Caron's remarks were made in Ottawa on March 11, 2009. They were made in the context of Canada's 150th anniversary on July 1, 2017.
This anniversary offers a moment of choice and opportunity to plan the future of our public memory, to fulfil our desire to commemorate, and to assure that we will have what is required to make this happen.
The new complexity of this environment is connected to two transformative phenomena. First, the landscape of "information resource" and memory development has almost entirely shifted from the controlled, ordered, formal experiences and limited relationships established within the physical space of official mediators, repositories and analogue communication to the uncontrolled, disordered, informal experiences and unlimited communications relativity of cyberspace permitted by the Web and networks. Second and more important in my view, is the coincidental and ongoing social merger of culture, technology and people. It is this merger--enabled by technology--which is beginning to sweep away many of our previously and collectively held principles, convictions and reference points about knowledge, perception, understanding, truth and meaning. I would even go so far as to suggest that these two phenomena are changing the very root conventions and sources of social interpretation, literacy, and ultimately, communal remembering.
Within this process of commercialization, corresponding advances in information and communications technologies are fundamentally changing the way people think about, understand, interpret, assign meaning to, create, use, produce, exchange, receive, store and provide information. They are changing the way people gain access--electronic and physical--to each other and to an enormous variety of information and services offered by business, government and local communities; they are enabling the opening and closing of new forms of personal, social and economic capacities, relationships and powers; and they are reinvigorating democratic processes by establishing new forms of interactive literacy that can transform relations between government and its citizens.
Yet I do not believe that this social merger is primarily a product of technological determinism. To me, the Digital Age is much more than an age of technology--which is simply a facilitating tool--but it is rather and pre-eminently an age of social transformation, wherein individuals, groups and organizations are socially "adapting" and "shaping" communications system technology to (1) permit a new kind of access to information, knowledge and literacy, and perhaps more importantly, to (2) enable the transformation of democratic society through reconfigured and redistributed information resources.
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