Canadian public television slowly replaced by global social media

As I watched a 5' 123 lb. Om Yun Chol of the Northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the smallest 56 kg. weight class of the International Weightlifting Federation win a gold medal in London by lifting an Olympic record 168 kilogram or 370 pound or triple his own bodyweight in the clean and jerk competition yesterday, it occured to me all of a sudden that I did not do so on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as I usually do. It would have been my last viewing of the network on the weekend, as well as that of Television Ontario which I used extensively thoughout the week ending with the highly successful and one of the oldest ongoing programs nationally Saturday Night at the Movies and its usual 3 late night movies. Instead, I watched the record lift on an internet news feed from a foreign cable sports network, which broadcasted it without fail which is something I could never depend on in the past from the CBC or the Canadian Television Network here in the Keady area of the Bruce-Grey-Saugeen region.

Readying ourselves for the eventual decommissioning of the high powered over the air analog signalling transmitter south of the hamlet just around the corner to the west CICA-TV-12 for TVO and east CIII-TV-4 for the Global Television Network means losing rabbit ear connectivity at the camp, cabin and cottage right in the centre of Canadian cottage country, but while it means these venues now immediately lose the advertising power they dominated by a forced population in Rural and Northern regions who had no other source of entertainment over the air, their now cheaply produced and even previously cheaper distribution of that information via cow cable can now be easily be trumped with a better variety of entertainment and more accurate information through the internet and its world wide web of global social media, going beyond even the given Youtube, Facebook and Hotmail one can go pretty far online with just Google. From the analog to digital reality, one loses a narrow form of entertainment provincially and gains a wider view of information globally, kind of like an informal freeing of the mind. So their plan not to replace them with the usual digital transmitters to allow TVO Channel 12 and CBC Channel 20, 45, 71 and 101 work for the old black and whites in the bush just gives us two less reasons to turn the old noise box on, as this region is not a market that has been giving a mandatory designation by the Canadian Radio Television Telecommunications Commission market for digital television conversion, the remaining 3 analog broadcasting stations being CTV Channel 2 or CKCO-TV-2, GTN Channel 4 or CIII-TV-4 and CTV Channel 8 or CKNX-TV, CTV Two are just repeated broadcasts from abroad based from other stations down south from Kitchener, London and Toronto.

Though most people would be lead to believe 3 out of 5 ain not bad when 2 of the 3 are basically sending out the same content and the other 1 might as well be then you know where this mininarrative is headed, luckily even without the internet, one has so many sights to see, books to read, broadcast radio communication, tapes, discs and various digital audio media files to listen to, films to watch on VHS or DVD that can still be used on those little black noise boxes and of course the good old fashion human touch through those local meetups with others within the community at large. At the end of that analog era and into this brave new ditigal world, the old boys network from the old broadcast media have become powerless by their own hands, leaving the 1.7% or less of country folk to be more freer with their spare time yet keeping the over 97% of city folk kept long and stronger into its bondage via pay to play digital cable television. So just remember, nothing in this world is free and though we may over 57 channels, there still really is nothing on.