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The new media

Philippe Morin
Northern News Services
Monday, May 14, 2007

INUVIK - Youth clicking away at keyboards, instantly streaming music, news and entertainment on-demand, points to a global shift in media-culture stretching to the isolated reaches of the Beaufort Sea.

NNSL Photo/Graphic

Tom Zubko stands outside New North Networks in Inuvik with a historical artifact: One of the NWT's first commercial satellite dishes, which helped bring early channels to the north. The world of media has changed immeasurably since the 1960s, Zubko said, thanks to improving technology. - Philippe Morin/NNSL photo

Regulars of the Inuvik Youth Centre, like Neta Allen said television is almost outdated when compared to the web.

"We do Bebo pages, and check e-mail," said 11-year-old Neta Allen, who added another favourite site is Youtube and said she'd prefer web surfing to channel-surfing.

Where technology and communication will go in the future is anyone's guess, but Allen's zest for Internet based media mirrors the advent of visual technology in the North nearly a half century ago.

For better or for worse, the arrival of television marked the beginning of several great strides in technology, which have changed local lifestyles and influenced culture.

Tom Zubko, who as president of New North Networks helped bring cable to Inuvik in the early 1990s, said it's remarkable how much things have changed.

"It's not that many years ago, really the only television (broadcast) in the Arctic was brought up in planes, in film canisters," he said.

In those early days of the late 1960s, films on Betamax tapes were also broadcast in Beaufort Delta communities, in a process called "canned TV."

Now, thanks to cable, and satellite, it is possible to tune into more than 200 channels in Inuvik

In Tsiigehtchic - a hamlet of 150 which doesn't even have an access road several weeks of the year - Chief Peter Ross said it's impressive to think about.

"You can watch everything that's going on in the world now, through satellite," he said.

Ross said he remembers the canned TV era.

The tapes were always a few days late, and by the time people watched hockey games, for instance, the scores were already known because they'd played on radio.

"It was CBC, they used to get videotapes from down south," he said, adding Inuvik's branch did the re-broadcasting.

As for broadcast quality, Ross remembers it was poor.

"Everybody had their antennas on top of the roof, and the rabbit-ears," he said.

In the mid-1970s, the arrival of the VCR and satellite brought more television to the North.

While residents of Inuvik had formerly enjoyed only CBC Arctic programming and a few other options - such as the Polaris movie theatre, which opened from 1970 to 1982 - satellite brought new options.

"Telesat launched a satellite in about 1979, and it carried a television channel," Zubko said. (The emphasis is on the singular: With a 12-foot satellite dish, Inuvik's satellite customers could only access CTV in the program's first phase.)

Zubko said the system would gradually evolve to include eight channels, but only for people who paid for a descrambler.

It would be several more years, until the arrival of cable in the 1990s, before Inuvik would enter the then-luxurious ten-channel universe.

"We went from eight channels over the air to about 12 or 13, and gave people the option of using a simpler method, instead of the dishes in the backyards," Zubko said.

He added that cable also brought American shows to Arctic viewers, which was also unprecedented.

With cable replacing satellite, the next great shift would happen in in 1996, when Inuvik got the Internet.

Zubko remembers how the first connections were based by satellite transmission, because no cables had yet been passed between Inuvik and Whitehorse.

Some Beaufort Delta communities like Ulukahktok/Holman still use satellite Internet, because of their location in the Beaufort sea.

"It was revolutionary," Zubko said.

Fred Koe, who lives in Fort McPherson, said he remembers when Internet first arrived at the Gwich'in band office.

"I remember, in 1992 because we had just settled the land claims, the band office had Internet and a fax machine, I remember using it," he said.

Asked what's next for the Beaufort region, Zubko said Internet-based television and radio might be the next frontier.

Since people in the north are starting to use their Internet connections to watch movies and videos on-line, he said, the 200-channel universe might expand exponentially.

"That seems to be the way it's going in the rest of the world," Zubko said.

Thanks to changing technology, it seems, the world of today's children - their favourite stories, their frames of reference, in short, their entire culture - has become radically different than the world of their parents.