Thursday, February 25, 2010

Mash-up generation

A couple of threads have come together over the past week that seem to indicate something of contemporary experience and attitudes.

Saturday's Globe and Mail brought us Elizabeth Renzetti's thoughts on plagiarism, in which she speaks of the "mash-up generation" that sees content as something to be borrowed and repurposed. Dr. John Stackhouse weighed in Monday with his own thoughts on plagiarism and a link to a quiz testing awareness of what constitutes unauthorized borrowing.

Somewhere in between I drafted an itinerary for my brother and his wife, who plan a cross-Canada road trip this spring. It was an opportunity to reflect on the highlights and lowlights of a country and countryside that has changed much since our parents married and started raising us back in the 1950s. What was upheld then has changed; what we see as the landmarks and icons of our country have changed. Niagara Falls remains, but the nearby wineries are where the action is; and how many visit Wawa for the goose (just to name one example)? It's far easier to fly across Northern Ontario, bypassing the hardscrabble towns and their attractions.

But there are deeper changes happening, equally easy to bypass, which stand to alter how the next generation thinks of the country. The landscape and rivers we took for granted are changing, as the Wall Street Journal reminds us. We engineered them for our purposes, but the changes ushered in an ecological mash-up that reflects the global culture that has both sidelined small towns and opened us to new perspectives in a smaller, more integrated world. Have we become richer, or forgotten who we are? Do we know the sources of the changes; who authorized the borrowing? Getting to know our own country, its sources and the influences acting upon it, is important; what we find might not be what we expected but it seems fundamental to knowing where we're headed, the legacy we've inherited and will eventually hand to the future. Tom Russell has something to say on the matter here, about his song "American Rivers." One could easily pen a similar song for Canada touching on the St. John and Skeena, the St. Lawrence and Red; the Saskatchewans and Fraser, the Ottawa, Deh Cho and Annapolis.

Without knowing the land, we'll have difficulty coming to terms with life on it; because, as a poet in Estonia told me as she stamped the ground: Culture (and not just agriculture) starts with the land, the country we know.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

bayard

Bayard: 1) A legendary bay horse renowned for his spirit and possessed of the ability to adjust his size to his riders. 2) The knight "without fear and beyond reproach" (sans peur et sans reproche), a descendant of which keeps this blog.