Is Canada Boring? : How the Media Influences Engagement (Week 5)

After having studied the subject of community engagement for the past several weeks, the most pressing question within the field seems to be how to get people to engage in conversations about their community.  And, after studying this question, again, for several weeks, the only thing that has become clear is that there is no one-size-fits-all remedy that will inspire thousands of (very different) people to rally around a part of their lives that we have been encouraged to neglect.  We are now living in the so-called “Age of Isolation”, where our strongest connection to the outside world (including our physical community) is the media that we choose to consume.  In Canada, we are uniquely situated in that we are the next-door neighbour to the biggest mass-media producing powerhouse in the world, the United States.  As such, we are constantly exposed to American culture, American issues, American entertainment, and most importantly for the purposes of this subject, American politics.

American media, by having access to a vastly larger audience, and thus, an exponentially larger budget than its Canadian counterpart is, almost as a rule, better produced than Canadian media.  Because of this, American media is by and large, more interesting and satisfying to consume than Canadian media, including American news outlets.  News stories in the U.S. are presented as narratives with polarizing figures that, depending on your stance, are either “good” or “bad”.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the American political sphere, which runs solely on a two-party system.  By engaging in this system you, by necessity, have to make a choice as to where you stand.   Of course, in doing so, you are also declaring what you do not stand for, and thus the political narrative has been created; your side, of course, represents the protagonist, while the other is the irrational, immoral, and frankly stupid antagonist.

Canadian politics, with its multiple, amorphous political parties and (at least slightly) less sensationalist media however, are much more subdued and civil, and thus are also much more boring.  Obviously, people will not engage in things that bore them, and this trickles down into the realm of local politics, which I would venture to argue, are seen as the epitome of boring by many people not within the field.  This culture of malaise surrounding local politics and community issues results in no-one knowing what is going on in their own back yard, but being intimately familiar with their neighbours.

What does this mean for community development at the local level?  Nothing good.  Generally, people not directly involved with local politics are able to live their lives in relative comfort without ever directly engaging in the process that makes their lives possible.  Unless of course, any type of scandal comes to light.  Then the knives are sharpened, the pitchforks come out, and all hell breaks loose.  The result of this is that if a random person is asked about their local government they will likely respond negatively (citing lazy bureaucrats or entitled union-workers) or with indifference.  If things are good, or good-enough, why should anyone outside of the local political process choose to engage with, or be passionate about it?  It is much more satisfying to engage with the manufactured antagonism of American politics, where the issues are polarizing and the story-lines are easier to follow and digest.  I would bet that most people (including me) know more about Barack Obama than Stephen Harper, and I am not entirely sure what this means, outside of the fact that I am clearly more engaged in American culture than Canadian. 

Because we live in a connected society, it is easy to look outside of your own community for distractions, and many of us choose the biggest distraction in the game, the United States, to provide our political fix.  This has led to Canadian’s disengaging from their country and by extension, their communities.  Unfortunately, it seems as though the only way to engage more people in local politics is to make it more theatrical, more narratively structured. For example, political parties could be introduced at the local level so that people have a group (community?) of like-minded people to rally around and define themselves as.  It seems strange that at the local level, where it is theoretically easiest to form physical communities, that we vote for individuals, and individual platforms, rather than voting for a political party, which is itself a community.  Perhaps by voting for communities we could become inspired to form our own, and thus engage more with our own surroundings.