Mass media holds a mirror up to Canadians, reflecting an image of who we are collectively. As that institution declines, what will fill its essential role?

We used to have a joke at The Globe and Mail that the job of our circulation department was to make sure the newspaper didn’t fall into the wrong hands. I thought about the joke, reading David Eaves’s essay in The Mark (“What New Media Means for Democracy”; Sept. 2) about an essay I wrote in The Globe (“The friendship of strangers: Is this the end of our age of social cohesion?”; Aug. 29).

The essence of Mr. Eaves’s essay is that I am antediluvian – and, who knows, possibly drooling – in declaring that the decline of old mainstream media and the rise of new social media mean Canadians are suffering from social cohesion deficit. Which is not what the essence of my essay was about. And if Mr. Eaves had confined his critique to his blog it would have been okay, a one-day chat maybe and then, poof, off the Google radar screen, but he migrated it to The Mark which has a readership whose opinions I care about.

My essay addressed four issues:

First, that there is a paradox in Canadians’ high degree of attachment to their country, and their increasing inability to feel a sense of common purpose or endeavour.

Second, that the country has deep cleavages vis-à-vis the imagined community of Canada – cleavages by gender, age, education, and megalopolitan-ROC (rest of Canada) – that seem increasingly beyond the ability of politicians to transcend. We have a national government, for example, that cannot elect members in our three largest cities.

Third, that as a result of those splits – and, I argued, of not-unrelated problems with polling methodology – opinion surveys are increasingly meaningless as measurements of Canadian public policy intentions. Which was the ignition point of my essay, a recent poll with a dubious outcome.

And, fourth, that an aggravating factor in public fracturing, a point I made about three-quarters of the way down in the essay, is the erosion of shared knowledge which mass media once provided.

It is this fourth point that Mr. Eaves seized upon, and presented in The Mark as my entire thesis, upon which he then walked harshly (his word) with boots.

Here is what I wrote:

The central instruments of social cohesion have been the mass media, now being gnawed away at by speciality channels and the internet, and by new generations who do not feel affiliated (the word communications theorists use) with TV networks or CBC radio or newspapers. And what appears to be the greatest single impact of digital media is the disappearance of what political scientists call the public space – the very public space that, two centuries ago, newspapers created in Canada.

The thesis is not simple, and likely the fault is mine in not explaining it clearly enough. It has to do with Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an imagined community, and it has to do with mythology – what we collectively believe about ourselves as Canadians to be true, and what inspires us to act collectively as citizens. Mythology is something that has fascinated me ever since. Years ago, I went to a lecture on the subject given by Pamela Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins. At the end of her lecture, I asked how are mythologies transmitted today. She replied: “Don’t you ever read your newspaper?” At that moment, a classic cartoon lightbulb came on over my head and I understood what I do for a living.

Incidentally, for Mr. Eaves to take what I said about eroding social cohesion and claim that I am arguing against diversity is just silly. A profound part of our Canadian mythology, particularly our megalopolitan Canadian mythology, is our diversity. But to go back to his central argument . . .

If he had said – which he didn’t – that the debate is anything but resolved over the impact of new media on social cohesion and its implications for things like how we do democracy, I would have said, “Yes, that’s right. In fact, it’s not really a debate. It’s a whole lot of informed and uninformed speculation because nobody knows at this point what the impact is going to be, but communications theorists and journalists all over the world are thinking about it.”

Where, in fact, debate is taking place is over how deeply the public sphere is being fractured, and I find it really interesting that, in the United States, the great 1920s contention between John Dewey and Walter Lippmann on the nature of the public – is there a public or isn’t there – has come alive again in universities.

What the mass media have done in the past is mythologize culture and, as Jurgen Habermas says, created a public sphere, something Mr. Eaves appears to realize; I get an email announcement from him whenever he has an article in a mainstream newspaper. They have reflected back to Canadians a certain conservative, bourgeois benchmark or image (which is basically who we are), set the boundaries on legitimate controversy and sort of chivvied us along as a group. The benchmark was never fixed in cement; it constantly moved. Part of the reason why it moved is because Canadians didn’t like what they saw in the mirror. Twenty years ago gay marriage would have been outside the media’s boundaries of legitimate controversy or discussion; 50 years ago aboriginal Canadians weren’t allowed to vote. And not always have we gone from bad to better: 40 years ago, virtually no one questioned the national government’s social engineering with pensions, public health care, and post-secondary education assistance.

Now the media’s ability to hold up a mirror to Canadians, however flawed the mirror may be, is eroding because they are reaching proportionately fewer Canadians every year. Mr. Eaves appears to celebrate that, which is fine. I questioned in my essay what will replace the mass media’s mirror.