This hits home for me because 1995 was when I discovered the Internet as well. I was nearing the end of my undergrad degree when I ended up applying for (and being accepted to) an exchange program that the U of R Arts Department ran every year with the University College of Ripon & York, St. John in the UK (try saying that college name five times fast! Hmm, good to see they’ve actually shortened it to York St. John University!)
Anyhow, I could pretty much fill this blog with stories of the adventures (and mis-adventures) I had during that four-month exchange but for now, I’ll focus on the subject at hand.
UCRYSJ had done a lot to build exchanges with, not only small universities on the Canadian prairies, but institutions across the United States and around the world. As there were only five Canadians there, all from the U of R, we quickly expanded our circle of friendship to some of the other exchange students, especially the Americans.
And I still remember being in the dining hall and after we’d finished eating supper, a couple of the American students said “We’re going to check e-mail!”
HUH?
I followed them to the computer lab and they showed me how they were able to send magical messages to family and friends back home via this mysterious “Internet”. They also showed me search engines (Yahoo at that time was the biggie) and a few “web sites” where you could find out news and other happenings from back home. (I suspect the true addiction kicked in as soon as I realised I could get NHL scores – something that didn’t get covered in the Times of London!)
My sister was at U of R as well so I got in touch with her (I think I called which probably cost me about $10!) and she said she’d look into it and try to get an e-mail account for me…if the U of R offered such a thing!
A little while later, she let me know that she’d gotten me an account (which is now lost in the fog of time – I doubt it was something as straightforward as “jhammond@uregina.ca” but more likely something like “jham07@pine.zeus.uregina.ca”. From then on, I was able to use e-mail to keep in touch with home…and flirt with girls who were sitting right beside me in the computer lab! (Of course, the amount of time I spent in the computer lab probably influenced why these flirtations rarely went any further.)
But those are stories for another blog post. At any rate, it’s really mind-blowing to think how far we’ve come in fifteen years. Now people travel the world and stay connected with home via Skype, Facebook and yes, even e-mail.
I’ve managed to track down a few of the people I met during the exchange on Facebook since then but in some ways, I feel like I was part of the last group of people to travel overseas when it really was cutting the cord (and yes, I know I was in a prim English country town, not exactly the jungles of Borneo.) But still – I bet you can get wifi on the beach in Timbuktu these days so you can do FaceTime on your iPhone with your friends back home.
I’m currently reading a book called “Stampede! The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite” by Gordon Pitts of the Globe & Mail. This book came to my attention after winning a 2009 National Business Book Prize and, as you might expect given its title and author, it’s a fairly pro-business look at the rise of the west through the development of the energy economy.
Although the main focus is Alberta, the book really takes a cross-country look at the current state of the Canadian economy – from the impact of the oil sands on the people of Newfoundland to the fall of Ontario as a manufacturing centre (and subsequent shift of economic and political power to Alberta)to the unlimited potential of BC as a hub between the prairies, the American west coast and Asia as well as a retirement/leisure paradise.
Pitts also includes a chapter at the end which begins with the words: “In writing this book, I almost missed the real story” where he goes on to talk about how Saskatchewan is the province that’s poised to be the true tiger of the Canadian economy in the near future. Unlike Alberta which is so tied to oil and gas, we have everything here – not only oil and gas but potash, diamonds, all types of agricultural products and more. (In terms of our crop growing capabilities, he points out that oil & gas are finite resources but if you can always grow food, people will always need to eat.) He also reveals that Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan has a bigger market capitalization than Encana, Alberta’s biggest oil & gas company!
In talking about Saskatchewan, Pitts includes an interview with Paul Hill who is the third-generation head of Saskatchewan’s most powerful family. Mr. Hill makes a strong attack on Tommy Douglas who he labels as the reason that Alberta, not Saskatchewan, became Canada’s thriving oil & gas hub. (There’s possibly some truth to that but I can also imagine a history where we ended up with US-style healthcare system if Tommy Douglas hadn’t come along when he had so I’ll take that trade!)
Anyhow, having just about finished the book, it connected to something else I recently came across via The Accidental Jurist. Social democratic principles don’t need to be completely adversarial with the business world (after all, it was Lorne Calvert’s NDP government who revised our royalty rates that led to much of our current boom. And NDP governments have been the most fiscally responsible wherever they’ve held power across Canada.)
Former NDP leadership candidate, Ryan Meili, recently published an article about one of his pet ideas – SaskPharm – in the Canadian Medical Association Journal which shows that business acumen and socialist ideals don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I’ve written about the “inter-connected beauty” of his idea for a Crown corporation in the business of making generic drugs before – how it could provide a permanent market for our agricultural crops, how it would provide even more impetus for our booming science R&D sector, how it could provide a revenue stream by selling generic brands to other jurisdictions and how it could help lower healthcare costs as we face an aging boomer population.
Like Medicare, it’s too good of an idea to let go and I suspect that in some shape or form, we may see something like SaskPharm at some point in the future. (You heard it here first!)
This article claims that the future success of libraries revolves around the need to allow for a “little chaos”. The author concedes that it’s hard to purposely engineer a chaotic environment but that the rewards, when this approach is embraced, is worth it.
I think that bravery based librarianship is the only future we have. At some point, we have to disrupt the patterns and set a new path. Many libraries are doing this already – our profession is, of course, much more responsive to change than most people realise. But fear-based librarianship, or at least caution-based, still seems prevalent. Many a decision is made in order not to upset the minority, rather than to potentially please a whole new majority. In many cases, this approach is taken with good reason. But we’re talking about the survival of our profession, here.
We were camping all weekend so didn’t really have a lot of access to the news (I did of course have my iPhone but Rogers service sucks once you get outside major centres). So it wasn’t until we got home tonight that I realised the full extent of the horror that had happened in Norway on Friday with a bombing in Oslo and then a subsequent shooting spree at a nearby island retreat for politically active Norwegian youths.
I really don’t have a lot to say about what happened in Norway. But strangely, one of the first things I did when I heard about the tragedy was to go to MetaFilter where I knew there would be a thread about what was happening. True to the site’s name, that thread would be a filter with links to various news organizations around the world, blogs, maps, photos and so on. Even within the relatively homogenous filter-bubble that is MetaFilter, there would also be a fairly wide range of opinions as well as a running commentary as details came out. There would be battles about the use of dark humour as a coping mechanism. There would be wild speculation. There would be insight, anger and grief. There would be community.
A common trope on MetaFilter is that it doesn’t do “breaking news” well but I don’t know if that’s true – the site does breaking news in a way that reflects what it is – not fact-checking, not journalism but more like a bunch of people communing in a coffee shop having imperfect, overlapping conversations (which can be just as valuable as the “hard news” – both in the moment but also as a historic record. Even when the site’s founder was asked in a recent interview for five memorable threads, the first two that he picked were about breaking news – the Seattle earthquake and 9/11.)
Okay, I have one thought about what happened in Norway. Sometimes our world is seriously fucked up.
I think we probably all have that experience where decisions don’t get made because we’re paralyzed by trying to make the “perfect” choice or not trusting our intuition?
The article reminds me of one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received. I was trying to make one of the most difficult decisions of my life when I was in my late 20’s and my aunt (who sounds like she might do a very good Yoda impersonation!) said “Remember – there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ choice or a ‘bad’ choice – there’s only choices.”
Realising that the difficult decision I was about to make – which had lots of good and lots of bad (as did the alternate choice) – would never have a “right” answer and I’d simply have to choose and carry on down the path I picked.
