This Globe and Mail article discusses the 'brand' of Canada, and how the fact that it is the third highest ranked nation (after the U.K. and the E.U.) in the world doesn't measure up in terms of actual tourism and other economic factors.
They discuss, among other things, that Canada needs to shed it's traditional imagery such as "Neil Young riding on a buffalo."
My favorite quote: "People say Canada is a place I have to go before I die, or perhaps after that."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
so what should our new imagery be? a sort of north american version of the netherlands? a good place to come and do drugs and visit legal prostitutes?
OR... do we sell ourselves as the last REAL bit of untouched wilderness left on the planet (w/ the possible exception of antarctica, i suppose).
and anyway, anyone who's been a logger, miner, oil worker or tree planter can tell you that every square cm of canada is currently being dam-ed, logged, mined, or otherwise "managed".
I'm just still laughing over the image of Neil Young riding across Canada on a buffalo... probably with a Mountie hat on.
I don't think I'd be that excited to visit, either.
actually, most people i meet from outside the country usually mention celine dion right off the bat, which i always find very odd.
I think it's pretty tragic that we use the language of Marketing so often to describe our identity to ourselves and others. To me it is an indication of how fucked up our priorities are, not to mention our language. Why are we so eager to be branded, and why do we care so much how our "brand" compares to that of other nations/provinces/regions? It's like we view ourselves as a business or something. Aren't we citizens? Aren't we people? Who the fuck cares what our "traditional imagery" is? Isn't there more important stuff to think about?
maybe there is, but these questions, in one form or another, have occupied human minds for tens of thousands of years.
I find it more amusing than tragic.
Tragedy and comedy... didn't someone else already think of this???
ha! shakespeare? the ancient greeks? cave artists?
You raise an excellent point Wolfie, we have been consumed with these identity questions forever--probably since the dawn of civilization. I know for a fact that Can Lit would be nothing without them.
But damn that Marketing lingo just burns my ass. Maybe it's because I studied advertising, and felt afterwards as if we were all being hoodwinked so we could buy some fucker in Toronto a bigger pool. It's such a brutal waste of imagination.
At the same time, I have to admit, I do see the comedy in it all :)
In all seriousness, this raises a real issue in terms of human history. From a language perspective, there is a movement among linguists regarding the origins of language that deals with it as a means of recognizing social group membership. In other words, I can know what group you belong to based on how you speak.
This may not seem too important anymore, but think back to the dawn of humanity. Whether we were hunters or scavengers (or both), we probably lived in very small familial groups. Other humans in the same region might look a lot like us, and we wouldn't know from appearance only whether we should befriend someone (who might be a relative, and thus worthy of our friendship) or not. Language is the deciding factor - as soon as someone opens their mouth, we can tell whether they are like us or not.
In fact, we are capable of amazingly subtle feats of linguistic decipherment. You are probably able to identify the voice of a close friend or family member over the phone within a split second, before they've even completed one word, and yet telephone signals remove a huge portion of the auditory spectrum so that you don't even get a very good representation of what they actually sound like. It's an amazingly sophisticated system, and must have developed for some very good reasons - communication being only one (perhaps only a minor one at that).
huh. cool. they also say that about gait-- that you can recognize a friend or loved one from an absurdly far distance, long before their physical features become clear, simply by how they walk.
and yeah... marketing and advertising are our culture's equivalent of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
i was talking about this w/ a female friend the other day-- why have an entire generation (or two) of women grown up thinking they are fat, ugly, and unattractive? it's probably not ONLY the fault of advertising, but pretty damn close. all of us, particularly women, are trained to think, through advertising, that there's a "norm" out there that we're not matching up to and we're therefore less than we could or should be. the "norm" of course, is impossibly beautiful and underfed people.
it's sad, really.
you'd think we would have a better outlet for all this brilliant creative energy humans possess than to use it to convince people to feel lousy about themselves, and then go out and buy stuff in the hopes that feeling will vanish.
sad and funny.
Organised religion has also convinced people to feel lousy about themselves.
Sad and funny.
:)
Post a Comment