What is the purpose of your trip, eh?
It’s highly unlikely that I’ll have the chance to mention Canada twice in a day for some time, even with the Stanley Cup coming up, so here goes.
Alfred Hermida reports that Canada’s broadcast watchdog, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is undertaking a public consultation exercise on how it should deal with the internet, in particular whether it should extend regulatory oversight to the medium.
As part of its public consultation, the CRTC released a 75-page report (.pdf) on research and attitudes to the Internet that provides some insight into how the media landscape is changing in Canada.
The report frames the debate in terms of preserving and promoting “Canadian content in a global new media broadcasting environment”. The CRTC is approaching the Internet as a broadcast medium, much like television or radio. This reveals a fundamental misconception of the net, as it is not less of a one-to-many and more of a many-to-many medium. But the public consultation is framed within the notion of the net as another form of broadcast…
However, Canadian media organisations would do well to take notice of how audiences are changing. The CRTC report found that high-speed residential Internet access is now available to 93% of households across the country and has been adopted by more than 60% of Canadian households.
It will come as no surprise that youngsters lead the way. According to the CRTC report:
* In 2006, 91% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 accessed the Internet, compared to only 69% of Canadians aged 55 or older.
* In December 2006, approximately 30% of Canadian adults online connected for more than 10 hours per week. This compares to 52% for young Canadian adults aged 18 to 24.
* Canadians under 18 now spend roughly the same amount of time online as they do watching TV – between 15 and 17 hours).
Clearly a shift is taking place in media consumption, so a debate on Canada’s approach to new media is timely. People have until July 11 to file comments, and the CRTC plans to hold public hearings in early 2009.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports on a curious use of virtual worlds in the educational context:
Even as some panic about the possibility of terrorist exploitation of Second Life, a program in Canada is using the virtual world to catch people at the border.
Loyalist College in Ontario has created a virtual simulation of a US-Canada border crossing, enabling students to practice quizzing travelers about their backgrounds. The program is one of several at the school that uses virtual worlds technology, including sims that teach prison guards and journalists. Almost ten percent of the student body has used Second Life in the course of their schoolwork.
One big draw for Loyalist is the low cost of building in a virtual world — no consultants were hired to build the simulations. “We figured out early the way to make it efficient is to do everything ourselves,” said Ken Hudson of the school’s Virtual World Design Centre. Hudson works with five part-time designers to build and maintain the simulations, all of whom are graduates of the school’s animation program.
Here’s some footage from the ‘virtual border guard training’:
