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An adjunct professor at Carleton University, Heather Menzies is the prolific author of seven books and dozens of articles on digital networks, globalization, and the technological restructuring of the workplace. Ursula Franklin has written of Menzies's 1996 best-seller, Whose Brave New World?, that it "is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the politics, as well as the hype, around the information highway." This holds true of all of Menzies's books and articles, which offer articulate, informed, and deeply insightful analyses of the ways global information networks are transforming the nature of social life. Menzies cogently critiques a discourse on technology that is controlled by a corporatist agenda and offers, in response, a grounded, critical discussion informed by storytelling and lived experience. Technology may increasingly enslave us within its rhythms and imperatives for speed and efficiency, but Menzies offers hope in the form of local action. She insists that community-building and public participation in the discussion about the information highway are the important means by which we can begin to gain control over the new information technologies and direct them to more humane, democratic, inclusive ends.

The following telephone interview took place on June 11, 2003, when Menzies was completing work on her latest book, A Feeling for Ourselves (Douglas and McIntyre, Spring 2004).

ER:     In your books and articles, you emphasize the importance of personal stories and of sharing those stories with others in order to maintain important social bonds that you see being eroded by information technologies. We'll come back to those ideas, but for now, by way of setting the stage for this interview, I'd like to ask you to begin by sharing some of your own personal story. How did you go from working for the Wheat Board in Winnipeg to being an agricultural reporter for the Edmonton Journal to becoming one of our country's foremost commentators on society, technology, and the effects of global digital networks?

HM:     I'm really glad that you started with that question, because seeing how I entered this big picture, how I did it as an ordinary human being and an ordinary citizen, speaks to the values that I bring to all my work, which is that we are all equally ordinary and equally extraordinary. The key is that we see ourselves as part of the picture and that we see our story as contributing to the larger story. And my story is of a somewhat marginal childhood, the kind of a childhood that gives you perspectives that allow you to become a commentator. I was raised in both a suburb of Montreal in the post-war period of suburban expansion in Montreal and on a farm in eastern Ontario, in a very poor area where a lot of the farms were abandoned and mechanization of farming was finally taking hold. The farming experience was quite formative, partly because that's where we were together the most as a family, so I grew up with a very strong sense of family and a very strong sense of the land. But I think there I also developed an interest in technology in the way that Ursula Franklin defines it: as how we do things around here. Having grown up on the farm, I learned how to harness a horse, I learned how to stoop grain, I picked stones out of the field; and one of the things we did constantly was improvise. The chore for the morning might be painting the barn door; well, we had to figure out how we were going to stack things so we could actually get to the top of the barn door. There were many, many formative experiences that involved improvising and gaining the confidence that you were alive in your environment and you made your environment work for you. I think that gave me an insight into the contexts of living.

ER:     And of course the farm has now become so technological that it's a different experience entirely.

HM:     Oh, yes, I have been amongst the people lamenting the loss of the family farm. I see it not just as something that is an important part of history but an important model for how to live more attuned to the landscape, the living earth. On the small scale of the family farm, you are much more in touch with your own animals, because you don't have the robotic milking machines and all this sort of thing. Some of the new developments in the factory farms - well, they frighten me because of the degree to which we are separating ourselves, removing ourselves from a sensitivity to our connection with all the other living creatures. Each stage of removal is one that is usually effected with technology, be it antibiotics or chemicals of some sort, and each technology is an artificial life unit that takes us more and more away from natural life and the autonomy of natural life-for example, our ability to protect our own immune systems - and more and more into an artificial life and the dependencies associated with that.

ER:     You've already mentioned Ursula Franklin, and it's clear, from your writings, that she, along with Harold Adams Innis, has had a great influence on your thinking. Can you talk about how Franklin's and Innis's ideas about media and technology have influenced you?

HM:     I think both Ursula and Harold Innis and a couple of other people like Robert Babe and Jacques Ellul have all influenced me. They tend to have in common their approach to technology, which is seeing the context out of which technology emerges and also seeing technology as a context. So it's a very inclusive, holistic approach.

Many of Ursula's ideas in particular have always intrigued me. For instance, prescriptive technology as a design for compliance: in that one nugget there's so much wisdom, so much richness. And also the recurring theme of social justice that runs through her critique of technology -like being able to deconstruct an ID card and the magnetic strip that allows or denies you entry into a building. She has coined a phrase, "the headless tyranny," to get at the enormity of the politics that are at work there. The idea is that, if you were dealing with a real person, you could challenge that person - Why are you barring me? By what right are you denying my freedom of movement? - but when it's this faceless, headless technology, there's no opportunity for negotiation, for dialogue, for empathy: nothing. The exclusion is absolute and the tyranny of it is so clear. Ursula is Canada's Hannah Arendt in her steadfast concern for how tyranny and totalitarianism continue to be a threat, and she reminds us that the place where they are to be watched for is in technology and our technological surround. After September 11th's terrible, devastating terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, she was on CBC radio and asked to comment. Everybody else was commenting on it - how there had to be a war on terrorism and so forth - and she had the insight, the wisdom, and the guts to say, well, you know, we have to remember that peace is not just the absence of war but the presence of justice. I thought that was so typical. And then the other thing with Ursula is her medium, which is actually much more the spoken word than the written word. Her spoken word translates well into the written word, but I always hear her voice very, very clearly in her writing. She's always vernacular in all that she does. She tells a lot of stories, she allows the voice of experience to have a major role in her consideration of what knowledge is, and she doesn't, like so many academics, hide behind theories. So, for instance, she uses, I think quite deliberately, these wonderfully everyday metaphors like cakes, earthworms, and knitting.

Now, turning to Harold Innis: I'm quite a fan of Innis in my own way, and I've tried in my writing about communications to keep his ideas current because many of his thoughts, particularly about communication technology, are so relevant today. I think his big contribution to the world is his notion of the bias of communication: the idea that if you can understand what biases are built into the dominant form of communication that a civilization is using, you can predict and identify the biases of that society or civilization. He also talks about how advances in communication allow for greater realism, but also for greater delusion. Unpacking that paradox is really important today because, after all, we are living in - what does everyone say? - we're living in "fictional times." Well, in a certain way, Harold Innis said that first, and he was saying things like that back in the 1950s.

ER:     As I think about Innis and Franklin and some other commentators on media and technology, yourself included, I wonder if there is something particularly Canadian about the urge to critique media and technology?

HM:     It could be for two reasons. One is because of Canada's proximity to the American empire. Certainly, since the 1920s, information, communication, and cultural instruments writ large have been a dominant official part of American foreign policy. So that's been a major medium of their imperial domination of the world. Canadians have been constantly the first on the receiving end, which has perhaps given Canadian commentators insight because we're the outsiders, we're on the margins. It could also be that we do have a longer legacy of the oral tradition, and being culturally removed from some of the dominant trends of print medium and then electronic medium has perhaps made people more sensitive. But certainly communication has been a medium of empire-building and Canadians have been the colonized. When you are on the receiving end and experiencing the dependency, experiencing the silencing or the marginalization, it gives you a greater insight, I think, than if you're in the driver's seat.

ER:     While we're on the subject of the Canadian Zeitgeist, I'd like to ask you to comment on your first book, The Railroad's Not Enough, published in 1978. I understand that the book was the product of nine months on the road, listening to people's personal stories about what it means to be a Canadian. What did you discover about the forces holding Canada together back then?

HM:     Well, that's why I chose the title. Just because you run a railroad across the country, that doesn't mean you've got a country! What came through for me loud and clear was regional identity. And that tended to be historically and geographically particular. In New Brunswick, for instance, feudalism has not gone away. One of my most poignant memories is of how frightened a guy who worked for Irving was when I tried to get him to talk to me. It struck me forcibly that here I had encountered something totally foreign to me: somebody who was afraid to speak his own mind. Really afraid.

ER:     Did you encounter that kind of feudalism anywhere else?

HM:     I encountered it more than once in New Brunswick; elsewhere in the Atlantic region, but it was most forceful in New Brunswick. In Newfoundland, they certainly have a strong sense of the colonized, but also a very fierce sense of independence: the legacy of having been a kind of unofficial colony in the early days. I was also catching some of the tail end of the old Canada defined out of relationships with the land. The fishery was still strong, potatoes in New Brunswick, wheat in the Prairies, forestry in Northern Ontario. There were still a lot of small farmers, and still a lot of people employed and identifying with that dimension of Canada. Now that has changed a great deal as we've become much more urbanized and as the post-war waves of immigration and refugees bring a whole new mix of skills and knowledge and traditions and expectations. What seems to have survived, though, is a belief in working together as well as working for yourself. A belief in cooperation, seen in such institutions as the national health care system, is an enduring feature of Canada.

ER:     Harking back to what you said about media fallout from the States, what would you say about our relationship to the United States and how that defines us as a people?

HM:     I think the United States will always be a very convenient reference point. Lately it's been used to greater effect because we've been seeing this real divergence of values between Canadians and Americans. It has come out to a certain extent with George W. Bush bringing to the White House this much more righteous, right wing, religious attitude, while in Canada people seem to be moving more towards a stronger affirmation of spiritual and humanist values with less emphasis on dogma and tradition. Also, in the United States there has been a forced march towards a renewed belief in rugged individualism, whereas in Canada there's been a renewal of belief in the institutions of a social welfare state, in working things out together and having more equitable social institutions that bind us together.

ER:     I want to move, now, to some of the important ideas that recur throughout your writings. One of your primary themes is that the new digital economy supports management's goals of productivity and efficiency. You counter all the hype about the information revolution by reminding us that, in fact, "It's business as usual, with a vengeance." In other words, rather than empowering people, digitization and the consequent restructuring of the workplace have resulted in even more fragmentation and deskilling of work, and the creation of what you call a "post-it-note workforce." Can you describe how and why you see this happening?

HM:     When you look at the history of these developments, of computers coming together with communications, the big breakthrough was the invention of the microchip in 1971. And then the big breakthrough in terms of that microchip technology being disbursed through communications and computers, to develop this whole smart, wired environment, was the rise of OPEC and the crisis in capitalism. It was partly a crisis of over-production but it was also because suddenly productivity costs were going up because of the rising cost of fuel. Out of this came a great impetus to move towards a new model of organizing capitalist economies. The critic David Harvey called it "flexible accumulation," meaning a new model delivered with network information, financial information, management information systems. Those systems can become the core of a corporate enterprise which reaches out virtually to contract out work to people and companies, to outsource production to suppliers and sub-suppliers, and generally to externalize or offload the risks associated with having all the capital intensive equipment yourself. I've paid a lot of attention to the incredible concentration of vested interest that lay behind that shift. I interpreted the embracing of free trade and the Canada-US free trade deal in the light of this larger development. I said, what I'm seeing here is that an old branch-plant model of industrial organization, in which machines are operated by people with human intelligence, is being abandoned. They're bringing in this whole new model of production where they've got computers and robots, and where the intelligence of production is in networks and in software rather than in people. The free trade policy shift provides the regulatory permission or background to support our complete continental reorganization and rationalization of production.

Why had the deficit suddenly become public enemy number one? I interpreted that as part of this new wave of capitalist organization. Because when you start to shift towards an information economy, suddenly the discreet separations between manufacturing services are gone, they're obsolete. So businesses like IBM and Lougheed redefined themselves as information service businesses and started to move into providing government information services, hospital information services, education information services, and they did this at a time when, in the name of deficit-cutting and general public sector cutbacks, you were seeing this drastic re-organization of the public sector - hospitals, government, etc. Suddenly, you saw, seemingly as a new feature, privatization, contracting out, deregulation that would permit privatization. I saw that as part of a larger paradigm shift, a really fundamental change in the organization of commercial, capitalist economic activity.

Coming back to your question, which to a certain extent asks: Why didn't I get all caught up in the hype of the information revolution? - I was willing to be optimistic in as much as, in the early stages of a new technology coming on stream, it is typically seized by people on the margins. This is one of Innis's great insights. It is typically seized by people who have been marginalized, and they will innovate, they will come up with wonderful breakthroughs in terms of new applications, particularly in communication, because with the old configurations they were left out of it. So I was willing to get a little bit excited over the wonderful flowering of democracy through the Internet, but all along I worried that the larger force around networking technology was coming out of the corporate sector and the corporate government sector. So I wasn't surprised that, by 1997, the top use of the Internet was for business purposes. And so we've seen a kind of an eclipsing and even an enclosure of some of these wonderful democratic initiatives on the Internet. Those are being stifled now and will survive and continue to thrive only if there is a major policy intervention to protect them.

ER:     So I take it that you would now say that the distinction you wrote about in the 1980s - between the information highway as a commercial infrastructure, an "info-mall," and the Internet as a non-commercial information commons organized by community groups and grass root interests - is no longer tenable?

HM:     No, I think we would be foolishly romantic to think that these are two separate spheres, almost like the public sphere and the private sphere. No, there really has been an eclipsing and an enclosure. We can see it in the privatization of the infrastructure for the Internet. We can see it in the multimedia conglomerates that have seized control of strategic sites like being Internet service providers. Now we've got just a few companies who are the gateways to the Internet and we're seeing some very disquieting trends around their policing activity. Certainly, the move is towards pay-per-service transactions and that, of course, mitigates against the kind of democratic commons, the sharing culture, that people were very bravely and successfully promoting during the 1980s and the better part of the '90s. Out of that culture came the kind of networking that made the anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle become a world event. You also had the highly successful global organizing around the Beijing women's conference. The women managed to pull off a very successful conference, even though the Beijing government did everything in its power to thwart them, and the networking has continued as the women pursue all the items on their agenda for action. Then there are initiatives like the Women's Health Network; like PovNet, which started in British Columbia and is now going national. There are still many great initiatives, so as Yogi Berra once said, "It ain't over till it's over." The struggle is ongoing, and I think it's very important to always think of it in terms of a dialectic. I think that what is happening now is people are paying more attention to the importance of linkages between online networking and grounded, face-to-face actions. Because the sustaining power of the anti-globalization movement is very much, in my opinion, the face-to-face encounters as people get together at Seattle and Quebec City. I went to Quebec City myself and my experience over the course of four days reaffirmed the importance of face-to-face dialogue in building a sense of personal power and then actually making things happen.

ER:     You say "it ain't over till it's over" - and yet there's a sense in your writing of time running out. In Whose Brave New World?, you warn that the paradigm is shifting fast and closure is approaching. Reading that, I was reminded of Jacques Ellul who, in his earlier works writes with the same sense of urgency about the need for critical thought on technique, but later seems to suggest that it's too late because people failed to heed his early warnings. Is change still possible? Can we still find ways to use technology to create more democratic, healthy environments?

HM:     I think your question addresses the sense of disillusionment and despair that is out there, and the cynicism of our time. It has become very trendy to be cynical, to think you can't make a difference, but I tend to think that the answer to the question is: Where are people struggling to assert the practice of democracy right now? That means freedom of expression, freedom of assembly; it means the time and space requirements for dialogue. Dialogue is so critical to democracy because it not only puts people into the picture as participants, but it puts them in on their own terms so that it allows for a challenging of dogma, a challenging of rigid ideologies. And it allows for the fundamentals of what democracy is about, which is the accommodation of difference in negotiation, coming to a consensus, creating a plan for action, and then moving with that. I think that we should always be prepared to see this kind of ongoing struggle emerge in unexpected places. Resistance and change are always possible. As long as people still have some latitude in which to think for themselves, some minimal freedom of space and time to regain and assert agency, then there's still hope.

Having said that, I've certainly seen a lot of windows closing, so to speak. The most disquieting trend of all is the deepening inequalities in the world. You're seeing this played out through the so-called digital divide. People are becoming more and more separated from each other by economic difference, by difference of endowment, by difference of life experience, and then by difference of perspective. And the more you have inequalities, the more you have a "them" and an "us," which leads to fear and paranoia. And you have the kind of politics of desperation that drove two planes into the World Trade Centre, because I very much interpret terrorism in the context of despair, the sense of hopelessness and disillusionment with the mainstream and with the powers of due process, as we have them right now. Too many people are feeling excluded, too many people are feeling marginalized. The inequalities have reached the point that too many voices are silenced, too many needs are going unaddressed. Look at the AIDS epidemic in Africa; look at the situation of the Palestinian people in Israel. In so many parts of the world, as well as in Canada, we've got deepening inequalities. We've got the people who are doing very well, thank you very much; all the people in McJobs and part-time jobs; and then a real erosion of the middle class, which is being very, very much squeezed - squeezed to the point where they hardly have any discretionary time to think for themselves. They're just trying to cope, they're trying to survive.

That's another disquieting trend that worries me very much. Nobody has time for going to meetings, nobody has time for the necessary dialogue to come to a consensus of what can be done, nobody has time for taking a practical course of action. The diminishing of time for voluntary activity, for civic engagement, is well documented. And then you've got the overt politics of surveillance that is rising, creating a climate of paranoia and fostering the us-versus-them divide. All the initiatives being taken by the Bush administration under the Homeland Security Act and other measures to diminish and curtail freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and to increase the powers of public surveillance are very disquieting trends. Then there's the issue of how much people are being isolated. The fragmenting of our society, the de-institutionalization of so much activity, is resulting in more and more people being isolated in their own little private cells-the home, the car, wherever it might be. Going to work on-line, going to school on-line, going to the bank on-line, going to the store on-line-and, again, in a climate of rising inequalities that can result in people being barricaded more and more in their isolation.

These are very disquieting trends. But I also see the unexpected developments and questioning coming out of, for instance, the SARS epidemic. People are questioning some of the priorities in our society. I think there's a great rethinking going on in a number of areas. And then there is the anti-globalization movement, the ongoing work in the women's movement and feminism, the environmental movement. People are doing things on a local level. For instance, in Brazil, the local people took back control of their own water supply. And in some of the countries in South America that have been so hard hit by restructuring, people are taking over factories and saying, okay, we're going to run them as cooperatives. This kind of direct, participatory, democratic action is to my mind very encouraging. People are using various technologies, including the Internet, as an organizing tool, as a supplement to their face-to-face meetings and dialogues. So these are hopeful signs.

ER:     You find cause for hope in what feminists, environmentalists, and other groups are doing, but aren't these marginalized groups who can be very easily ignored by technocrats? Isn't it necessary to somehow demarginalize technology critique so that society will take it more seriously?

HM:     Don't forget that whole notion of "marginal" is in the eye of the beholder. It's like the way Canada is described: you guys down there in the Maritimes are the "regions," but Ontario is the last province to ever describe itself as a region - it's the centre. So describing people as marginal is just one more little piece in the toolkit of trying to control and delegitimize others. But the people who will describe a critique of technology as marginal and try to marginalize it will only get away with it as long as they can keep the public's consent and endorsement of their mainstream analysis. The ongoing struggle is to find ways of showing the inadequacy of the critique at the centre. I think that the environmental movement has done that successfully. I've also always been persuaded by Saul Alinsky's notions of social change, in particular the idea that it's very important to quantify the costs of maintaining the status quo. If the cost of leaving the status quo can be made manifest and shown to be burdensome to society - for example, this is the dollar value if we leave people in downtown east side Vancouver without adequate access to clean needles - then suddenly the critique that has been effectively kept in the margins is now mainstream.

ER:     What do you think the government's involvement or responsibility should be in all this? Here in New Brunswick, for example, starting particularly with Frank McKenna, the government has been intensely involved in building and promoting the information infrastructure - often, as you've observed, spending billions on it while neglecting more fundamental social needs.

HM:     I think the government's responsibility should be the public sector side of it. They should not be the handmaidens of industry. We are seeing the emergence of a corporatist society, and I do know that the definition of fascism is a union of big government and big business. The more we see that kind of linkage and integration of interests and commitments and vision, the more we move away from a democratic society towards a fascistic one. My sense is that the Canadian government and other governments should be pursuing the policies that they had pursued all along in terms of communication infrastructures. One of them is infrastructure as public utility and another is parallel institutions that subscribe to, serve, and are accountable to public policy purposes. The CBC, for example, is not only mandated to provide regionally inclusive programming but is also mandated to pursue equity in its hiring and for the people who produce its programs. Gender inclusiveness and racial inclusiveness and making sure that the voices of First Nations people are heard loud and clear in the mainstream of Canadian media: that's the kind of policy that should be pursued. This zealous concern with helping to ramp everybody up into the information highway and wiring everybody in and connecting Canadians, as though that is the sole responsibility of government, is actually a real abdication of government responsibility.

ER:     Much of your writing is specifically concerned with the impacts of the new digital economy on women. You suggest that women are more likely to become the tools, or servomechanisms, of technological systems rather than using those technologies as tools. Why is this more of a risk for women than for men?

HM:     It isn't a greater risk for women as a gender, but rather a risk for women in terms of where they have been historically in the labour market. Women have been historically concentrated and confined to support positions - clerical, sales, and service have been the three great pillars of women's employment - and I use the word "confined" deliberately because that's the key point. Typically, women have been ghettoized in these positions through gender perceptions, the organization of work, job descriptions, and so forth. When these areas of work were computerized, informatized, and digitized, there were built-in barriers that prevented women from being able to move readily into positions where they could control the technology. Rather, they were shunted into positions where they were much more controlled by the technology and came to work as extensions of the technology: as the fingers on the keyboard, inputting data, processing data, or as the voice box at the other end of a digital telephone maze. So it's been more a function of where women have been in the labour market than a function of women as a gender.

There's something kind of interesting that I have noticed in terms of women in society: historically, we've tended to be multi-taskers. We have juggled taking care of kids while churning the milk into butter and running households. And then in the post-war period, when women went out and got jobs, they were juggling work and home life. So women have actually been in a position to succeed in this new fragmented, asynchronous work environment, but they've been more vulnerable to exploitation for that very reason. They risk becoming overextended and the victims of stress and burnout and then all the diseases of our time, like chronic fatigue syndrome, because in the past there were always limits to the environment in which women did this multitasking, the limits of the household, but now there are no limits. The demands of work can intrude into a woman's life whether she's in a car taking her kids to the doctor or at home trying to read a kid a story. So it's the absence of limits now that I think is a real danger for women; this great skill for juggling many things could set us up for being really over worked.

ER:     One of the qualities I appreciate most about your writing is your concern with discourse. You compel us to think about words that are, for the most part, bantered around without a lot of thought - words like "globalization," "virtual corporations," "privatization," and so forth. Why do you think it's so important to deconstruct the language we use to talk about digital networks and their social impacts?

HM:     Language is the medium through which we construct our perception of reality. We can either use it in a way that helps us feel and deeply understand and interpret realities or that takes us away from them. We can be deluded and even delude ourselves with "plastic words" - that's actually the English translation of the title of a German book by Uwe Poerksen. It's so important with language to carry on with traditional words that resonate with established, lived meaning. The word "class" means something; the word "McJob" is new. If words are constantly being newly coined, newly minted, it has the effect of severing us from the past and from our capacity to use the past to inform ourselves in the present - to give us that depth of perception, that depth of field, that deepens our understanding and our analysis. These neologisms are free-floating signifiers. What do they signify? They might have a little buzz, but they'll be here today, gone tomorrow. I want to sense the continuity of meanings and be true to them. One of my favorite phrases from George Orwell is "let the meaning choose the word," but that doesn't mean make up a new word. It means search and remember, check it out with other people and agree that, given your understanding and my understanding, this is the word that really names this reality. Then that word is positioned in a cultural context that is not only rich with interpretations from the past but is a context in which we can see ourselves taking action in the future.

ER:     Technology does seem to produce an enormous number of buzzwords. The latest is "e" this and "e" that; next year it will be something different.

HM:     Yes, but they're words that are not only new but stripped - especially these abbreviations - of expressive complexity. There's no onomatopoeia, there's no rhythm, there's nothing that evokes the body. It's through speaking with our tongues - the tongue as an extension of our body and the tongue as a vocalization and an outering of our sensory experience of the world -t hat we put ourselves in the picture. We can feel it as we name it, and feeling it motivates us to do something about it. That's why stories are so important: because stories are alive. Theories and prescriptions and quick analyses aren't; they are inert and two-dimensional. A story is three-dimensional; it's the body of experience that has been given voice and utterance. As you listen to that story you enter in, you're drawn into the story.

ER:     But today, it seems that the story is increasingly being reduced to the sound bite.

HM:     Yes, and when you've got everything reduced to a thirty-second sound bite you're limited in what you can say. I remember when Alexa McDonough resigned as leader of the NDP, one of the things she said quite forthrightly was: I've found myself silenced. The things that I have to say cannot be reduced to a thirty-second sound bite. All this clever spin doctoring on the part of certain politicians is spinning away from the context of lived reality, and it just becomes a set of symbols, a set of impressions. It's really both plastic words and the Orwellian Newspeak, where everything is reduced to "good," "doubleplusgood," and meaning is divorced from historical context and story. So there's no time for stories anymore.

ER:     Can you talk more about stories and why you put so much emphasis upon them?

HM:     I grew up in a rural environment where storytelling was an important part of daily culture and how people learned things. I think it might also have to do with the fact that I was dyslexic as a kid. I cultivated skills in listening and watching people for cues to cover for the fact that, until I was in grade six, I couldn't read. Those two things propelled me toward a greater awareness of storytelling than otherwise would have been the case. And then storytelling became something that very much resonated with my values. I really believe in the importance of everyone being participant in our democracy. I think that everybody has the capacity for thinking and speaking for themselves and that doing so is necessary for a healthy society. Also, stories to my mind model life the way it is. Life is complex. Stories faithfully reflect that complexity because they're always full of interconnectedness, interdisciplinarity, so they are a mirror of the narrative of life itself. As Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin said, life is an event. When you tell a story, you're modelling that for the listener, and the listener or reader becomes much more drawn into something with a sense of it being alive than if you're reading data sets in a field. Now, there are dangers to that. You could be drawn in for devious and misanthropic, ill-advised reasons. So I don't want to romanticize storytelling, but nevertheless, in terms of the trade-off, there is this to be gained from the storytelling tradition: namely, the participation of the listener.

ER:     What about the danger of total relativity when everyone is telling his or her own story?

HM:     Of course, the postmodern perspective is that everybody's narrative is equally valid and therefore there can be no movement toward a consensus on what our narrative is. I fundamentally disagree. I think that part of storytelling is listening to the other person's story, telling your own story, and then searching for the commonalities. Consensus emerges from that, from the dialogue.

ER:     I'd like to shift gears and talk about your work as an educator, although I suppose all of your work could be deemed educational in a way. I recently bought a copy of the textbook you created for your course, "Canada in the Global Village," and, though I haven't seen the accompanying videos, it's clear how much work went into it. You've been giving that course for a number of years now. Can you tell me a little bit about the course - its rationale and how it came about?

HM:     This is, like so many things in my life, sort of serendipitous. I had been recently invited to become an adjunct professor at Carleton University and to teach a course, based on a book by Arthur Kroker, called "Technology and the Canadian Mind." I took that course the way it was given to me and have made it my own course over the years. I've used it as an opportunity to get students to think critically about technology and to get them to see that technology is nothing new - even the Internet. So, for instance, I talk about three waves of globalization and I position the Canadian fur trade as part of the first wave; the communications media and globalizing networks at the time were comprised of sailing ships and paper. And then the next stage was railways and telegraphs, and that sort of thing. This takes technology out of the buzzy realm of everything new and puts it into a historical context that allows people to see where patterns of inequality, exploitation, and various biases were at work. Then they can extract the lessons from that and apply them to a much more critical analysis of what's going on these days. I always teach this as a seminar course. The in-class dialogue is absolutely vital, so that the students start to make this material their own, start to incorporate some of the ideas into their own language, and then they're just flying.

ER:     I teach a similar course called Media Ecology, and some of the students have told me that the ideas of "old guys" like Innis, McLuhan, and Postman don't apply to the world they live in. Which is interesting, because those old guys are the ones who lament the fact that technology has become our new environment and it certainly is the environment these students live in. So how do you convey to this generation of students, born in the 1980s, the importance of thinking critically about an environment that's as natural and often as invisible to them as air?

HM:     I think you've named it precisely. That's the difficulty: how do you persuade a fish that it's in water? I always start the course with the here and now. I start with very simple ways of getting people to think about their technological surround. The Canadian Studies school happens to be on the twelfth floor of Dunton Tower [at Carleton University]. So I get them to think about the elevator and about trade-offs with elevators and stairways. And I get them to think about the Queensway in Ottawa, with its limited exits and entrances, and the trade-offs there: who designed them, was there public consultation, and whose voices were represented? I invite them to think about what they are taking for granted - to think about the water, and that may mean a judicious application of dye so that they can see it. Perspective is everything. The key to information and to insight is difference: seeing the "other," seeing that there is something different, separate, can start the process. And we talk about women and reproductive technology, technologies in the environment, genetically modified food, things that people are concerned about now, and then run backwards from what has caught their attention to some of the deeper, more invisible systemic and infrastructural forces.

ER:     A last question, or set of questions, on education. You've written about education and the new economy, and the importance of resisting educational initiatives that train people in narrow skill sets, that teach them to do rather than to think - which is a trend, unfortunately, even at the university level. In addition, you and Janice Newson recently did a study on determining how academics are being affected by working in an increasingly on-line university environment. I'm interested in knowing what you learned and just what your thoughts are in general on the way globalization and technologization are affecting the university and the meaning of university education.

HM:     One of the things that it is doing is disintegrating the university as a whole - as a community, as a commons, as a collection of colleagues in proximity to each other. One of the subtle and yet very persistent and pernicious effects is reducing the amount of chance encounters - cross-disciplinary conversations as people run into each other in the library, as people have brown bag lunches. All of that sort of thing is gone as we move towards a much more individualized relationship of the academic to the university. More and more academics work at home, so the time for spontaneous chats with students, with colleagues, has really been one of the great casualties. But when you think of it, it's out of those kinds of chats that are not directed and focussed but rather diffused and free-flowing that some of the most creative thinking emerges. So there are subtle and then there are more direct evidences of a dumbing down. Now, academics by and large both love and hate the technology because the technology allows them to be in touch with the universe, to form all kinds of collaborative arrangements, to get their work out, to get published more, but paradoxically people are feeling more isolated.

ER:     And the e-journals are becoming so specific as more and more of them arise that academics are further partitioned into little enclaves of knowledge.

HM:     Yes, that's why I love stories. It has to do with how everything's nicely, complexly related when you tell it as a story, versus micro-fragmented the way academic discourse is these days. Since relativity theory and chaos theory, the thrust of understanding about how the universe works tells us that everything is connected to everything else. So we need more holistic thinking, at a time when it's getting more and more fragmented. And when you get all that fragmented knowledge you have little power. This came through in some of the interviews we did: people are feeling less sure of themselves when they open their mouths to speak. They don't feel as though they have something relevant to say to the world of the here and now. And that's partly the specialization, partly the isolation, partly being strung out, and partly that there's just not enough time to read deeply and reflectively. If you're reading superficially just to grab something that you can stick in your next article, you don't have the confidence of full understanding. And there are consequences.

ER:     That prompts me to ask how you decide, given the sheer proliferation of writing on every conceivable subject, what and who you are going to read.

HM:     Well, I follow my instincts! I'm one of those people who loves to browse. I'll find a book, check its references, that'll lead me to something else, then I'll go and find a book on a shelf and look at the books beside it. I like the immediacy of being able to do that kind of research - being able to just reach out and hold something in my hand instead of ordering it. That's why I love libraries. I also rely on networks. I'll read a book by somebody and I'll write them a letter, that will lead to a conversation that puts me onto other stuff, and so my understanding grows.

ER:     My reading also tends to be serendipitous. I'll go into a second-hand book store and find a book that will send me off in a new direction. It's exciting, but also worrisome because it makes me wonder, what if I hadn't found that particular book, or had found another one instead?

HM:     Yes, it leaves you very vulnerable to self-doubt, but we have to trust to serendipity and tolerate that anxiety. And that's perhaps a healthy thing - to always be doubting. As John Ralston Saul said, it's an honourable tradition in an intellectual's life, and I think it helps to keep us honest. But it's important to be aware that there's so much out there and we're always just scratching the surface.

ER:     What do you have your students read?

HM:     My course is very much focused on the ideas that have shaped Canada, so I draw from writings that deal with that. John Ralston Saul is one, and this year I'm using Janice Stein's The Cult of Efficiency. But mostly, I go back to Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Ursula Franklin - the people who had time to think and time to think things through. Their fundamental ideas are enduring, and each word resonates because they have reached that level of understanding. Reading their work is like going back to the well; I keep going back to the well and rereading passages and getting more insights.

ER:     Before we wrap up this interview, I'd like to ask you to tell me a bit about your forthcoming book. You're busy preparing it for publication now, I understand.

HM:     Yes, it will be coming out in spring 2004. The working title is A Feeling For Ourselves, and my thesis is that we're losing that: we're losing touch, we're losing a sense of connection with each other and society and the living earth. We're losing a sense of what really matters. And I take that as a function of time-space compression writ large. But it's very broadly construed, not just narrowly in terms of the time-space compressions of globalization and on-line networks. In the book, I go through a whole history of the standardization of space necessary for its compression, the standardization of time necessary for its compression, and then the two coming together to create these simulated worlds that function asynchronously and at the speed of light. And then I look at what the consequences are. I have a section on the physiological and psychological effects - looking at the stress and burnout caused by the pace of life having speeded up so much and the relentless pace of change. You just lose your inner equilibrium, and because you're going so fast you can't really process experience, you can't really get back to your own inner sense of balance and equilibrium. I also look at how people are being drawn out of a context of life into a symbol sphere where the medium in which they are immersed and perceive reality is one of highly abstracted symbols rendered as little flashes of light that move and morph at the speed of light. A lot of the book looks at the implications of both being drawn into this unbearable lightness of being digital and being drawn away from, becoming more disassociated from, grounded realities, face-to-face dialogue. And as we are drawn away, we lose the capacity to get back to it: it's almost like closure sets in. Then, having looked at the psychological/physiological aspects, I look at what this means for culture and society. I look at attention deficit disorder in the context of harried, workaholic parents who don't have time to be there with their kids and to cultivate a sense of attuned engagement in life. Those fundamental relationships and the rhythms of engagement in society that are inculcated through parenting are being really shortchanged. And then it goes on into the social deficit and the ethical deficit and I bring it home in terms of a crisis of accountability.

ER:     What's next, after this book?

HM:     Getting back to my novel! I have one in the drawer, as they say, and then there's another one writing itself in my head. I've been working on fiction for a number of years, taking courses and going to summer writing schools, but I haven't had the time nor have I been able to afford to move away from the non-fiction. But I'm really hoping that this book that I'm just finishing is going to be the last big non-fiction book. I feel as though my work will have been done.

ER:     Does your fiction deal with any of the same ideas as your non-fiction, or is it a total departure?

HM:     The new one does, but the other one doesn't.

ER:     I look forward to reading the new books - both non-fiction and fiction. Thanks, Heather.