It's hard to believe that there was ever a time when one had to explain what the word Internet meant.
But in Canada of 2009, those times appear to have come again.
This time the issue is not simply that significant numbers of people are unaware of the Internet.
Instead visitors to Japan and Korea return with tales of space age cell phones that let you buy anything you want by swiping your phone. Picking up some milk? Swipe your phone. Airline tickets? Swipe your phone. Getting on the subway? Swipe your phone. Want to watch television? Watch on your phone.
Contrast this with the Toronto Transit Commission that is functionally a cash only operation, with less than 5 debit card readers in the entire subway system. Or consider the cost of the data plan you’d need in Canada if you went around browsing all the broadband media you wanted on your cell phone
After a strong start out the gate in the mid-90s Canada has fallen behind in maintaining the public infrastructure necessary to sustain healthy growth and innovation in its post-industrial economy.
There are bright spots in this far north digital darkness, but these are clustered around pedigree ponies like RIM or Nelvana that do well for investors. Meanwhile large scale rollouts of the latest innovations remain pricy or completely invisible in Canadian markets.
As well, there appears to be a shifting digital divide in Canada, where some people are maintaining current literacy in emerging digital paradigms, while others are not.
This means that some Canadians are able to use technology to find jobs, bypass traffic jams and participate in the modern era, while others only hear about these things from their kids, or on television. Canada appears to be hovering on the brink of falling into third world status in the post-industrial technocratic milieu.
The post-industrial technocratic milieu is currently dominated by one Twitter Inc.
This is a strange organization with no visible means of support aside from some very patient investors. It also has lots of promise and enormous mindshare. Who knows if it'll still be around this same time next year.
Meanwhile, here is a TweeterBrowser diagram depicting the relationships between 40 users (and their friends) of the Twitter Social Networking site who sent messages containing the text #can30 between 9:15 AM EST and 10:18 AM EST on Tuesday June 9, 2009.
The University of Waterloo is hosting a major conference on Canada's digital future, called Canada 3.0. The people shown in this diagram are talking to each other about this event.
Today the Premiere of Ontario the Hon. Dalton McGuinty will speak on matters including the Government's role in providing public policies to ensure that Canada remains an innovator in this arena.
We'll have to wait to hear what he said on Television, because nobody at the conference can simply hold up a cellphone and broadcast his words to the public. The location, a major University campus, is not served by the kind of high speed digital infrastructure to permit this.
TweeterBrowser is a tool for analysing the connections between users of social media. Currently the tool supports Twitter, with other modules to follow.
You can install TweeterBrowser by visiting http://www.tweeterbrowser.com/