Digital Media and the Global Village in Canada

Through digital media we have the ability to connect with people from all over the world, whether friends or family or complete strangers. We can become involved with the lives of others from different countries, provinces, cities. As a result, it makes sense that it would be difficult to establish or maintain an individual identity when we are so involved with everyone else’s business. The tendency to lose ourselves in everyone else’s lives is apparent when we spend hours on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the like. However, we can establish our own identity through the use of such digital media as well. Our Facebook or MySpace pages can reflect who we are (to an extent), what we like and where we are from. We can post pictures of Canada, we can be engaging in "Canadian" activities in these pictures, such as attending a hockey game, drinking beer, camping, seeing a Canadian concert. Through this we can establish our individual identity by expressing the things make us who we are. The ‘global village’ can keep us connected to other Canadians as well as to people from others areas of the world. The positive and negative implications can go both ways when it comes to digital media and the global village. The positive implications of this connectedness are as mentioned above-we can basically advertise our lives on the Internet for all to see, and those who see it get a sense of Canada. A negative implication could be that not always would this generate accurate ideas about Canada. Another positive would be that we can blog or Tweet about the activities we do in Canada, or about where we live, or about other Canadian things, like politics, health care, the economy. Basically our depictions of Canada are subjective. We present ourselves a certain way as Canadians and those who know us or read what we Blog or Tweet about, or look at our pictures, get their own sense of who we are as an individual for one, and for another as a Canadian, which in turn establishes a perceived Canadian identity. Another negative implication could be how assimilated we are to the U.S. Much of our media is U.S. related, much of our pop culture is saturated with American content and this can blur the lines between identities as it can be reflected in our individual blogs and pages (Facebook, MySpace). Thus, those viewing would think Canada and America are not that different, and there goes a Canadian identity.