Page - 168 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Augie Fleras | Ethnic and Aboriginal Media in Canada 168 influence, the answer is increasingly clear: Greater empowerment for the historically disenfranchised by changing the subjectivities and practices (both online and offline) of the marginalized and disempowered (Landzelius 2006). This transformation goes beyond a simple asking of ‘use’ or ‘effects’ of the new media. Emphasis instead is on how members of a community are making themselves a(t) home in a global communicative environment. Four patterns can be discerned according to Kyra Landzelius: (1) aboriginal/indigenous peoples are appropriating and moulding ICTs to reflect, reinforce, and advance their needs, interests, and identities - including the use of cyberactivism to promote their ends; (2) ICTs as forum for making claims in the name of ethnicity (or indigeneity or aboriginality); (3) for naming ethnicity or claiming ethnicity (or aboriginality); and (4) shifting the boundaries by which the politics of ethnicity/aboriginality is rethought, reworked, and revitalized. To date, aboriginal peoples engagement with ICTs stretches along two directional pulls, namely, inreach (bonding) and outreach (bridging) (Landzelius 2006). Inreach orientations range from promoting localized interests and community services, including the dissemination of ingroup information to the importation of expert knowledge for community use. For example, aboriginal leaders are turning to ICTs to deliver high quality health care to remote Canadian communities (Gideon 2006). Telemedicine enables medical specialists to observe patients via real time links, thus providing an affordable way to defeat the tyranny of distance across Canada’s vast expanses, while balancing Western medical knowledge with aboriginal health beliefs and practices. Outreach orientations tend to focus on bridging with the outside world, ranging in scope from simple tourist information to full blown indigenous revolutionary movements. The uprising of the indigenous and metizo peasants of the Chiapas in their resistance against the Mexican government constitutes one of the more spectacular examples of an indigenous cybercampaign against the new geopolitical order - thus reinforcing the web’s potential for local empowerment (Belausteguigoitia 2006). In short, far from being at odds with each other or canceling each other out, inreach and outreach functions are mutually reinforcing by embedding the local with the global and their implications for the articulation of identities, experiences, and outcomes (Landzelius 2006). 4.4 Mainstreaming Ethnicity References to ethnic and aboriginal media in Canada include an additional stream. Mainstream media in Canada are under pressure (both formal and