Blog Post #2: Dylan Gowanlock

For this week's discussion board entry, we have been tasked with identifying a piece of the course content that we found specifically interesting. Recently in this course, the work of Liam Cole Young on "Innis’s Infrastructure: Dirt, Beavers, and Documents in Material Media Theory" has been of great interest to me, as I feel that it provides an interesting account of the economic development of our nation. Young is particularly focused on the development of communication infrastructure, which in modern scholarly work can be seen as "logistical supply chains, urban environments, and digital labour" (Young, p. 227). However, in Innis's era of work in the field or "dirt research," these systems of infrastructure came to be through the export and frequent trade of Canadian staples such as furs, timber, fish, and mined minerals, to name a select few. A quote that really stuck with me is "The beaver was the vessel, the medium, by which Innis grasped how human activities become inscribed into the earth as infrastructure, and the way these constitute the plane on which subsequent activity can (or must) unfold" (Young, p. 241). This is to say that Innis believed that Canada was not formed on the idea of "manifest destiny" or incredible groundbreaking technology, but rather on the cultural practices such as hunting, trapping, and economic circulation that were undertaken by the indigenous and Canadian colonizers at the time that led to the birth of the nation and large-scale industrial growth. This growth can best be illustrated by the passage of text in Young's work noting that "roads replaced paths, steamships adopted the routes of canoe, towns replaced trading posts, maps became standardized (allowing for the eventual parceling out of land plots in settlement), and institutional bureaucracy replaced ad hoc techniques of same" (Young, p. 240).

In summary, to view the birth of Canada as a nation that is something inherently and uniquely Canadian as opposed to a rub-off effect of the incredibly large economic stature of the country just south of our border is something that has really stuck with me. The idea of large communication networks that allow for the spread of commerce and goods interests me. A question I have for anybody who chooses to answer would be as follows: Do you personally believe any other notable Canadian events can rival the trade of these staples as the most important piece in the puzzle of the development of Canada? Having been educated on Canadian happenings well beyond the lifespan of Harold Innis, do you feel any other events, systems of knowledge or people have been just as (if not more) important?