Polish Canadians, Searching for a Voice (Part 4)

Sociologist Mark Wegierski resumes his analysis

The persistence of the cultural identity of some “white ethnic” groups such as Polish-Canadians has become increasingly problematic. The official declaration of Canada as a multicultural society has not led to an increased profile for these “white ethnic” groups. Indeed, there is a marked contrast between the emphasis placed today in Canada on so-called visible minorities – as opposed to the so-called “white ethnics”.

In Canada and the United States today, the various mass media have reached a historically unprecedented level of importance. Living in such a mass-media saturated society, it now becomes almost impossible to even conceptualize how life might have been lived before the advent of radio, cinema, television, rock- and rap-music, cable-networks, or the Internet. To the extent that a certain cultural tendency does not appear prominently in the mass-media, its presence in society is certainly going to be minor.

It is questionable whether the Internet, with its potential for a genuine pluralism of outlooks, is different from such media as radio, cinema, television, and rock- and rap-music, where the presence of gatekeepers is always salient. However, the Internet arrived as a truly widespread medium only in the late 1990s. Indeed, the first websites accessible to everyone who had a computer and Internet connection became possible only in 1995. Thus, the Internet arrived after over four decades of the conceptual and infrastructural weight of earlier media, most notably, television. Continue reading →