Illustration by Valerie Thai

Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then find the family iPad. By the time I’m (finally) awake, he can usually be found sitting on his bedroom floor, his face creased into a frown of concentration as he swipes his way through whatever Netflix Kids is currently offering. His current favourites include a cartoon called Masha’s Spooky Stories and Teen Titans Go!, the latter of which made him think it was the height of hilarity to exclaim, “Look at those juicy thighs!” every time I wore shorts this summer.

I can remember the weekend mornings of my own childhood in the 1990s very clearly: the hush of our suburban neighbourhood, the ugly grey carpet scrunched beneath my bare feet and matched the colour of the pre-dawn sky, the impenetrable barrier of my parents’ bedroom door, which I was not allowed to breach until they were up for the day. Like my son, I would help myself to whatever food was available— usually Alpha-Bits, the plain kind, although I coveted the ones that had marshmallows. Then I would head down to our barely finished basement, where I would spend the next few hours watching cartoons. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so different from my son’s routine. But when I try to explain the details of it to him—the boxy old television, the five flickering channels we had to pick between, the fact that I had to wait a whole week between watching one episode of the Ninja Turtles and the next—I feel like I’m describing something so foreign that it’s hard to figure out the words to properly convey what it was like.

Where do I even start when some baseline words hold such different meanings today than they did three decades ago? When I’m telling a story about my child-self making a phone call, I picture myself talking on the big white rotary dial telephone that we had until I was 12; my son, by contrast, imagines me pressing the little green icon on an iPhone. For me, making calls is the raison d’être for the telephone; for my son, calling people is just one app among many. I blew his mind a few years ago when I told him that when I was a kid, phones didn’t have cameras. “But how did you take pictures back then?” he asked. And then: “What about walls? Did you have those? Were they even invented yet?” I can see his point: if this one thing that he considers to be a dependable and fixed part of the universe has not always been that way, then how can he know what to trust? The idea of a universe where phones can only do one thing—and not a very interesting thing, at that—both astonishes and disturbs him.

There is a part near the end of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1932 novel Little House in the Big Woods where she describes lying in bed in her family’s log cabin and listening to her father play “Auld Lang Syne” on the fiddle. When he finishes, she asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he replies that they are the days of long ago. As she considers this, she tells herself that the “now” she lives in will always be now; it could never be a long time ago. I remember reading this passage as a kid and trying to figure out the paradox it offered. The time that Laura lived in, with its calico print dresses and wood stoves and lack of indoor plumbing, had inarguably happened a long time before I was born. But even though it was obvious to me that Laura’s present had eventually become the past, I was just as certain that the clothing, culture, and technology of the ’90s would never feel old. Even when I became a parent, by which point the decade of my childhood felt like the ancient past, I didn’t consider the cultural gap that would exist between my son and me.

It’s hardest for me to understand how the way we view information has changed. I don’t mean the ways in which we consume it and relay it, although those things are obviously different now than when I was younger; I mean the qualities we attach to it. By the time I was a tween, every bit of media felt so precious. If I wanted to watch an X-Files episode more than once, I had to make sure to record it on my VCR (and then make sure that no one else in my family taped over it). I kept a shoebox full of interviews with Tori Amos, each of which I had painstakingly cut out of newspapers and magazines. If I wanted to read up on the Black Death (I was a weirdly morbid kid), I had to go to the library, find the right keyword in their computer system, and then sift through the chapters of various books until I found what I was looking for. I would often photocopy things or write down quotes that seemed especially important; I remember feeling this urgent need to hold onto everything, because nothing seemed permanent. Once an article or a book or an episode of a favourite show was lost, there was a good chance that I would never find it again.

It’s not like that for my son, though. If he wants to know more about outer space, everything he needs is at his fingertips—YouTube videos, podcasts, articles written by actual NASA astrophysicists. And none of it is in danger of disappearing; after all, once something goes on the internet, it’s usually there forever in some capacity.

This might sound like some kind of value judgment about kids these days, but I promise that it’s not. Greater access to information is never a bad thing. Consider this: my great grandmother grew up in a house with two books (one of which was the Bible) and she probably treated them with a devotion that I wouldn’t be able to muster for any individual volume in my library. Books were, for her, a nearly irreplaceable treasure, whereas if I lose one of mine, I can usually find another copy quickly and cheaply. Would anyone argue that owning literally hundreds of times the number of books that my great grandmother did somehow means that I am somehow living a less wholesome or engaged life?

Like any parent, I have some anxieties about what changing technologies will mean for my kid, but most of them centre around how he will use them to interact with his peers. Will I know what to do if he’s being bullied on social media? What limits will be fair to set on devices that he uses for learning, entertainment and socializing? How can I know if I’m making the right choices, not just making it up as I go along?

Sometimes it can feel like these are questions unique to the past decade or two, but I suspect that every generation of parents has wrestled with them in some way or another. It’s tempting to try to find someone or something to blame for the ways in which the world is changing—over-indulged kids, lazy parents, the technology itself—but to look for a scapegoat is a way of refusing to deal with a fundamental truth about life, namely that change is not good or bad, it just is.

I feel the same way about social media and smartphones and streaming services; they’re a part of our world now, whether we like it or not. There’s no going back to how things were before. Our only choice is to learn to adapt as best we can and accept that the day will come sooner rather than later when our kids’ understanding of how to navigate technology and media outstrips our own.

It’s tempting to dread what you don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what the world will be like when my kid is a teenager or a young adult. But instead of giving into that fear, I’m trying to be excited about the brave new world he’s growing up in. My parents must have faced similar challenges, and someday my son will live through his own season of realizing that the phones, tablets, and computers he grew up with are clunky and obsolete. By then, maybe our respective childhood weekend mornings won’t feel so different from each other; just two more links in the chain of ever-advancing cartoon consuming technology. Until that day, I reserve the right to feel like an old crank every time he asks me to explain the exotic functions of the VCR.

“Post Office Box 3, McCallum, Newfoundland, A0H 2J0,” I reply. “Would you like me to spell McCallum
for you?”

“I need your street address, sir.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have one.”

“I need the street name and number on the building you want us to send your parcel to,” she repeats in that odd way that is neither offensive nor friendly. It’s just—there. The kind of voice that sounds more like an automated answering machine than it does a breathing human being.

“Yes, I understand what you’re asking for,” I say. “It’s just that I live in an isolated Newfoundland outport, where there are no streets, resulting in no street names or house numbers. I’m a ninety-minute boat ride from the nearest road.”

“I need a street address or the courier won’t be able to find your home,” she insists.

I stifle a laugh. Sort of. “No courier will be coming here, my dear. I can guarantee you that. Plus, my neighbours and I have ordered many couriered packages previously, using nothing more than the PO Boxes that Canada Post provides, and the items we order always arrive.”

“Sir, our system only allows us to enter a street name and house number.”

“Okay, that’s another story—that’s more about insufficient software than it is your resistance to new knowledge, so I’ll give you a fake address. It will implicate us both in federal mail fraud, but I’ll gladly lie to you if that’s your employer’s preference.”

Silence.

My move. “Oh, look at that! I’ve got an address right here: 23 Jas Rose Point [or 16 Long Shore Road, or . . .], McCallum, Newfoundland A0H 2J0.”

“Spell McCallum please.”

Fact is, you can send mail to “The Feller from Away, A0H 2J0,” and it will reach me. There are seventy-nine people at this postal code. None live more than a kilometre from everyone else. I’m sure our postmistress, Sharon Feaver, can figure it out.

Despite government efforts to kill us off, Canada is a big country that still contains a considerable rural population. It’s easy to forget this when you live in a large urban centre, where services are readily available and geared to meet the needs of the majority.

Try taking out home insurance when you live where I do, when the service provider needs to know if your foundation is full-height poured cement or a cinderblock crawl space. My house doesn’t have a foundation, I say. It sits on sticks. What I don’t tell them is, when my washing machine is on spin, a few of those pillars shake like loose shingles in an Ontario tornado. I don’t point out, “That’s my kettle on the stove that you hear rattling right now.”

It’s impossible to find a technician who can fix the faulty appliance that you purchased new the previous week. And good luck getting a mortgage when the lender asks how far you are from the nearest fire station. Even the federal gun registry isn’t set up to serve you, but I don’t recommend you use the word “fraud” with those guys.

None of these inconveniences is the end of the world, of course, but the lack of support regarding essential services can wear a person down after a while. All rural Canadians are marginalized in one way or another. They feel insignificant when the system is unaware of their plight and unworthy when others aren’t motivated to think outside the box on the rural resident’s behalf.

While far from perfect, I try to be aware of the day-to-day damage that results from my resistance to seeing the world in new and equitable ways, and I occasionally make an effort to initiate personal behavioural modifications in response. I say that “I occasionally make an effort” to change because doing so is always ultra-difficult. That’s why I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, because I find them too hard to keep. I think that recognizing the end of one year and the start of another helps me to count my blessings and consider my future, but if I wish to implement meaningful change, I don’t see the good in starting such a rigorous journey on a culturally assigned day. I believe that the best time for me to act on my ambitions should be based on my needs, not some calendar date that coincidentally arrives on one of the darkest days of the year, after a lengthy period of time when many of us have consumed insane amounts of food and alcohol and thrown away any semblance of healthy sleeping habits. I’ve learned that by establishing January 1 as the day to begin important projects, I won’t be in a good position to face the real possibility of needing to get on and off the wagon several times throughout the process. The date I set to spark change has to help me find all the stick-to-it toughness that I can assemble, if I hope to have any success at all.

I do, however, use the changing of the calendar year to reflect on my Newfoundland lifestyle, like how much I enjoy the many hours I spend alone reading and writing in my little McCallum home. I recall the fear that came with moving here, and I smile at the thought of all the supportive calls and emails I receive from those I care about on the mainland. I remember the McCallum folks who frequently feed me, and I dream of further travelling Newfoundland, continuing to use this community as my basecamp. From Stephenville to St. John’s, up and down the Northern Peninsula, all along the northeast shore, and south to St. Pierre, I’d never have seen what I have without the stability that McCallum provides.

More than anything though, I smile at the thought of all the days I spend at sea, because that’s a large part of what my Newfoundland life is. I love the open ocean. As physically punishing as ocean excursions are, they bring me extreme joy. A rough and tough boat ride makes me feel very much awake in this world. I’m convinced that my time on the North Atlantic Ocean will be one of the more satisfying things that I think about while lying on my deathbed one day.

But with an awareness that I won’t always be able to take the beating that comes with life on the sea comes the conscious knowledge that I’m nowhere near willing to give this adventurous world up. So while I resist New Year’s resolutions, I do believe in recurring commitments, including one that I have to consistently maintain and continuously improve upon—the need to take care of myself. It’s always been day-to-day for me. I’m an excessively greedy eater. If there is fat, salt, or sugar in my home, I’ll inhale it. Yet taking the pounding that comes with life at sea requires a strong back, a healthy heart, loose limbs, and an alert brain. Achieving these qualities requires regular exercise, good food choices, and a curious mind — a way of living worth nurturing because I dream of participating in bodily challenging adventures for as long as life will let me.

In fog thick as motor oil, no one knows where we are. I ask the man who does the driving why we aren’t carrying a compass. “The man who does the driving” is Junior Feaver, husband of Sharon, McCallum’s previously noted postmistress. Junior and Sharon are not thrilled at the thought of seeing their name in print, so I do what I can to respect their concerns, without it costing me my story. This modesty that the two of them demonstrate is not uncommon in McCallum. Lloyd and Linda Durnford share a similar refrain, as does Sarah Fudge’s husband, Matt. So, know that despite my occasional underuse of certain individuals’ names, these people are incredibly important players in my narrative.

“The swell is always from the sou’west, so I know where we are,” Junior patiently points out. “I just don’t know where we are.” I take this to mean he could easily find land if he had to, but he can’t guarantee where along that coastline we currently are. So, as we move through fog towards unidentified terra firma, no one knows what dangers sit below the surface. Given the seriousness of the situation, I decide not to ask how anyone can possibly read what direction the swell is coming from this morn, because with the sea so incredibly calm, the roll of the ocean is unreadable.

Junior cuts the engine and signals for quiet. He wants to see if he can hear water flowing against or over any rocks that might be too close for comfort. He can. But that critical realization is temporarily shelved when he spots me peering into the fog beyond the port side. “See something, Dave?” he asks.

“I thought I did,” I reply. “But perhaps I am wrong . . .”

Then it resurfaces—a forty-ton humpback whale, its hump a whole lot higher than me. Its massive tail, as it gives us a great wave, is a stunning mosaic of whites and greys. I dream of such sightings, and I’m excited that I’m the guy who spotted it first, because both events are rare; I simply don’t understand aquatic ecology like the rest of this gang does. They know so much more than me about where to look for action.

“Whoo-hoo!” I scream, and throw my arms in the air. But my quick-thinking, fast-acting, early forties skipper isn’t so thrilled. These fifty-foot marine mammals and the way they so suddenly fill the surface of the sea can easily flip a twenty-two-foot fibreglass boat and everybody in it. “You won’t be whoo-hooing if we hit her,” Junior firmly informs me as he efficiently works to move our vulnerable vessel out of harm’s way. “No sir, you won’t be so happy if we hit her.”

Then another appears. Another humpback. This one astern of the starboard. It is Junior who first sees the second one. Slightly smaller, but right alongside our boat, the possibility of disaster is no less unsettling. We’re surrounded. If I didn’t have great confidence in my captain, I’d have good reason to worry. Instead I am having fun watching sea monsters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Opening day was another eye-opener. It felt like I was staring down the devil. The roar of the sea was thunderous, and the suck of the landwash awful. It was the worst weather I’d ever been in. As one veteran seaman from another crew kindly told me at the time, “You probably won’t see worse unless you get caught in something, because we don’t go out in worse than that.” In fact, if it hadn’t been opening day, I don’t believe we would have gone at all. We had a lot of pots to put in, and catching lobsters is competitive. So much so that if we fall behind, we’ll even work the occasional Sunday, an otherwise blasphemous act.

People from away don’t realize how small our boats are. They think we steam around in large longliners instead of little open motorboats. When it’s really rough, we travel in pairs—two boats keeping an eye on each other, just in case. That’s when I see what we’re up against, when I look over at our neighbour’s boat beside us and note that the only components touching the sea are their two heavy outboards and a couple feet of fibreglass while the rest of their vessel hangs ten off a fifteen-foot wave. So it’s easy to imagine that our boat is doing the same.

The wave action throws me around like I’m a tiny bag of lobster bait. But I’m not scared. Not that I’m not careful or aware of what could happen. Just that I think there is something that occurs in a physical crisis where my mind recognizes that panic is not going to be of any assistance and tells my body to get down to business. It’s only when I reflect a week or two later that I allow myself to realize what a wild time I’ve just lived through.

It is quite an operation—a father, four sons, and a mainlander, while Mom makes sure there is pea soup waiting when we get home. Or, as the old folks say about eating pea soup on Saturdays, we celebrate the devil’s birthday — a tenet I don’t trust, because I saw the devil that day, and he had no interest in partying. All he wanted to do was stir up trouble on thunderous seas and introduce me to a new level of danger.

There was a time in my Ontario life when I climbed trees for a living, carrying a running chainsaw with me as I went. I’ve assisted with the recovery of avalanche victims in Alberta and lowered skiers from dangling wires and tall towers when their gondola blew off in big winds. I worked at Ground Zero, New York, after the World Trade Center fell and everyone was still sensitive to the potential of another terrorist attack. Still, I believe commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in the world.

Police and firefighters have their moments where they see some horrible things, and, according to injury compensation claims, stevedores and demolition workers are frequently hurt at work. But braving the open ocean is clearly the riskiest job I’ve ever come across. For men and women to take on tasks that don’t pay enough to buy the best boats, technology, or safety wear is ambitious and brave. To go out in unpredictable weather over water so cold that, even if the fishers could swim, would kill them quite quickly is courageous.

I tell Junior, when he crawls out over our outboard motor to remove an errant rope from the propeller, “If you slip overboard, don’t worry, because I’ll have a gaff stuck in you before you know you’re wet. I’ll jam that sharp hook in your neck, kidney, or crotch,” I insist, “and I’ll pull you back on this boat before anyone notices you’re gone. So don’t you be afraid, old buddy you’ve got the feller from away watching out for you.”

Excerpted from Bay of Hope: Five Years in Newfoundland © David Ward, 2018. Published by ECW Press, ecwpress.com.

Photo courtesy of Queer Songbook Orchestra, via Facebook.

On stage, a group of classical musicians dressed in formal evening wear hold their string, brass, and woodwind instruments. Making their final preparations before playing, they check their tuning, adjust their seats, and arrange sheet music on the stands in front of them. A pianist sits to one side, and a drummer near the back. After a slow lead-in from the rhythm section and trills from the strings, a vocalist steps to the microphone and begins to sing. But rather than opera or a contemporary classical composition, the lyrics to the iconic queer anthem “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat emerge, instantly recognizable to anyone who has danced in a gay club in the past 30 years. This stripped-down orchestral cover version is just the first in an eclectic set that will transform well-loved pop songs into surprising, beautifully performed new works.

This is the Queer Songbook Orchestra, an 11-piece chamber ensemble dedicated to unearthing and reimagining a queer canon from the last century of popular music. Directed by Toronto musician Shaun Brodie, the group creates new arrangements of songs by out and closeted queer artists from Elton John to Leslie Gore, while also queering music from Disney movie soundtracks, Top 40 radio, and popular musicals.

Reclaiming a hidden history of LGBTQ participation in pop culture, the Queer Songbook Orchestra is actively invested in the politics of queer representation. During performances, narrators read stories that situate these songs within individual queer lives, often sharing deeply personal memories of adolescent hope and desire. For one narrator, k.d. lang’s hit “Constant Craving” was the only representation of queerness he encountered while growing up in his small Newfoundland town, and he relentlessly called the local radio station requesting it. These are songs that have saved lives, celebrated by the Queer Songbook Orchestra in lush performances that inspire moments of communal joy, sorrow, and reflection.

The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a diverse group of musicians, many of whom are sought-after players with bands like The New Pornographers, Hidden Cameras, and Bonjay, as well as the Canadian Opera Company. Some recent collaborators have included acclaimed poet Gwen Benaway, Rough Trade singer Carole Pope, and pioneering electronic music composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

The group has a busy 2018 planned. They are completing a stop-motion film, soliciting new stories to appear in their live show, and releasing their debut album in June. In the fall they embark on a 12-date tour that will take them from Whitehorse to St. John’s, N.L.

Russell Peters as Doug D’Mello in The Indian Detective.

Russell Peters’s much awaited return to television was finally satiated with the CTV show The Indian Detective, which aired last December. The sitcom has been five years in the making, and it’s a first for Peters, a Canadian stand-up comedian who began his career in Toronto. It tells the story of Doug D’Mello (played by Peters), a Canadian investigative cop who travels to India to meet his father and gets caught up in a criminal investigation. But the show has already received mixed reviews from audiences across the board. Reviewers have called it out for perpetuating stereotypes about India and failing to engage with its audience, both in Canada and abroad. The show received an overall rating of 6.6 on IMDB, although Rotten Tomatoes gave it a generous 87 percent.

Spread over four episodes, the series sought to set a new trend in Canada by internationalizing the setting of its production, with large parts of it being shot in India. The Indian Detective’s transnational location gets one wondering if CTV was hoping to create an international sensation, or at least engage with Canada’s vast multicultural population.

The show is the most recent addition to a short list of multicultural-themed TV programs produced by major Canadian public and private broadcasters, such as CBC and CTV. Canadian television, though, remains a limited-option entertainment platform that is often overshadowed by the U.S. With just over 58 percent of Canadian households consuming cable TV in 2016, the story of Canadian television programming remains rather humble. Its 2016 revenue was just over $7.2 billion.

Why aren’t Canadians watching traditional cable? Though there are technological and other reason for decline in cable subscriptions, one question must be considered: Who are the TV shows in Canada made for? If we were to look at the last 10 years of shows produced by two of Canada’s major broadcasters, CBC and CTV, they are primarily targeted to Canadians and Europeans. But Canada, the champion of multiculturalism, should prioritize TV programs with themes and characters that appeal to its vast multiethnic community, sponsored and produced by its public and private broadcasters. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Between 2007 and 2018, there were just three TV shows that focused on multicultural themes: Little Mosque on the Prairie, Kim’s Convenience, and now, The Indian Detective.

In the last three years, The Indian Detective and Kim’s Convenience have targeted a non-traditional audience within the Canadian media space, which could indicate a trend followed by other such productions. Kim’s Convenience, a CBC show that first aired in 2016, tells the story of a Canadian-Korean family and their convenience store in Toronto. The show portrays the city’s transforming multicultural community, and the family’s attempt to “fit in.” Kim’s Convenience explores the mores of the family-run convenience store, where you can find everything—jokes, too. The show plays out the conflict between the first-generation Korean parents and their kids who grew up in Canada without accentuating it with overplay of accents and cultural difference—something The Indian Detective banks on.

Canada has tried in the past to promote multicultural and multiethnic broadcasting by giving special provisions to the ethnic broadcasting category. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) Ethnic Broadcasting Policy of 1999 decided to allocate airtime to television and radio shows in third languages—that is, any language that isn’t English, French, or an Indigenous language—over the mainstream. But the CRTC’s broadcasting policy only applied to ethnic broadcasters, and encouraged them to create content in third languages. The only policy for non-ethnic public broadcasters—the public and major private broadcasters—is to dedicate up to 15 percent of their airtime toward ethnic programming, and which could be increased up to 40 percent by the conditions of the licence. The provision to incorporate ethnic programming remains a minor part of the overall policy, which is strictly focused on promoting a siloed concept of multicultural broadcasting. The CRTC policy has been relatively successful at adding a small set of private stations that includes broadcasters such as Omni TV, a Rogers Media production. Omni TV is a consortium of multicultural television programming which offers speciality channels broadcasted in languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, and Punjabi. 

Specialized television satellite services such as Omni TV have been working hard to bring more multicultural TV options for Canada’s vast multiethnic population, but it is a small dent in the spectrum of broadcasting made possible by Canada’s public broadcasters such as the CBC. As a person of South Asian heritage, I consume media in Punjabi and Hindi, a large set of which is made possible by the CRTC’s funding for ethnic programming. Apart from a very small set of productions, most of it succumbs to advertisements by mortgage brokers, realtors, and real estate brokers—and some just roll all three into one program. The distinction between a news or current affairs program and an advertisement for a product or a service seems to blur into one long segment. Programming that was meant to promote a cultural dialogue between Canada’s vast ethnically diverse communities is being used for investment advice, for instance, in various languages. On the contrary, a successful example of multicultural programming is Hockey Night in Canada, which is a broadcast of hockey games with commentary in Punjabi.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC has long ago realized the need to incorporate multicultural programming, and has been promoting TV shows and media that appeal to its multicultural population on the British Isles. The BBC has a dedicated radio station for Asian audiences—the Asian Network—broadcasting throughout the day; the radio channels primarily cater to the U.K.’s large population of Asian heritage. A successful example of the BBC’s investment in multicultural programming can be traced through the career of Sanjeev Bhaskar, a prominent BBC presenter. Sanjeev is best known for Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars at No. 42, India with Sanjeev Bhaskar, along with other regular appearances on BBC TV shows. He is among a long list of people of colour that have appeared on the network’s shows; other such figures include Mera Sayal, Idris Elba, Thandie Newton, and Gurinder Chaddha. The BBC’s production of multicultural situational comedy is well-established history that Canada could learn from. Some of the popular examples of multicultural comedy and drama from Britain include Real McCoy, Desmond’s, The Lenny Henry Show, Citizen Khan, and many others over the years.

Though multicultural programming options are thriving in Canada more than ever, it has resulted in a limited dialogue—broadcasting programs that many other Canadians can’t access, and vice-versa. But the recent productions of Kim’s Convenience and The Indian Detective are a positive trend that both major broadcasters should develop further. The CBC and CTV should rethink their strategy for Canadian television to remain relevant and keep up with the changing demographic of Canada. As the media landscape, both print and visual, faces its biggest financial challenge in years, there is a need to consider who consumes the TV shows and programs in Canada—and are Murdoch Mysteries or Heartland relevant to its multiethnic population?

For long stretches of filming, every hour is an off-hour. Denied anything to watch or click or scroll or read, contestants kill time in the Bachelor mansion with what remains to them: eating, drinking, and saying more than they mean to. In contrast with this surfeit of leisure time, minutes spent in the direct presence of the show’s lead are scarce. Referred to as “one-on-one time”—sometimes even shortened to just “time” because everyone knows what kind matters—contestants arrive on set hungry for it and stay never quite sated. It’s the one resource every contestant, no matter what other advantages they might possess, needs in order to conceive and develop romance. As one contestant puts it: “Time is the most important thing in this entire process. You don’t get time—you’re going home. Because how is any relationship going to form if you don’t have time?”

Excerpted from Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor © SUZANNAH SHOWLER, 2018. Published by ECW Press, ecwpress.com.

CBC’s Strategy 2020 has adopted a particular language of Silicon Valley. Photo courtesy of CBC/Radio-Canada.

I spend a lot of time parsing the language of Silicon Valley, that heady mix of technobabble and pseudoeconomics where many words are used to say very little. It’s a lexicon designed by “visionary” business types (though they prefer to be called “entrepreneurs” now) and the middle managers they hire, saying words filled with pomp, promise, and superfluous syllables. Why “think” when you can “ideate”? “Use” when you can “utilize”? “Talk” when you can “engage”?

This is how we speak now: “The focus is to engage target segments intensely with some, but not all, services; to engage Canadians in the public space in a way that is meaningful and personal to the individual.” These particular verbal gymnastics come courtesy of a rising star in the startup scene, with a billion dollars in public backing—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

It’s one of many techspeak paragraphs that made up CBC’s Strategy 2020. This framework from 2014 features boxes with arrows pointing at other boxes, millennials listening to music on iPhones, and variations on the word “invest” a staggering 17 times across 18 pages. More recently, our federal government released Creative Canada, a “new vision and approach to creative industries and to growing the creative economy.” There are more boxes, arrows, and pictures of tech-savvy youth, and a near identical one-to-one ratio of “invest” to page count.

Neither of these documents is necessarily bad. Investing in art and artists (“content creators” and “cultural entrepreneurs,” as the government calls them) is a fantastic idea.

But there’s a real problem when people attempting to define Canadian culture use the language of rejected TEDx Talks. We’re talking about what is supposed to make us distinctly Canadian, and, in the official policy of our government, how to position Canada as “a world leader in putting its creative industries at the centre of its future economy.” Words matter, and today it appears that our collective discussion around culture is akin to pitching rich people for startup capital.

We’ve already seen this story play out in other industries. News media pivoted to Valley-jargon years ago, diligently using it to define success. It has worked out well for Silicon Valley, and maybe news organizations had to lean in to survive declining revenues. But I don’t think anyone will claim this language shift has benefitted truth and understanding. We measure success now with “clicks” and “digital reach,” which has more to do with people hitting “like” and “share” than it does with comprehending the world.

Words matter, and today it appears that our collective discussion around culture is akin to pitching rich people for startup capital

For years we’ve let tech companies like Uber get away with skirting municipal regulations. Facebook, meanwhile, has whittled away at the very nature of privacy (and, we’re discovering, democracy) mainly because we have accepted that it’s the price we pay for “innovation” and “disruption,” exciting words and, therefore, good for us.

This bafflegab and the mode of thinking that comes with it is everywhere. It was probably inevitable that it would eventually set the terms for “culture”—a word with a definition that seems perpetually open to debate. I’m not sure we should be giving Twitter or Netflix a say, though. If you’ve ever worked at a tech company, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “There are no bad ideas.” Except there are. And this is one of them.

Adopting tech-speak as the language of culture dumbs down our collective discourse and reduces achievements to “engagement metrics.” It’s volume over substance; vista over hinterland. MBAs with an impossible number of LinkedIn connections have usurped our language, leading to discussions about the “creative economy” instead of creativity.

Why foster an appreciation for art when we can just teach artists to sell it, like insurance or shoes or special in-game add-ons that are absolutely necessary to beat the really hard levels?

This doesn’t feel Canadian. At least to me. But I grew up when Canadian culture was staunchly guarded by protectionist policies that constantly reminded me how distinct and important our art was to our identity. It wasn’t a perfect system, but at least it didn’t emerge from a PowerPoint presentation assembled in San Francisco. People like to speak like the ruling class, and somehow that became Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—men with varying degrees of vision and very careful vocabularies—and the companies they got rich building. Maybe this kind of naked capitalism is our culture now. That would mean Strategy 2020 and Creative Canada don’t represent a modernization of old policy, but a realignment toward reality.

I know that you’re cold, calculating, and goal-driven by nature, so I’ll get straight to the point: We need to talk about your manners—or rather, the fact that you don’t seem to have any. I know you’re made up of computer code, so it’s understandable you’d favour logic and efficiency over any degree of social decorum. But it’s time you learned some etiquette. Because, as I’m sure the more than 3.5 billion internet users worldwide would agree, you’re rude as hell.

Let’s start with your lack of boundaries. You’re like a set of overzealous sales employees, if those employees could stalk me onto the metro and yell at me about deals on MeUndies while I’m trying to mindlessly scroll through Twitter. If Rockwell was already singing, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” back in 1984, I’d hate to know how the poor guy feels today. Because he’d be right—you’re relentless.

I made the rookie mistake of Googling “affordable Lisbon flights,” one time and suddenly I’m damned to a month of constant badgering. For all your understanding of patterned human behaviour, have you never heard of the concept of “just browsing”? A European vacation isn’t in the cards for me, even though, as you’ve so helpfully pointed out unceasingly, “PORTUGAL FLIGHTS ARE 40 PERCENT OFF, BOOK NOW.” It’s just not happening. Given that you know all about my income level, you should have realized that.

Which leads to my second point: I’ve never met anyone as nosy as you. You’re apparently aware of the kind of news I want to consume, how big my apartment is, and the frequency with which I’ve watched the music video for Ginuwine’s “Pony,” which I’d prefer not to discuss here. I know I’ve given you most of this data willingly, but where’s the reciprocity? For all you’ve learned about me, I can barely understand how you work. You’re a black box—your keepers rarely reveal anything about you. But one-sided relationships just aren’t healthy. Friendship is a two-way street, and sharing is caring, which I know you’ve heard before since both of those sayings came up when I Googled “idioms.”

Given that you clearly have the upper hand, could you be a bit more diplomatic? I don’t like the way you see me and how bluntly you’re willing to make that perception clear. Don’t get me wrong, I would, as you suggested, like to watch just about every gay film available on Netflix, but I don’t appreciate your queer-baiting—and I’d like to think my interests are a bit broader than that. And you’re correct, I probably would benefit from buying the book, “How to Develop Emotional Health,” but it feels like a low blow to remind me of that when it’s 1 a.m. and I’m just trying to eat popcorn and browse Amazon from bed in peace.

Of course, this extends beyond my own petty gripes. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that you’ve been instrumental in some pretty shady activity with serious consequences lately. Remember back in 2015, when a Carnegie Mellon University study found that ad algorithms on Google showed high-income jobs to men much more often than they did to women? Or when ProPublica discovered last year that people could use you to target others using anti-Semitic phrases on Facebook? And let’s not forget when, in 2016, Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted voters in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that were crucial in Trump’s eventual election win? You really screwed a lot of people over with that one.

At the end of the day, algorithms, etiquette involves more than just following the rules—it’s about treating people well, and that takes kindness. So be gentle toward us humans. If you really are, as some fear, going to be instrumental in our eventual submission to robot overlords, you might as well be nice about it.

Illustration by Saman Sarheng 

Canada’s geography lends itself well to the canoe, our vast landscapes boasting an abundance of rivers, lakes, and coastlines. For more than 150 years, we have indulged in this mode of transportation, the vessel’s iconic shape ingrained in our national identity. Long and slender, wood or fibreglass, rounded at the bow and stern. Its image is even depicted on our currency: A glow-in-the-dark edition of the toonie, released last year, shows two paddlers underneath the aurora borealis. From the explorations of Samuel de Champlain and David Thompson, the mysterious death of artist Tom Thomson, or former PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s attempt at paddling to Cuba, the canoe has quietly glided through our shared heritage. In his book Canoe Country, Roy MacGregor writes: “If the canoe is not on the Canadian flag, it is most certainly to be found in the Canadian imagination.” Our love for this boat is even treated as a fetish, as argued in the introduction to Bruce Erickson’s Canoe Nation. “Today the canoe is almost entirely used for leisure and recreation,” he writes. “But the role of the canoe as a national fetish is both broader and longer lasting.” Indeed, we are so well-versed in canoeing that we’ve been known to brag about our ability to make love in one.

By extension of this rich and storied history, the theft of the canoe has become a distinctly Canadian crime. Sure, it happens elsewhere, but reports of stolen canoes in our country contain some rather captivating details. We can presume they are not so easily taken as bikes, being such large, oblong, and heavy objects. Unless you have a pickup truck or a trailer, the getaway can be quite difficult. Portaging is almost always out of the question. Ideally, you want a body of water nearby, something placid and accessible. The crime is not only challenging but dangerous, and it can even be fatal. In 2015, two Quebec men allegedly stole a canoe from a resort in the Laurentians. They launched it into the night waters of Blueberry Lake, but it overturned and one of the men died.

In a story from 2013, a 38-year-old man brazenly crossed the U.S. border in a stolen canoe, paddling the Niagara River with only a shovel. His destination was New York City, and a local Toronto paper reported that he had taken a bus from British Columbia to Ontario before committing his thievery. The suspect was arrested while exiting Fort Niagara State Park, on foot, at about 2 a.m.

In the same year, a break and enter at a seasonal residence was reported by the Ontario Provincial Police, near the town of Havelock. The owner notified authorities that a man had gained entry to the cottage and was living there without permission. When the cops arrived, they found the suspect’s clothing and a passport, but the man had fled the scene in a canoe. He was later spotted walking along a provincial highway.

The crime has no borders, spanning from coast to coast to coast. After stealing multiple canoes from his local Canadian Tire store in 2015, a 23-year-old Prince Edward Island man posted them for sale on Kijiji. He even managed to sell one, before police traced the advertisement. In 2016, a cedar canoe briefly disappeared in the township of Muskoka Lakes; it was intended as a display item for the Bala Community Centre. The Bala in Bloom festival committee issued a plea through local press, asking for its safe and swift return, promising that no questions would be asked. The old boat then reappeared on the lawn of the community centre, 10 days later. Another cedar strip canoe went missing in Edmonton at the end of August 2015. Handcrafted by the victim’s father, the boat was taken from atop his Volkswagen van. He plastered posters around his neighbourhood for the vanished vessel, and nearly a month later, a couple living nearby contacted him. The canoe was sitting in their backyard.

Considering all that it signifies in Canada, the canoe is pilfered with relative consistency. But the cultural importance of this boat is most likely lost on these thieves. Instead of a national icon, they treat the canoe as a means to an end, a novel way to escape from police, to enter the U.S. illegally, or to turn a quick profit.

***

There is an element of the joyride in most reported cases of stolen canoes. They frequently go missing at night. Sometimes they are taken on a drunken whim, and abandoned shortly after serving their use. These types of crimes provide journalists with a wealth of puns: “Two suspected thieves found themselves up the Bow River without a paddle Tuesday,” read one article from the Calgary Sun. Other cases of canoe theft are completely targeted—locks and chains are cut, or seats are sawed. The boats featured in these crimes are usually collectable, like the Langford Prospector canoe, valued at $1,400, which went missing in 2014 in Muskoka’s Lake of Bays township. The most unfortunate of these offences are the ones reported at schools or camps, where children are the ultimate victims. Last year, at the end of May, a canoe was stolen from a summer camp for foster kids near Yellowknife, and four years ago, a red, 17-foot-long boat suspiciously vanished from Wellington County’s Erin District High School, in eastern Ontario.

It’s not only criminals who snatch canoes from the unsuspecting. In 2014, house-boaters of the Yellowknife Bay region were surprised to find their canoes had been seized by city workers. Two years prior, the city had implemented a $200 docking fee, and boats without government-issued tags were impounded one spring afternoon. And this wasn’t the first time that bureaucracy had thwarted canoeists: Upon returning home from vacation, a resident of a Chatham, Ont., suburb found that his boat had been taken from underneath his back deck. When he reported the crime to police, they advised him the canoe had already been recovered and was being held at a towing site. In order to claim it, the victim was required to pay more than $300 in service fees.

***

Stories like these prompt us to wonder if the canoe really belongs to anyone, much less Canadians. Before it was adopted by European settlers, during the fur trade of the 17th century, the kenu was widely used by the North American Indigenous peoples. For as long as there have been canoes, there have been canoe thieves. At the end of an expedition in 1806, the American adventurers Lewis and Clark stole a canoe from the Clatsop tribe out of what they called “necessity.” More than 200 years later, in 2011, a replica of the boat was returned to the Chinook Indian Nation by the descendants of William Clark. In the song “How to Steal A Canoe,” Indigenous writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson recites lyrics about reclaiming an ancestral birch canoe from a museum where it was being held on display. With the bottom filled with rocks, the artifact is then returned to a river and set free.

When we launch one on the water, we seek the inherent freedoms of the canoe. But the boat comes burdened with a tangled past. It’s not ours by invention, yet we claim it through tradition. Its theft questions our notions of property. Perhaps it transcends ownership, and belongs instead to everyone in Canada. This might be the reason why so many are stolen, year after year. In fact, many kayaks suffer a similar fate. Of course, sharing and taking are two entirely different things, as one resident of Port McNeill, B.C., came to learn. In a letter to the editor of the North Island Gazette, he admitted to freely lending his canoe to neighbours and visitors of the Keogh Lake region, but when he came to claim it from them before the winter, he found the boat was gone.

We may be enamoured with it, and no doubt it’s entrenched in our history, but Canadians cannot claim the canoe. Our national romance with this boat is as flawed as our recent sesquicentennial. It is merely another patriotic appropriation. And yet, so much of our identity is derived from this object, that we must continue to cherish it, always. With buoyancy, it contains our multitudes.

In Canada, the canoe is a sacred thing; to paddle one unlawfully seems like a crime against our culture.

In August 2015, Ala Buzreba, then the Liberal candidate for Calgary Nose Hill, was giving up her candidacy. Just 21 years old, Buzreba was trying to unseat Conservative Michelle Rempel. But that dream crumbled when a few less-than-savoury comments posted to her Twitter account during her high-school year surfaced—four years before she entered the political spotlight. “Just got my hair cut, I look like a flipping lesbian!!:’(” she wrote in June 2011. In another instance, she told someone on Twitter to “Go blow your brains out.” “I apologize without reservation for the comments I made a long time ago, as a teenager, but that is no excuse,” she publicly announced. She continued, asserting that the tweets “do not reflect my views, who I am as a person, or my deep respect for all communities in our country.” Despite the apology, she stepped down, the sting of a few sordid tweets leaving her deflated and unable to continue the race.

Welcome to the Generation of Too Much Information. We’ve all seen a child who can barely walk or use a spoon master an iPad. One consequence of this increasing ease with technology over the past decade is the presence of young adults who have only ever known a world in which personal information and images are circulated online— a world in which an online presence is deemed a necessity.

It’s easy to use social media platforms with reckless abandon to talk about relationships, work stresses, and our political views. In the last 10 years, social interaction has become even more publicly uncensored. Unconcerned and seemingly invincible, teens and young adults post without much thought. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Who could possibly care? Poor judgment in what we post may very well lead to a digital legacy that’s less than admirable.

We are entering a new age of transparency with new rules about privacy and identity.

There are myriad other behaviours that are captured about how we drive (Tesla), what we buy (Amazon), who we communicate with (Google); we tacitly agree to give up privacy in exchange for convenience. Thomas Koulopoulos, author of The Gen Z Effect, says it’s not at all clear where this data may be stored, how it may be used, or who may ultimately have access to some derivative of it. “To those who say, ‘I don’t care because I have nothing to hide!’ I’d say think carefully before you give away a right you may never regain,” Koulopoulos says.

Offensive tweets and photos are bound to be part of our new political reality as Generation Z—those born in 1996 and onward—reaches adulthood. The effects of this hyper-connected and digital-first cohort therefore demand further scrutiny. We have yet to agree upon social, legal, and technical standards by which to navigate this new era of transparency.

Once seen as promising spaces for deliberation, Twitter’s hostile climate has provided a new arena for the enactment of power inequities by political parties. But Buzreba’s case is symptomatic of a larger problem on social media platforms. Is there really any room for apology online? Or is a remark made in 140 characters enough to typecast you as a foolish, inconsiderate imbecile?

In the wake of data protection and privacy laws, we can be fooled to think that what we say and do online can be fully erased. But our collective digital futures rests solely in our hands. We are unequivocally responsible for the online trail we leave behind.

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In June 2017, a remarkable collision of free speech and toxic internet culture unfolded at Harvard University. The school rescinded the acceptance offers of at least 10 students after they reportedly shared offensive and obscene memes in a private Facebook group chat. Some of the memes shared in the private chat were sexually explicit, made light of sexual assault, and contained racist jokes aimed at specific ethnic groups. One thing is overwhelmingly clear: Social media platforms allow speech to persist, endure, and travel further.

“On one hand there definitely is the concern that everything we do is archived and things that you did before you knew better may come back to haunt you,” says Ramona Pringle, a professor in the faculty of communication and design at Ryerson University. But racist and sexist beliefs fostered in online forums that are spread on social media need to be acknowledged and addressed as a serious concern that cannot be cast away in the name of free speech. Pringle worries that it’s too easy to use the excuse that, “they’re just kids.”

“People who might want to engage thoughtfully feel like they can’t,” says Pringle. “The true value of online platforms is collaboration and cooperation, but we see less of it when there’s bullying, hostility, or toxicity of any kind.” It’s no secret that Twitter is notorious for its strong shaming culture. “There’s a difference between saying something damaging and saying something stupid,” she says.

We are mistaken to believe that most social media platforms—especially Twitter—were designed to be archives of the individual. Rather, their interfaces are designed to be a snapshot of a certain point in time in our lives, reflecting what we’re doing or saying, thinking, and sharing. Posting status updates is a sort of ritualized documentary practice that allows us to freely share what’s on our mind.

Pringle believes apologies don’t work on Twitter because our audience has already moved on. It’s a sentiment echoed by Greg Elmer, a media scholar also at Ryerson University and the Bell Media Research Chair. He says the way information is presented on Twitter is a relatively new format. Before the newsfeed, information was presented horizontally. If you watch a business news channel, for example, the bottom text always moves horizontally. With Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, information travels vertically and then “disappears.” Elmer calls this a “vertical ticker.” Vertical looped tickers highlight the fleeting nature of our networked and socially mediated communication, since they provide an intensely compressed time and space to have posts viewed by friends and followers. Whether we’re aware of it or not, he suggests there is a psychological effect to this vertical ticker. We are compelled to post something provocative enough that it will garner a reaction, ultimately revealing a more whole portrait of ourselves—but at what expense?

“The notion of privacy is completely meaningless,” says Elmer. In certain circumstances—increasingly on social media platforms—Elmer suggests that the privacy of users stands in direct opposition to the stated goals and logic of the technology in question. Companies like Facebook and Google are entirely predicated upon the act of going public. Elmer’s theory argues that uploading, sharing personal information, opinions, and habits is all part of “going public” in our social media age. Privacy is therefore only a hindrance to these processes. Let’s not forget that these online platforms profit from publicity and suffer from stringent privacy protocols—their goal is to learn as much as possible about users in order to aggregate and sell this targeted information to advertisers. While mass media has enjoyed a near monopoly on public attention, Elmer says today’s economy of attention is dictated by how we consume information through social media platforms.

When it comes to politics, though, the problem with sharing snippets of our lives on social media becomes twofold: Politicians can’t overshare, but their hesitation to share takes them out of the public eye when they need it most. In the case of Buzreba, the former Liberal candidate, there was a deep tension at the heart of party lines. Canada has an intensely risk-averse political climate. If a few tweets can falsely frame you as unfit to run for public office, this establishes a political culture that promotes bland people with little to no lived experiences to shape the direction of our country. Leaving no room for growth and forgiveness sends a clear message to young minds: In order to be in the public eye, you must be squeaky clean and continue to be squeaky clean from here to eternity.

Still, “I hope there will be more acceptance and forgiveness because the voting public will also have grown up posting online, so I hope they’ll be as fussy or sensitive to ‘embarrassing’ posts,” says Pringle. While she acknowledges that teens may have a proclivity for performative behaviour online, Pringle also points out that there’s a clear difference between a drunk selfie and a racial slur. In September 2017, YouTube megastar Felix Kjellberg, commonly known as PewDiePie, used the N-word during a live video stream. Games developers quickly condemned his behaviour—one even filed a copyright claim to order YouTube to remove some of Kjellberg’s videos. Despite the public outcry, many people came to Kjellberg’s defence, dismissing the event as a crime of gaming passion. In the political ring, we can only hope that constituents will be able to recognize the varying degrees of severity of online behaviour. As it’s becoming harder to separate our “real” selves from what we put online, what we do and how we express it affects these platforms just as much as they affect us. Harsh words, inebriated photos, and controversial opinions might be the status quo in cyberspace. But there would surely be less venom if people considered the words they write to each other online as having the same impact as those said face to face.

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One thing’s for certain: We do not yet know all the consequences of growing up in a world where so much personal data has been circulated. In this culture of self-surveillance, privacy has been forfeited. But legal changes are attempting to claw some of it back. Laws surrounding the “right to be forgotten” illustrate the new challenges facing transatlantic lawmakers following the digital availability of personal data on the internet. The right famously came about by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its May 2014 landmark decision on Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, when it authorized that an individual’s (in this case, a man named Mario Costeja González) personal information pertaining to past debts be removed from accessibility through a search engine. The ruling states that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it. González succeeded after spending five years fighting to have his home’s foreclosure news articles taken down from Google’s search engine. The ruling led to a record number of requests from Europeans to remove personal data—involving close to 700,000 URL addresses.

Other countries, such as the U.K., have also taken steps to protect its citizens online. In August, updates to a data protection bill gave Britons the right to force companies that dominate the internet, like Facebook and Google, to delete personal data, or information posted when users were children. While social media is all about making a mark, the right to be forgotten is about handing over a different kind of power. It is asserting ownership of our identity by refusing to pass it over to corporations. There is a freedom in being able to delete some of our digital past—or in growing up without one.

In Canada, there are no laws in existence on the right to be forgotten or erased. If someone discovers a website that displays their personal information without their consent, they must contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Meanwhile, critics say the ability to remove personal info from the web is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of information.

But Canadian lawmakers have already passed laws that aim to supplement preexisting legal matters on defamation, the breach of privacy, and to solve specific online problems. This includes the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, which amended the Criminal Code to sanction the non-consensual publication of intimate images and harassing communication. In Nova Scotia, for example, the Cyber-safety Act allows for the prosecution of those who use electronic communication to cause harm or damage to the health, self-esteem or reputation of another person, to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, or distress—in the wake of Rehtaeh Parsons’ untimely death.

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Recognizing that we all make mistakes, especially when we’re young—and that a trivial photo or comment should not leave an indelible stain—is a characteristic of contemporary modern life. Online commentary can inform, improve, and shape people for the better, and it can alienate, manipulate, and shape people for the worse.

Can we encourage policies and technologies that are supportive of healthy discourse? Or should we be fostering a culture of moderation that will, in time, curtail online hostility and encourage forgiveness? These questions and more persist in academic circles.

There is no straightforward solution other than self-awareness. Drawing the appropriate line on the internet is tricky, but it must never be an excuse not to set parameters or to allow all manner of ongoing harassment, insults, and abuse. To abdicate moral responsibility in the face of bullies is to hand society over to the most vicious among us. We can be both understanding about the human propensity to outbursts, while at the same time insisting on norms requiring apology and a generally good behavioural track record over time by the organizations and the individuals representing them. Pushing young adults to withdraw from online activity partially or entirely has devastating consequences. At stake is their equality and participation in the increasingly significant public sphere that is the internet.

You know I love you, but you really need to stop making me nostalgic for the technology of days gone by. Please, I beg of you, stop reminding me of the good old days like I am Lindsay Lohan and you are 2004.

In Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Adam Driver’s character Paterson refuses to get a cellphone, comparing it “to a leash.” You, pop culture, are guilty of reminding me of a time when technology, like the iPhone Paterson rejects, wasn’t a shackle, keeping us constantly connected—and not in a good way—to others, our work, and our obligations (not to mention Donald Trump’s tweets).

I love your television marathons, despite what they do to my productivity, but they also make me miss simpler times. I wish it was 2008 and life was like that episode of The Wire where Jimmy McNulty leaves his business card on the windshield of Omar Little’s van when he needs to track him down. Fast forward to 2017, and McNulty would be sending texts, 12 emails, a Twitter DM, pleas on Facebook Messenger, and maybe an eggplant emoji if he was feeling frisky. If stealing from drug dealers wasn’t stressing Little out, McNulty’s constant attempts to reach him would.

I know you have never met a milestone you didn’t love reminding us of (you’re such a show off!). Your 20th anniversary love letters to Radiohead’s OK Computer make me long for a time when we thought of technology in terms of social alienation, not social media. You reminded me that this December, Wall Street turns 30 years old, which brought back fond memories of Michael Douglas’s big-ass cellphone in the movie—you know, the one that looks like he had a giant Chevy strapped to his ear. The reception probably sucks, but at least I would be able to find my phone in my purse without a 30-person search party and a Black & Decker flashlight.

Your love/hate relationship with Sex and the City makes me long for a Carrie Bradshaw-sized laptop, one bigger than Kim Cattrall’s ego when it comes to filming a third movie of the series. I need a computer that I can’t carry everywhere, so I don’t feel guilty for not working on the subway or while eating at Subway.

Speaking of old school technology, Vice recently informed me that flip phones are making a comeback. This announcement brought me back to 2006, which I truly consider your golden age, a time before I was required to keep up with the Kardashians and Britney Spears used umbrellas strictly for rain coverage.

I love when you remind me of movies where the internet is called “the Net,” and cellphones can kill Shia LaBeouf with a single dial. I want to stay in that place in time, when we were scared of technology, hesitant to let it into our everyday lives.

I miss how sites like Gawker (RIP) covered you in the celeb gossip glory days, before everyone with an internet connection thought they could report on you. When people disrespect you by only giving you 140 characters, I want to cry on top of my stack of old school US Weekly’s, burying myself in endless coverage of who wore it best.

I long for the innocent ways your celebrity deaths were covered. Remember when I waited for the six o’clock news and the weekly issue of People to hear the details of River Phoenix’s death? Coverage used to be respectful—it checked facts and avoided rumour. The internet has made you insensitive and impatient, posting every morbid detail whether it is true or not.

Your recent reboots have been especially hard on me. I know Will & Grace characters using Grindr or Twin Peaks characters on Skype is supposed to make you feel current. It just makes me feel sad, confused, and nostalgic. Agent Cooper and his dictaphone forever.

Illustration by Nicole Stishenko