Elections, Wars, and Protests? A Longitudinal Look at Foreign News on Canadian Television

This study reports on the Canadian data from a recent international content analysis of broadcast news in 18 countries. With a mind to Robert A. Hackett’s longitudinal analysis of foreign news on CBC and CTV in 1989, the current study addresses questions of foreign news prominence, geographic distribution, topic coverage, and variation between networks, noting differences and similarities in the content of foreign news in light of shifting cultural, political, and economic environments; news production processes; and communication technologies. This analysis provides an update to Hackett’s seminal work, painting a picture of the Canadian foreign news landscape two decades later

Fruits of Gregory Bateson’s epistemological crisis: embodied mind-making and interactive experience in research and professional praxis

Background: The espoused rationale for this special issue, situated “at the margins of cybernetics,” was to revisit and extend the common genealogy of cybernetics and communication studies. Two possible topics garnered our attention: 1) the history of intellectual adventurers whose work has appropriated cybernetic concepts; and 2) the remediation of cybernetic metaphors. Analysis: A heuristic for engaging in first- and second-order R&D praxis, the design of which was informed by co-research with pastoralists (1989–1993) and the authors’ engagements with the scholarship of Bateson and Maturana, was employed and adapted as a reflexive in-quiry framework.Conclusion and implications: This inquiry challenges the mainstream desire for change and the belief in getting the communication right in order to achieve change. The authors argue this view is based on an epistemological error that continues to produce the very problems it intends to diminish, and thus we live a fundamental error in epistemology, false ontology, and misplaced practice. The authors offer instead conceptual and praxis possibilities for triggering new co-evolutionary trajectories

Calling Dick Tracy! Or, Cellphone Use, Progress, and a Racial Paradigm

The hero and phone-watch from Dick Tracy are evoked regularly in news and studies of cellphone use. This paper argues that the racial paradigm of White law enforcer and Dark law-breaker in the comic strip resonates in contemporary evocations and in discussions of cellphone use and crime. Representations of mobile communication and racialized criminality in Dick Tracy were inspired by the 1930s “war on crime” that intersected with wireless innovations and with lynching. This paper interprets that repeated evocation of the comic strip is a “perverse nostalgia” for an old-fashioned form of law and order premised on racialized violence and viewing

Locking Out the Mother Corp: Nationalism and Popular Imaginings of Public Service Broadcasting in the Print News Media

Early promoters of public-service broadcasting (PSB) in Canada emphasized its democratic and nationalist merit. Of these twin pillars, only nationalism appears to still be standing. In this article, the author surveys the vision of PSB that emerged in the national English-language print media during the 2005 CBC/Radio-Canada lockout and suggests that our peculiar brand of multicultural nationalism (which underestimates the divisions within civil society) has subsumed democratic values. Yet, she argues democratic principles—particularly those of access, participation, and publicness—are critically important to defending the relevance of PSB in the current environment of seemingly endless media choices and borderless technology

Cultivating the Taste of the Nation: The National Council of Women of Canada and the Campaign against “Pernicious” Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This article analyzes the campaign against “pernicious” literature undertaken by the National Council of Women of Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. Concerned with the growing availability of dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and romances and their perceived influences on young readers, Council members sought to educate the Canadian public about the circulation of so-called “pernicious” literature. But they also sought to eradicate the popularity of “pernicious” literature by encouraging children, youth, and adults to read a “better class” of books, through the creation of the National Home Reading Union in 1895. This article argues that through these strategies, the Council’s campaign re-asserted the primacy of the family, with the mother as its moral guide, in providing the ultimate defence against the dangers of “pernicious” literature

Human Rights Revisionism and the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism

This article focuses on the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA): a self-appointed group of parliamentarians dedicated to extinguishing what it calls “the new antisemitism.” Working from a Gramscian perspective, we identify key discursive strategies in coalition publications and testimony and argue that despite the CPCCA’s pretence to being a forum for liberal-pluralist debate, in fact it is engaged in an ideological reframing of human rights designed to restrict political debate. It does so, paradoxically, by drawing on the language of left-liberalism, which contrasts with recent ideological interventions aiming to secure the priorities of the neo-liberal state

Domestication analysis, objects of study, and the centrality of technologies in everyday life

The article first introduces the domestication approach, its origins, its key elements, and its general contributions and limitations. It then examines ways in which the domestication analysis could be developed. One issue concerns contemporary objects of study and research questions given developments in information and communication technologies since the earliest domestication studies. Other issues include developing the analysis of the centrality of ICTs in our lives. Where appropriate, these issues are illustrated by considering examples of the computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. To illustrate how the domestication framework can inform wider academic and policy fields, the final section considers its contribution to debates about the digital divide

Designing for mobile: A walk in the park

Design for mobile platforms and the challenges and opportunities inherent in the design of mobile applications and experiences are presented in this research report on the Park Walk Project. Park Walk participants use a specially programmed application on a mobile phone, connected via Bluetooth with a GPS device, to see images and hear stories mapped to various locations, enabling an exploration of the social, cultural, and natural history of Toronto’s Grange Park. The intention of the Park Walk Project is to tie information directly to places with the use of mobile technology and to create a narrative space in a public park that is open to collaboration

The sound of silence: the absence of public service values in Canadian media discourse about the CBC

Public service broadcasting (PSB) across the world is in crisis. This article examines how, if at all, normative academic ideals of public service broadcasting inform discussion about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canadian news media. The researchers undertook a quantitative (N = 467) and qualitative (n = 29) content analysis of five years of Canadian news media coverage about the CBC published between January 1, 2009, and April 30, 2014. Their systematic analysis of this research found little connection was made between the CBC and discussions of public service values. This study contends that the pre-eminence of neoliberal discourse represents a serious assault to broadcasters with a public service ethos