One Canadian, Talking by Chris Dunning

As the chairlift swings, I sneak a sidelong glance at the young man. He's about 14, left boot attached to a rude-looking orange and purple snowboard. He shakes a lock of wild blonde hair over his eyes and peers at me through it. A geometric pattern is shaved into the darker hair over his ear. He watches me notice.

"Nice locks." I smile, and he relaxes, visibly.

"Yeah? You like it? Pretty rad, eh. My parents hate it." This time, he smiles, plainly proud of his small affront to authority.

"That's a parent's job. Just think. If they liked your hair, you might have to do something worse."

"Yeah, like dope. Or something really brutal-- like pierce my nose!" He snickers. "Never thought of it that way. I should explain that to my old man."

We both ponder this in silence, come quickly to the same conclusion. "Naaahh-—" and we laugh again, together.

The generation gap has been bridged, at least in this here and now. During the rest of our ride, I learn a little about halfpipes and Metallica. He learns a little about disposable contact lenses and McAffee VirusScan. Our ages may differ, our sports may be opposed, yet we two have built trust and shared information in the space of a single chairlift ride. We have communicated.

On these winter weekends, I spend more time riding chairlifts up the mountain than I spend skiing down, and each chairlift ride, as in the example above, is a social experience. Lately, I've been trying to monitor my media, and I've been amazed to discover that while I gather a lot of information electronically, it is refined and relayed just this way, through one-on-one interaction with real living human beings!

This is a revelation, an 'a-ha'. If anyone asked, I might have confided that I was hopelessly plugged in, terminally and technologically hooked. I might have said that personal contact played only a minor part in my patterns of communication. And I would have been wrong. Face-to-face communication is still the cornerstone.

I talk. I chat with family, with clerks, neighbours, sometimes total strangers, at the grocery store, the drugstore, and the bank. I converse with friends over lunch, discuss trends during coffee break. I debate cultural issues in class, argue politics at the pub. I talk to my cat. And during the time I spend on the Web, or watching TV, or even reading, I interrupt everyone to explore whichever themes I find stimulating. I assemble information from print and electronic media, but the spoken word acts as the filter through which I develop and refine my ideas.

I "channel surf", fascinated by the difference in slant and agenda between American/Canadian stations. I watch videos, driving everyone crazy by pausing the tape to discuss every second scene. I listen to CBC radio, CFOX in the car. I read. Hypertext, textbooks, magazines, novels, poetry, newspapers, cereal boxes. I'm on the Internet 30 hours per month. Information received from one source is echoed, compounded, or conflicted by information received from another. My personal interpretation of the overall pattern is what I transmit to others, and that interpretation is liquid and evanescent, changing its shape and colour almost hourly.

Media theorists predict that computers will create an extended human consciousness. As I sit at my already-obsolete computer, I feel left out. I suspect this feeling is genuinely Canadian— it may be what allows us to retain our identity in the face of America's cultural force. We are American-NOT. I think it was McLuhan who said, 'the fish is the last creature capable of understanding water'. Being outside allows us perspective. If, as Canadians, we use that perspective to analyse and direct the new media, we may become the brain of the global nervous system!

Whether the expansion of our media is driven by our yearning to overcome the limitations of space, or whether it is driven by the political-economic agenda of multi-nationals, one fact remains: Human communication is being transformed at a rate unprecedented in history. As an individual, I have choices. I can hide from the electronic technologies, blinking disdainfully from the safety of my print-bias. But my cave is lonely, and there's always the risk that I'll be dragged out, either by my own curiousity, or by my need to perform tasks daily becoming undeniably electronic (like sending a letter, or paying a bill). On the other hand, I could choose the American way, race headlong-and-hyped onto the information highway with no idea where I'm going, and risk getting stuck in eight lanes of gridlock with no off-ramp in sight.

But in a typically Canadian way, I've chosen neither extreme. I shut off my less-than state-of-the-art computer, turn on my modest 21-inch colour TV. And I watch, carefully and critically, as a fibre-optic network begins to meld computer, telephone, and television into one interactive unit, a unit that will obsolesce all three. Again, McLuhan describes it so well:

Canadians are always waiting for the latest model without making a commitment to what is available here and now. As the United States careens toward its rendezvous with the unified effects of combined video technologies, it might steadily keep its eyes on the rear-view mirror.... to see how the Canadians sidestep the impact of these new media, keeping a sort of stasis in place, so characteristic of the northern ability to juggle fierce separatism and regionalisms without cataclysmic finality. (Global Village, p.149)

What allows us to keep our balance in a world speeding toward its own image in the cosmic mirror of technology? The peculiar way we engage in a national dialogue about communication may be the key. Canadians don't just communicate-— we communicate about communicating. Why?

Maybe human contact becomes more important the more difficult it is. Canada, after all, is a vast and empty country. As singer Murray McLaughlin says, "There's a whole lot of it and there's nobody in it". Like McLaughlin's song, we ask "Is anybody out there having a party?" And in classrooms, on park benches, in restaurants, on street corners--and on chairlifts--we talk.

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