Over the past decade the terms ‘global culture’ and ‘cultural globalization’ have come to the forefront of international communications research. While there is little consensus as to the cultural consequences of the phenomenon of globalization, most scholars will agree that the rapid flow of images and messages in an increasingly transnational electronic media environment has changed the ways we perceive space and time and their relationship to collective identities. As borders are becoming more permeable to the flow of people, ideas, capital, technology, and popular entertainment, cultural and social group identities are evolving at local and global levels that transcend...

In the 1980’s the B.C. Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture developed the ‘Super Natural British Columbia’ campaign, which promoted travel to the province by extolling the beauty and variety of British Columbia’s natural landscape in a series of advertisements directed at both the American and out-of-province Canadian markets. While ‘Super Natural British Columbia,’ remains the province’s official tourism motto to this day, by the mid-1990s the slogan became more closely associated with the fact that Vancouver was the production home of nine of the top American ‘supernatural’ television series, includingThe X-Files, Highlander, The Outer Limits, Poltergeist: The...

When I first entered the Vancouver CBC offices in 1996, there was not a single television series in development or production at the largest of the public broadcaster’s English production centres outside of Toronto. The latest project shot in the centre’s vast studio facilities had been a series of American-produced television advertisements for Ford cars and trucks, featuring the former star ofThe Bionic Woman,Lindsay Wagner. It was difficult to miss the irony of the situation, given that the CBC’sraison d’êtrehas, since its inception, been to serve as a bulwark against American cultural dominance in Canada. These types...

As the above comments suggest, in the new global media landscape economic contingencies are winning out in the ongoing struggle between market forces and national cultural development goals. As we see dwindling financial and political support for national public broadcasting institutions around the world, producers in countries with relatively small domestic markets, such as Canada, have found it necessary to turn their attention to international audiences and co-production partners to piece together the requisite funding to tell their stories. Within the growing body of scholarship on media globalization, debates over the role of the rapid increase in international television flows...

My assistant is from England, and she said to me, ‘You know, it’s funny but I find Canadians sneaky.’ I’ve never imagined Canadians as being sneaky, but now I think she’s exactly right. It’s the colonial experience. You try and get your way. You can’t get your way by direct means so you get it how you can. And whether you get it by whining, snide comments, or by humour, you just do it. When you’re facing power which is way beyond what you have, you do what you have to do ... Being Canadian is like being at the...

The central premise underlying the preceding chapters, and reinforced in the book’s title,On Location,is that the national, regional, and global community formations illuminated on our television screens are social constructions to the extent that they are the products of a series of complex negotiations between policy makers, funding agencies, and the creative minds that reinterpret diverse, and often competing, conceptualizations of place in the process of cultural storytelling. It is a truism to state that television doesnotprovide a mirror of any society. If this were the case, we would see far greater diversity in the range...