The first issue of Alberta Views came out in January 1998. Generation Z were newborns. Over the quarter century that we have been publishing, Gen Z has grown up in a world of constant connectivity, instant communications, smartphones and social media—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, which are their primary sources of news now that they’re adults. Earlier generations had to adapt to television, computers, the internet and Google as the universal brain, but for this generation digital was as familiar as breathing.
Some might find it remarkable that print has survived at all. Nonetheless with the December 2022 issue of Alberta Views we completed 25 years of publishing a print magazine. In this Jan/Feb 2023 issue we mark that anniversary and reflect on the cultural revolution we’ve witnessed unfold in the first decades of the new millennium.
In our very first year Myrna Kostash described the 25-year-olds of that time as already being comfortable with technology (“The Next Alberta,” Fall 1998). Now called Gen X, they were “at home with the ubiquity of the new media and excited by the possibilities inherent in the new technologies.” She continues, “If my generation is the first to have been exposed full-time to television, Generation Next, at the end of the 1990s, is playing computer-based games and surfing the internet instead.” She has hope for this generation, but grave concern for the society they need to find a place in: “How do webheads construct community in the rubble of disintegrating public works?… in the attack on the idea of public space—formerly defined, even in Alberta, as a collective consensus to invest in institutions serving the common good.”
It was the Klein era. Following the example of Reagan and Thatcher, his aim was to shrink the role of government, to lower taxes, cut funding to services, deregulate and privatize. In those early years Alberta Views was alarmed by the attack on public institutions. We documented the cuts to the funding of healthcare, education, social services and infrastructure, and we were concerned about the lack of critical commentary in the media. In the Sep/Oct 2001 issue David Taras and Larry Johnsrude made the case that “concentration of media ownership stifles the free market of ideas and therefore is not good for democracy.” (“Are our newspapers betraying us?”)
The Conservatives practised austerity, but where they did spend big was on technology, for example, building the SuperNet. In the Sep/Oct 2002 issue Mark Wolfe and Mary Ann Moser critiqued the plan (“The Wired, Wired West: Who knew? The Alberta government has a plan to make this province the most wired in the world.”)
The SuperNet was originally a $300-million project ($193-million of it public) intended to connect 420 rural Alberta communities by 2004 to a high-speed digital network in places where private companies had no incentive to build. Eventually the SuperNet cost a billion dollars, and rural households still didn’t have adequate access to the internet.
Wolfe was skeptical from the get-go. “Leaving aside the wider question of general technological intrusion on our lives, I seriously question the planning process around the Alberta SuperNet. Keep in mind, the networks being constructed comprise only the hardware component of the project. In itself, there’s nothing terribly questionable about building for high-speed internet-like access at reasonable cost. If I lived in rural Alberta, I’d be delighted. What is questionable is the project’s planning process and the number of blind spots in its conception—in user expectations, efficiencies and social impact.”
Moser countered that the project wouldn’t provide service to individuals: “[The SuperNet] will connect a local school, hospital, library or municipal office, forming a hub that will allow internet service providers to offer rates in these communities competitive with those offered in cities. The strategy is designed to provide the same advantage to rural and urban dwellers alike.”
Wolfe was right to have reservations. Having not fulfilled its promise, by 2011 the government wanted even more money for the SuperNet. David Climenhaga observed, “Now that someone wants us to spend more money on it, it’s being described as a flop that made it no further than the town office and the public library in Smallsville and Elk’s Knuckle.”
By 2018 CBC reported that according to that year’s auditor general’s report, “Service Alberta did not properly manage and monitor the $1-billion in contracts the government signed with private companies to build the SuperNet…. Problems with the contracts extended over 17 years, from when the initial agreements were signed in 2001 to when a new contract was finally signed in 2018.”
Recently while COVID-19 raged, rural Alberta was still suffering from digital poverty. The CBC reported, “Charlene Smylie, who is running as councillor for Parkland County’s Division 5, said during the pandemic she’s seen local students without good internet access sitting in school or library parking lots to access wifi for remote schooling.”
At the same time as they were cutting funding for education the Conservative government was buying computers for schools. Despite cutbacks in other areas of education, the government injected $125-million between 1996 and 2001 into educational technology, including computers.
Linda Flanagan warned in the Sep/Oct 2002 issue (“Problems and Potential of Digital Technology for K-12”): “But technology cannot be a substitute for experiences in the physical, social world. Young children especially need to move, play, build, discuss and read. As we move deeper into the 21st century, public educators and those who support them must continue to look for ways to improve student learning and better prepare graduates for participation in the knowledge era. Clearly, the investment must be in people as well as machines. Only by understanding the new digital techniques and recognizing both their potential and their danger can schools take charge of computers to obtain the maximum benefit for students.”
The wired generation makes little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.
From its beginning, the Internet revolution was wreaking havoc on the print universe. The rise of digital technology exacerbated the fall of the city newspaper. The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald had been considered good papers when Southam owned them. In 1996 Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. bought them both, cut costs and reduced staff. In 2000 they were sold again to the Asper family’s CanWest Global and were required to run “national editorials,” compromising the independent voice of each newspaper. In 2009 a bankrupt CanWest sold its newspapers to Postmedia, which consolidated operations. Though they had promised not to, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and the two cities’ Suns.
We chronicled the decline of print newspapers over many years. In the May/June 2004 issue, Lisa Gregoire asked, “Are Alberta’s two big dailies telling you what you need to know?” (“The Slipping News.”) She quoted Robert Bragg, a former Calgary Herald reporter: “He says local coverage has become trite and forgettable: the entertainment section is obsessed with ‘looking up the skirts of famous actresses’ rather than covering the vibrant local arts scene; and city news doesn’t adequately reflect Calgary’s growth and diversity except in boosterism or tokenism. ‘It’s an embarrassment for a city this size to have a paper this shallow, this out-of-touch with whatever’s going on…. They don’t put enough resources into it.’”
Circulation was plummeting. At one time almost everyone read their city paper, but by 2003 only a third of households in both Edmonton and Calgary subscribed. By 2008 this was down to only a quarter of households, 26 per cent for the Journal, 27 per cent for the Herald. By 2015 paid circulation was down to less than a fifth of households.
What was contributing to this decline in circulation? It was a vicious cycle: as quality went down, readers cancelled their subscriptions. As readers cancelled their subscriptions, quality went down. But really there were fewer readers because of online news. In the December 2008 issue Susan Ruttan argued that even though they were in decline, newspapers were more necessary than ever (“The Case for Newspapers”). Ruttan was there in the Hollinger era. “In the months after Black took over, a kind of panic gripped many of the senior managers of the chain; they knew Black’s libertarian views clashed radically with the mild-mannered liberal stance of most editorial pages.” She deplored what happened to the papers but she still believed in them.
“The traditional model of a newspaper, the thing that thumps on your doorstep at 6:00 a.m., may go—but that’s not the essence of newspapers. The essence is the content, the daily reporting by trained journalists who have sat through council meetings, read secret government reports, attended press conferences, interviewed parents of murder victims and cultivated contacts on their beat. No amount of chat room pontificating (or CNN talking head) can replace that grunt work. You may say ‘Mayor Bronconnier’s a good guy’ or ‘Edmonton needs a downtown arena,’ but how do you know? Few people have the time to regularly watch Bronconnier at city hall, or to talk to experts about arenas. A reporter will do that for you. Increasingly, we turn to the internet, not newspapers, for our information. That’s the new battleground for the news business.”
In that same 2008 issue Todd Babiak reiterated that young people prefer online news to papers—if they read at all. (“Black and White and Dead All Over.”) He anticipated the coming age of fake news: “Canadian newsrooms are shrinking. Newspapers are shrinking. The move to websites has been vigorous. Young people—even smart young people—are getting their information from social networks. But even social networking needs a primary source. Where does it originate? A growing cadre of citizen journalists, who are bound by neither training nor libel laws, took to the internet. They blogged, inventing and repeating rumours. They guessed. They commented on Facebook sites. For at least two generations of wired North Americans, there is little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.”
We focused on one of the better citizen journalists in our June 2009 issue. (“Citizen Bloggers: Online social media and networks provide new ways for Albertans to get political.”) Dave Cournoyer argued that online citizen journalists could fill the information gap as local political news coverage fell victim to cutbacks and layoffs at daily mainstream newspapers. He became a blogger because “I felt that with the consolidation of ownership of the daily newspapers and local television stations, the political discourse in Alberta was becoming narrower by the week. With a quick visit to the Blogger website, within minutes I had registered and launched my very own blog, www.daveberta.ca.”
Cournoyer demonstrated how out of touch certain politicians were by telling an amusing story. He’d registered the domain name www.edstelmach.ca for approximately $14.78 four months after Ed Stelmach became premier. When he was threatened with litigation, he went public, posting the letter from Stelmach’s lawyer on his blog.
Cournoyer was upbeat about the digital age. “Fully 85 per cent of Calgarians and 78 per cent of Edmontonians over the age of 16 go online. The percentage of citizens who use the internet to search for information about government or to communicate with politicians is also rising. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of the internet’s vast potential for citizenship.” He went on to show how politicians were using Facebook and Twitter and how like-minded citizens were finding each other on networking sites.
“Twitter has even made its presence felt in the Alberta Legislature. Using the tag #ableg, Twitter users across Alberta comment on and debate issues under discussion in the Legislature and Question Period. Citizens can follow live discussions in the Legislature and post ‘tweets’ instantly so that citizens in other cities know what’s going on under the dome before the mainstream media are able to tell them.”
He articulated the optimism current at that time about the promise of the internet and social media: “This is an exciting opportunity: the decentralization and democratization of news coverage is a positive evolution in media. The internet rewards innovation, and well-written and credible blogs could carry the same weight as a city newspaper. Now that citizens are realizing the power they hold to publish their own content and commentary, they will continue to contribute to and affect the dialogue.”
In what must be the understatement of the decade, Cournoyer observed, “Facebook allows citizens to find like-minded people by cross-referencing information such as ‘political orientation’ with ‘location’. The implications for citizenship and politics are vast.”
As unlikely as it was that the insights of bloggers could carry the weight of a traditional newspaper with its army of reporters, factcheckers and editors, newspapers were indeed dying. We asked if it was the end of our city newspapers again in the March 2017 issue (“Paper Thin: Deathwatch for Alberta’s big-city newspapers”). Ian Gill argued the firing of so many staff with the consolidation of newsrooms was the culmination of a steady decline in quality and readership.
“The newsroom mergers—a mushing of distinct journalistic formats, cultures and audiences—heralded the end of Alberta’s big-city newspapers as we had known them. When the dust settled, Edmontonians and Calgarians had to adjust to uniformity in their leading newspaper titles. The quality of the Journal, Herald and Suns, already in decline, fell precipitously.”
One long-time Journal subscriber explained why he wasn’t renewing his subscription: “Seeing someone who had written for the Journal for 30 years now appearing in the Sun as well was like having Wayne Gretzky playing for both the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames.”
Two of our own columnists had different opinions about the seriousness of the loss of the daily city newspaper. Fred Stenson in “Survival of the Richest: One future for newspapers” (May 2018) said newspapers were obsolete:
“Well, there’s this digital thing that puts news into your home, car or purse. Such news is all but instant. Tsunami on the other side of the planet. I’ve got it in my pocket minutes after the waves hit shore. I’d go so far as to say that if Kim Jong Un or The Donald accidentally starts a nuclear war, I’ll find out on Twitter before I hear a siren—and, as for finding out in the newspaper, maybe never. Newspapers—printed onto paper, wheeled out of a press, put into trucks to travel far distances… If the idea of news is that it be new, the cumbersome daily production and transportation of printed pages is a whole lot more than a small problem. Whalebone corset, steamboat, stagecoach, draft horse, transistor radio, typewriter, newspaper.”
Stenson saw no difference in reading a newspaper online or on paper. “It isn’t whether paper newspapers survive [but] whether iconic newspapers can buy enough time to lure their customers across to a digital platform.”
Graham Thomson in “Who’s Keeping Watch?” (May 2020) had a different perspective on this. Online newspapers had not maintained the quality of the old print newspapers. In 1992 there were at least 25 members of the Alberta Legislature press gallery. “Alberta’s four major newspapers had a dozen or so reporters and columnists based at the Legislature. Today, those four papers are all part of the Postmedia chain, which has assigned just two reporters to the Legislature. It makes it harder for journalists to make sense of what’s happening and to hold a government to account…. You could argue that in a digital age, when news conferences are livestreamed on Facebook, you don’t need reporters assigned to the Legislature. But you do. Reporters know the players, the issues and the context.” Thomson agreed with Ruttan that what is essential is daily reporting by trained journalists who have witnessed what’s going on. This is the opposite of what’s happening online.
Because of digital media, a huge segment of the population is now badly misinformed.
Anyone can generate content on digital media such as Facebook and Twitter and TikTok. Smartphone cameras now meet professional requirements for news picture quality. The most politically charged news events of our time have been captured on the cellphones of bystanders. When “everyone is a content creator,” some believe that smartphones can make up for the absence of reporters, just as Cournoyer believed that blogs could replace newspapers.
But there’s no guarantee of accuracy or factuality in online social media reports. Certainly in the beginning nothing obligated those platforms to ensure that the information people see was verifiable. Being outrageous is more interesting than being accurate. Conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies spread faster than truth. People are vulnerable to believing this misinformation (accidental inaccuracy) and disinformation (purposeful deception). So now we have a huge segment of the population badly misinformed.
One of the most important functions of the daily city newspaper was to provide a shared text for citizens. When everyone read the same paper every day, they had a common base of information to discuss a problem. The proliferation and variety of sources of digital online information mean that citizens no longer have a shared text to give them a common understanding of reality.
“Big data” technology enables the sending of news to digital devices tailored to the preferences of the owner of the device. So you get information only about subjects you’re interested in and opinions you agree with. Far from having a shared text, each of us gets different texts reinforcing our biases. This fragments society. Narrowminded groups are convinced that only they are right and others holding different views are crazy.
By 2016 digital media had ushered in the Trump era and the gaslighting of the entire world. Trump’s communication medium of choice was Twitter, a platform that even its new owner Elon Musk called a potential “free-for-all hellscape.” Musk is a “free speech absolutist,” but free speech must have limits. As Evan Osenton observed in his editorial in our September 2018 issue, “Governments in Canada can restrict speech when it does real harm to other people—not just psychological harm (through denying facts), but exposing them to the risk of violence.”
Who could have anticipated the evils unleashed by the technological revolution and the rise of social media—polarization, lies, seemingly the end of truth? In the post-truth world, objective facts have less influence in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Truth is not determined by evidence, but rather by the number of people willing to believe and share an idea. That’s a dangerous world, one of division, demonization, fragmentation, breakdown.
The demise of print and the rise of digital paralleled the demise of “we” and the rise of “me.” Individual freedom was beginning to take precedence over the common good—the well-being of society as a whole. The libertarian idolizes the rugged and willful, independent individual. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” Her view was that we’re only an aggregate of separate autonomous individuals responsible only for ourselves.
But tell that to an epidemiologist. Disease behaves differently in different societies, as we learned so well in the pandemic. The COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population, as at November 5, 2022, was 326 in the US, 123 in Canada and 37 in Japan. Your chance of being sick has less to do with you as an individual and more to do with the society of which you are a part. That society affects you in myriad ways.
For example, in our November 2021 issue, we found that the pandemic had exposed systemic horrors in long-term care in Canada (“Fixing Long-Term Care”). “Of all countries in the world, Canada had the highest percentage of its COVID-19 deaths coming from long-term care: 80 per cent…. In our most-stricken long-term care homes, staff walked away, patients died of starvation and dehydration, in their own excrement, alone—in Canada! … We’re a profoundly ageist society. We do not value older adults; we value them less when they’re not ‘unit-producing individuals’…Neither does our society value the work of caregiving, work often done by women—and in the case of long-term care, almost entirely by women, over half of whom are women of colour.”
If we’re going to improve conditions for individuals, we have to change society. And one of the only ways to do that is through good government. An effective response to COVID-19 required effective collective action. When a plague sweeps through, it can’t be every man for himself. We are literally in it together. This is anathema to the fans of Ayn Rand, including our unelected premier.
Digital media created a wildfire of misinformation about COVID. Timothy Caulfield from the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta said at the time that “misinformation is a dire, imminent threat to the lives of all Canadians and is proven to be one of the factors fuelling COVID-19 infections, and dissuading Canadians from getting vaccinated.”
The protests against health restrictions, the occupation of Ottawa by the truckers “freedom convoy” and the Coutts border blockade were all fuelled by digital misinformation. The situation is made worse when politicians lend their support to these misguided efforts because their right-wing ideology meshes with the libertarian sentiments of the protesters.
About digital misinformation Caulfield says, “It’s exhausting to see the rage and the consistency of the messaging. They always fit into this one basket. If you think vaccines don’t work, you think monkeypox is a conspiracy, climate change isn’t real… you can go down the list and tick the boxes. You’ve got to counter this stuff, even if you think it’s absurd.” Caulfield has spearheaded a campaign to counter the “infodemic” with evidence-based content. He refers to the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines were a cover to implant trackable microchips in the population. “It was almost laughable, but a big hunk of North American society is at least open to it.”
Do our current leaders pretend to believe conspiracy theories to appeal to the duped masses, or do they actually believe, having been duped themselves? Premier Danielle Smith presents herself as a sympathizer with the “freedom convoy,” seems to admire Putin, says cancer is preventable, believes that the World Economic Forum is a secret cabal exploiting the pandemic to dismantle capitalism, and asserts that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated-against group she’s ever seen.
Believers in reason were gratified when, in October 2022, Alberta Court of King’s Bench Justice Grant Dunlop ruled that the UCP government’s order to lift mask mandates for school children was unreasonable. He made it clear that such a decision is not for politicians to make, but for the chief medical officer of health, who has the knowledge and the authority. The top doctor’s concern is the health of the entire public, unlike the partisan politician seeking popularity with her base. The justice also found that UCP Education Minister Adriana LaGrange created “widespread misunderstanding” by saying that schoolboards could not impose their own mask mandates when her statement didn’t, in fact, carry legal weight.
Almost immediately Premier Smith objected and asserted “our government’s full authority with respect to this and other health and education matters.” For her, individual wilfulness takes precedence over the rule of law and the well-being of society. Given her susceptibility to the questionable information circulating in the online digital world, what kind of leadership can she provide?
As citizens concerned with our shared public life, we need valid information based on sound reasoning and solid evidence. In a secular pluralistic society, we need to respect agreed-upon criteria for determining whether a statement is credible. We have to be able to come to agreements in order for society to function.
It’s not enough to access information online. Print publications are still valuable.
Over the 25 years that we have been publishing Alberta Views, the digital realm has triumphed. But we still stand by print. It goes without saying that we can’t know what’s happening in the world without trained reporters and qualified journalists paid by publishers. But beyond that I would also argue that it’s not enough to access information only online. Print publications are still valuable.
Digital publication is fast and cheap, but it is also ephemeral. Digital media can modify or delete contents and they disappear. Browsing online content on a digital device with texts pinging in, it’s easy to be distracted. An online article has links that take you down the rabbit hole. More importantly, we don’t retain or even understand online material as well as print. A mounting body of research bears this out.
The opportunity to investigate the different effects of print and digital arose in schools. Some school districts no longer provide students with textbooks; they issue iPads with downloaded e-books. Studies comparing the performance of students learning from hard-copy books and those with only digital versions show the consequences. An overview of the research by Bella Ross et al. in 2017 found “an overwhelming number of studies reviewed suggested that print-based texts contributed more to increased comprehension and recall than e-texts. For example, Singer and Alexander (2016) found that students were better able to recall key points linked to the main idea and other relevant concepts when reading print. Students reading print-based texts performed significantly better on a reading comprehension test than those reading e-texts.”
Screens and digital media also cause stress and exhaustion. More time on screen is having a bad effect on how well we sleep, so much so that doctors recommend no screen time for at least an hour before you intend to fall asleep.
Part of the difficulty of reading on screen is that you can only see a certain amount of material at a time and you don’t know where you are in the document. In a print publication you know where you are. It’s easier to find a passage on a print page. Print gives you a better mental spatial orientation to the physical layout of a text. If you need to reread a section to better understand an idea, it’s easier to find that section in a physical document, or to flip ahead to get an overview.
Print has other advantages. Since we have to spend so much time on screen for work or school, print is a relief. It is a slow medium, conducive to thoughtfulness. A print document conveys a sense of significance.
Sitting in a chair with a book or magazine is a pleasurable experience. The mind is far less likely to wander reading print. It’s not just that the reader can focus on the text without the distractions and interruptions of a digital device. Reading print is a visceral experience that involves sight, touch and smell. The thickness of the document, the feel of the paper, its texture and scent engage the senses and draw the reader to pay more attention.
But the pleasure of print pales when considering its most important characteristic: the fact that the printed page exists in the physical world. Once we commit something to print and publish it, it’s out there. It can’t be changed. So we take extra care to factcheck, to verify information. That makes print more trustworthy.
And we need trustworthiness now more than ever.
Jackie Flanagan is the founder of Alberta Views and for years was its editor. She doesn’t own a cell phone or visit Twitter.
