IMAGE BY © HOME BOX OFFICE, INC.

My decision to watch Flavor Flav over Tony Soprano was, at the time, a no-brainer. On March 12, 2006, I had two television options: a viewing party of the first episode of the final, and sixth, season of HBO’s hit crime drama The Sopranos or a solo session with the first season ender of VH1’s Flavor of Love, a Bachelor-style reality show starring Public Enemy’s Flav and his big clock.

While I anxiously tuned in to see whether Flav would choose Hoopz or New York, it felt like the rest of the world was in New Jersey. That spring day in 2006 was the closest I came to an episode of The Sopranos, sitting out the show’s previous five seasons, ignoring its 111 Emmy nominations and glossing over its numerous accolades, including best-written television series of all time honours from the Writers Guild of America. But try as I might, I could never fully escape the show. It came up often in conversations, box sets caught my eye when there were still video stores to rent them from, and friends regularly shamed me for never having watched a single episode.

A few months ago, I finally caved. A woman can only live on the Jersey Shore surrounded by teen moms for so long. As my Facebook feed filled up with Donald Trump stories and the world started to resemble a bad reality show, I craved good writing and smart storytelling. Top chefs and models, once my escape from the outside world, couldn’t save me from a reality that looked like an episode of The Apprentice gone off the rails. I hit play on the first episode and never looked back. Tony had his ducks, Carmela had her priest, A.J. had his baby fat, and I had a new favourite show. I may have been tardy to the party, but it still felt wonderful.

The Sopranos was definitely great TV, but there was another reason I loved it: None of my friends or family were watching it. To find mentions of the show on social media or the internet I had to use search functions and other Google wizardry. There was no spoiler alert shaming, no front-page analysis, and no water cooler conversation—what old people did before Facebook. It felt like I was the only one watching a show, and for the first time in a very long time TV didn’t feel stressful.

Binge watching has turned television into a competitive sport. A marathon, but with, hopefully, less sweat. Now we’re not only judged by what we watch, but by how much we consume. How many episodes did you watch this weekend? How many in one sitting? Only one season, where’s your commitment to the cause?

Before binge watching became fashionable, being camped out on my couch all weekend in dirty Roots sweatpants and a stained Mudhoney shirt, eating chip dip with my finger, and watching Laguna Beach was just called lazy. Now I am shamed if I don’t forgo sleep for days to mainline the new season of House of Cards the minute it is released. Netflix and chill has become anything but, well, chill.

Watching The Sopranos alone I felt chill. There wasn’t a pressure to keep up so I watched at my own pace, often leaving the show for days at a time. Social media may make television feel like a communal experience, but it can also mean we spend more time watching Twitter than the actual program. I read Sopranos commentary, but I didn’t feel like I was cramming for an exam. Gone was that overwhelming morning-after need to impress my co-workers with analysis and behind-the-scenes facts.

With each new season of The Sopranos I felt more alive, even as the mob hits piled up. I returned to scenes and episodes, savouring them in a way that’s impossible with binge watching. At last count I watched the scenes where Tony strangles Ralphie and he and Christopher deal with the aftermath at least 12 times. I cried alone on my couch when Adriana was killed, wondered aloud to myself whether Ben Kingsley actually would have been right for Cleaver, and cringed along with my cat at the homophobia Vito experienced. The Sopranos was mine and mine alone. It was bliss.

When I finally got to the last episode I waited. This June marks the 10th anniversary of the finale so another day or two didn’t matter. “Not now Tony,” I would say setting my remote control on the coffee table. There was no build-up, no must-see TV moment. It didn’t bother me that I already knew how it ended and that some obsessed fans of the show can’t hear “Don’t Stop Believin” without feeling culturally short-changed. I loved the ending, but I haven’t talked to anyone about it. It is still all mine.

I have decided to get into The Wire next. I heard it’s good and it has that annoying guy from The Affair.

Illustration by Matt Daley

Why the Canadian government needs to hit refresh on its digital strategies

When former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood in the House of Commons and proclaimed that anyone who didn’t support the government’s new Lawful Access legislation was standing with the child pornographers, the Internet collectively decided he was being ridiculous. When MP Dean Del Mastro compared ripping a CD to buying socks and then stealing shoes (because, you know, feet), the Internet collectively decided he was being profoundly stupid.

The Internet wasn’t wrong.

And it’s not that Toews is a ridiculous guy or that Del Mastro is actually stupid, but there’s a disconnect between the digital policies they’re advocating and the way people actually use digital technology. Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you support molesting children and converting your music collection doesn’t make you a thief. Obviously.

This isn’t strictly an attack on the current Conservative government. Previous governments didn’t really have to deal with these issues. Consider how far we’ve come since Stephen Harper first came to power in 2006, before the iPhone was a thing or the words “big” and “data” had collided in a sentence. But newness doesn’t excuse the tenuous grasp elected officials like Toews and Del Mastro have on both the technical and cultural aspects of modern technology. Either they aren’t the right people to be working on these policies or, more frightening, it’s a problem that permeates the entire House of Commons—a group whose average age is 53, with only a handful of millennials (the only generation with the opportunity to have internalized so many digital issues) who all belong to the minority opposition.

Whether it’s age or politics, the sitting government has already repeatedly whiffed on digital policy. Most disappointing was when Industry Minister James Moore introduced Digital Canada 150 in April, a strategy document designed to put digital priorities front and centre, but was  panned for lacking any sort of real vision or concrete plans (Michael Geist called it a strategy document lacking much in way of actual strategy). It was a document that took a staggering four years to produce, which means much of the data used pre-dates the iPad and Netflix streaming and a lot of other things we take for granted today.

The shortcomings of Digital Canada 150 became apparent with subsequent legislation. Bill C-13, officially the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, was supposed to be a huge step toward combatting cyberbullying. Unfortunately, it also includes a pile of provisions that have nothing to do with cyberbullying, and has been strongly criticized for allowing investigative overreach without judicial oversight, while stripping away the privacy protections many Canadians assume they have. It’s a wide-reaching bill that was heavily scrutinized by a small group of people who enjoy heavily scrutinizing these things, but was largely sold to the general public as something that would save our kids from the scourge of bullies on the Internet. In short, C-13 has never received the public discussion it deserves and, while not straight out of 1984, does have an Orwellian feel to it.

More curious than sinister was Bill C-23, the much discussed Fair Elections Act. In a world where we can pay bills, buy groceries, and file taxes online, C-23 offers substantial electoral reform without ever broaching the subject of online voting. In fact, the infrastructure needed to make online voting a reality isn’t really on anyone’s roadmap, which is crazy if you really think about it. (This isn’t just a Canadian problem and, oddly, it’s Estonia that leads the way with a comprehensive digital identification program that’s required at every level of government.)

Technology touches everything—justice, privacy, resources, copyright, access to information, entertainment, democracy itself—so robust and complex digital policies are necessary. It’s not just enough that our politicians understand this stuff, which they mostly don’t (if you don’t believe me, you haven’t listened to an MP try to clearly and accurately define “metadata” or “net neutrality”), they need to ensure we understand it, too. Balance on these issues is important: balance between companies and consumers, law enforcement and citizens, government and taxpayers. But keep in mind that half of all of those equations is people—we are the consumers and citizens and taxpayers. And, generally speaking, when an issue isn’t being widely discussed and properly understood, it’s the people that are getting screwed.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.