understood to be singular in that there cannot be a sense of any real understanding of the message or event other than what has been predetermined by that medium.
For example, the alphabet as a medium is encoded by a complex system of symbols, which in turn defines a construct called language in order to express messages. We will find that if we were to begin to look at each of these encoded symbols – each letter on their own – the message would be indecipherable and lost. Our sensory experience of mediums is always in terms of its Event Horizon and never the medium itself. Yet, it is the medium which transforms us.
Cyber/Space
Our relationship to mediums is in itself paradoxical. To reference something akin to a Canadian identity based on a singular medium is not possible. Yet the potential exists in the dynamic interlacing of two or more mediums that other possibilities can begin to be relevant.
Ascott points out that “instead of creating, expressing, or transmitting content, the artist is now involved in designing context: contexts within which the observer or viewer can construct experience and meaning. (Ascott 279)
This shift, that Ascott is implying, is that the observer’s relationship to art should cease being a window from which to observe the event horizon, as has been the case with traditional art forms. There exists the possibility of creating a doorway – a wormhole. if you like that could allow the artist and the observer to enter and explore “a world of interaction and transformation”. (Ascott 279)
The underlying context of Ascott’s meaning references the concept of Cyberspace, a virtual space that has emerged from these new digital technologies.
Ascott elaborates that:
“Cyberspace is the space of apparition, in which the virtual and real not only co-exist, but co-evolve in a cultural complexity. Apparition implies action, just as appearance implies inertia. Apparition is about the coming into being of a new identity, which is often, at first, unexpected, surprising, disturbing. The role of the artist within this context becomes one of mediating the juxtaposed realities of real and unseen. The artist in this new role can be likened to that of a shaman creating structural nodes“ doorways of experience that the observer can then enter and define their own experience and conclusions.” (Ascott 279)
Appearance as Ascott points out has inertia, but is limited by the process of an observer looking passively through a window, as is usually the case in our relationship to art objects. Whereas, if an apparition can be created whereas both the observer and artist interact to create a new experience, then identity becomes fluent and self directed.
McLuhan aptly defined how appearance takes on a Narcissistic relationship in that: “This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image.” (McLuhan 30)
Now, if the observer is allowed to bring their own imagination and experiences to fill in the blanks of the event; they may determine their own unique way of seeing and understanding their own identity and thus negate this idea of a static identity as referenced in the past through nationality, religion, race and gender. The identity of self, therefore goes into a state of constant flux in relationship to one’s experience.
In Conclusion
Canada, perhaps more than any other country lies in the forefront of this new McLuhanisque revolution. With its cool persona and 68% [16] of its population already wired into cyberspace, the relationship of space and time ceases to play as critical a role in the Canadian identity as it has in the past.
This is not to say that the Canadian identity will cease to exist – if it existed at all – but that the interrelationship between the self and experience is free to look beyond the medium’s event horizon.
There now exists, a real possibility for Canadians to go where no Canadian has gone before.
About this Essay:
referencing the Canadian Identity was originally written in 2006 and updated in 2018 by Montreal based artist John Naccarato. Many of the ideas formulated within the essay would influence the development of the artist’s large scale site specific installations such as the x-Series (2010), The Skinning of Memory (2011), and The Obscure Objects of Desire and the Rise of the Technological Chimera (2011).
Notes
[01] “At all times the trade to the upper countries has been considered the staple trade of this province, but of late years it has been greatly augmented, in so much that it may be reckoned one year with another to have produced an annual return to Great Britain in furs to the amount of £200,000 Ster., which is an object deserving of all the encouragement and protection which government can with propriety give to that trade.” Reid, McNaught, and Crowe (147)
[02] In his essay Canadian Independence, Andrew Heard states: “Indeed, symbolically-important legal traces of Canada’s colonial status were only shed with the passing of the Canada Act by the British Parliament in 1982. That Act not only provided for the first time a process by which Canada’s basic constitutional laws could be legally amended without action by the British Parliament, but it also declared that no British law passed thereafter would apply to Canada. There are still two final vestiges of colonialism to be eliminated, those found in ss.55 and 56 of the 1867 Constitution Act which provide for the reservation and disallowance of federal legislation.” Andrew Heard 1990
[03] Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 2001
[04] “With instant electric technology, the globe itself can never again be more than a village” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 375)
[05] Vincent Lavoie referencing a photograph of Sir Donald A. Smith driving in the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which meant to define that moment of the Canadian identity through confederation concludes that: “As reproducible and banal as an iron spike, photography clearly represented the emblematic depiction of the technological modernity.” (Images premieres: Mutations d’une icon nationale (238)
[06] In Modernism and Postmodernism: an overview with art examples, Terry Barret explains that: “Whereas modernists search for universals, postmodernists identify differences.” (27)
[07] Ken Wilber points out that within a postmodernist ideology of worldviews; where one worldview is not anymore, unique or correct than another, negates the ability to reference reality; therefore leaving us with this aperspectival madness. To see a world: art and the I of the beholder. One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (247)
[08] As Charles Harrison and Paul Wood point out in Part VIII: Ideas of the postmodern: “Postmodernism as thus conceived is not immediately a new form of the practice of art, but rather a critical redirection of tradition on the basis of a revised understanding of the immediate past.” (998)
[09] Ian McKay elaborates on this idea of tradition; specifically how it relates to the context of Folk: “social relations and ways of seeing, not intrinsic properties, determined who (or more commonly, which forms and traditions) were called Folk. City-dwellers, and for the most part the middle-class cultural producers of Halifax, were those who first ‘discovered'(that is, constructed) the Folk and then used the advanced means of communications open to them to popularize their ‘discovery’. The Folk under Conditions of Postmodernity (275)
[10] Let us say for example, that an artist’s visual experience or understanding of the color red in relationship to an apple is a light, yellow-red tone. The artist then videotapes an apple, which is rendered a deep red due to the pre-formatted transcribing of the color by the video pre-format. When viewed there will be an instantaneous re-calibration on the part of the artist’s understanding of this color in relationship to the apple. The artist then can either accepts this new reality or disagree with its rendition and choose to re-shoot it, thus initiating the same process over again; in either case, the medium redefining his/her experience.
[11] McLuhan expressed that: “Richard M. Nixon did not go over well on television during the 1960 Presidential campaign, Mr. McLuhan argued, because he was a ‘hot’ person in a cool medium. John F. Kennedy was more effective because he was ‘cool’ (Whitman, Alden. Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared ‘Medium Is the Message’ )
[12] In Modernism and Postmodernism: an overview with art examples, Terry Barret also references this notion: “The Age of Modernity is the epoch that began with the Enlightenment (about 1687 to 1789).” (18)
[13] Terry Barret points out that there is no exact start point, which can be attributed to the rise of Postmodernism, that Postmodernism was a reaction to Modernism; implying that one could reference several examples within the history of Modernism which could be construed as postmodernist. Modernism and Postmodernism: an overview with art examples (18)
One could argue that Postmodernism began with Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) or Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) or as Barret points out, the riots in Paris in May 1968. Within the context of this essay, I have chosen to go with Warhol, since the appearance of his Brillo Boxes act as a defining historical point to what is to become distinctive socio-political global revolution.
[14] Canada’s Art Council continues to represent a major contributing factor in keeping the arts in Canada ‘hot’ and thus preventing the possibilities for a ‘cool’ breading ground to manifest so that a distinctive Canadian identity could emerge. The Council’s federally directed and ethnocentric-biased mandate continues to reference and reinforce the surface identity of the arts. As its mandate states: “the role of the Council is to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.” It goes on to state: “The Canada Council for the Arts reports to Parliament through the Minister of Canadian Heritage.” http://www.canadacouncil.ca/
[15] “Canada looks more like a police state than a democracy eight days after the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross. On Parliament Hill a reporter confronts Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau: “What is it with all these men and guns around here?” By calling in army tanks and men in full gear, Trudeau boosted national security. But the military’s presence makes some Canadians feel a whole lot less secure. How far will the prime minister extend law and order? Just watch him. “Just watch me”. The CBC Digital Archives Website. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Last updated: 20 June 2005. . (Accessed 14 Aug. 2006.)
[16] 20,900,000 Internet users in Dec. 2005, 67.9% of the population. As of Dec. 2017, 33,221,435 Internet users, 89.9% of the population, per IWS., Internet World Stats (Accessed 14 Aug. 2006, 2018.)
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Works Consulted
Ascott, Roy. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Ed. Edward A. Shanken. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.
Barrett, Terry. (1997). Modernism and postmodernism: an overview with art examples. In J. Hutchens & M. Suggs (Eds.) Art Education: Content and Practice in a Postmodern Era. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, pp. 17-30.
Crowe, S Harry & McNaught, Kenneth. A Source-Book of Canadian History: Selected Documents and Personal Papers, J. H. Stewart Reid; 1964
Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul (Eds.) (1992). Part VIII: Ideas of the postmodern. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 987-992
Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge, 1999.
Heard, Andrew. Canadian Independence. Simon Fraser University, 1990. (Accessed 14 Aug. 2006, 2018.)
Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. London: Routledge, 1999.
Kramer, Eric Mark. Modern/Postmodern: Off the Beaten Path of Antimodernism. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997.
Lavoie, Vincent. Selections. Images premieres: Mutations d’une icon nationale. Paris: Centre Culturel Canadien, 2005. pp. 229
McKay, Ian. Prologue : a postcard from the “Shore of Song”; The folk under conditions of postmodernity. The Quest of the Folk : Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. pp. 274-311
Mcluhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge, 2001. “16. Myth and Mass Media.” Myth and Mythmaking.
Ed. Henry A. Murray. New York: George Braziller, 1960. 288-299. Parker, Barry. Cosmic Time Travel: A Scientific Odyssey. New York: Plenum Press, 1991.
Pelton, Joseph N. E-Sphere: The Rise of the World-Wide Mind. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2000
Wilber, Ken. To see a world: art and the I of the beholder. One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 2000. pp. 243-251.
Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul (Eds.) (1992). Part VIII: Ideas of the postmodern. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 987-992
Whitman, Alden. Marshall McLuhan, Author, Dies; Declared ‘Medium Is the Message’. The New York Times obituary for Marshall McLuhan. New York Times, January 1, 1981