With a certain degree of poetic license, I am continuing to use lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game as the title of my year-end wrap-up. Add 50 to the title to get a more realistic picture of where I am at.
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels thru the town
And they tell him take your time it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down
No. I am not ready to slow those circles down. There still seems to be so much to get done.
This past year has been somewhat challenging, so in many ways I will be happy to turn the page in the calendar. Aside: Will my grandkids understand that metaphor? Our family is particularly grateful for the miracles enabled and delivered to us over the past year thanks to pharmaceutical and medical research. At the same time, we are deeply pained by horrors of the terrorist attack of October 7, and the global rise of overt antisemitism.
I have family in the Middle East. It is disturbing to see the number of people who seem uninformed, or misinformed about what triggered the war. And, that provides an appropriate segue to one of the main themes of this year-end post.
Improved access to quality information is the presumptive raison d’être for Canada’s Online News Act, Bill C-18. While I understand the motivation behind the legislation, as I have written, its implementation was badly fumbled.
Unfortunately, I am concerned that this is another case of government focus on the supply side without consideration of factors impacting demand. With all the best funding in the world to create better news, are we doing enough work to ensure there is a market to consume that news? Just as I have frequently complained about our work on broadband, we seem to be better at stimulating supply, and rely upon a Field of Dreams hope for the demand side. What if you build it and they don’t come? There are a number of ways to improve funding for news, but how does that help deliver quality information to a generation who don’t watch linear TV, and don’t pick up a newspaper, or rely upon news websites?
What do we do if we provide funding to create high quality local and national newsrooms, but a generation of consumers rely on 30-second high-energy video clips where adherence to facts isn’t valued as highly as the entertainment quality by the search algorithms?
Will digital literacy training in elementary and secondary schools include teaching how to differentiate between information, misinformation, and disinformation? How can we create more sophisticated consumers of high quality content?
Dealing with supply side issues is relatively easy. In most cases, if you throw enough money at the problem, it gets solved, whether it is building broadband, funding newsrooms, creating quality Canadian media content. Dealing with the demand side is much more challenging. What do we do when Canada’s universal broadband objectives are met, but more than a million people remain off-line? The issue of driving increased adoption will need to be a carry-over from my 2023 agenda into next year.
Being well informed is an important prerequisite for responsible leaders. Helping you stay informed is one of the reasons I added 98 blog posts to “Telecom Trends” over the course of 2022, continuing to write around 2 posts per week. There are more than 3260 posts in the archives (fully searchable). In 2023, I migrated my weekly newsletter to a new platform. You can subscribe here.
As I have said in the past, it is my objective for this blog to be a source of quality information on Canadian telecom policy, with occasional gastronomical diversions. In each case, I am trying to share elements of my expertise accumulated over decades.
I look forward to engaging with you in the New Year, readying for yet another spring and summer.
I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.