They’re called social media for a reason, but for activists like Susanna Haas Lyons, tools such as Facebook and Twitter have much more to offer than funny cat videos and photos of your baby niece. “People spend an average of 14 minutes a day on Facebook,” says Vancouver-based Haas Lyons, a 33-year-old public engagement consultant […] More »

The United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan soon after 9/11 was misguided for many reasons, but one was purely practical: Al Qaeda is a stateless, decentralized network scattered across the globe. The spectral, international scope of the problem was no secret—so why wage a conventional war on one country? It was as if an outmoded […] More »

Media determinists of all stripes have hailed the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social media in prompting the recent pan-Arab revolts. Though it could be argued that these revolts were bound to happen eventually, the catalyst isn’t likely social media — it’s food. One of the main causes of the French Revolution was a combination […] More »

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it. That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s […] More »

In Listen to This #020, This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey talks with Ottawa Citizen Parliament Hill reporter Glen McGregor about the effect that social media like Twitter and Facebook are having on the news cycle, for readers and consumers, reporters, and politicians alike — but why social media is still no way to attract […] More »

Though you might reasonably condemn the modern internet for a variety of reasons—ruining attention spans, turning all public discourse into a shouting match, or insulting your sexual prowess with badly punctuated mass emails—one thing the medium could always reasonably claim was its potential for spreading truth. Decentralized and egalitarian, the web seemed to herald the […] More »

In this edition of Listen to This — the premiere of our second season of original interviews with Canada’s most fascinating activists, politicos, and artists! — we talk with Heather Leson and Brian Chick, two of the more senior Canadian coordinators of Crisis Commons, an international online community of people who use their technology skills to […] More »

Thousands of people who experienced the G20 summit weekend in Toronto have their own individual stories—some of them terrifying, we’ll have some from our own correspondents soon—and Twitter was one of the main ways that the narrative was shaped. Lots of people took their smartphones into the streets to document the protests and the police […] More »

Last night was the annual Canadian Society of Magazine Editors gala, and we’re very happy to report that This was named Magazine of the Year in the small publication category. We think it’s a huge honour, especially considering the fearsome quality of the nominees, including our friends at Explore and Spacing. Industry awards are always a […] More »

If you’re like me and you shudder to think of the store of personal information you’ve inadvertently let loose online, you’ll be happy to know that a few altruistic software programmers are on the case. Four NYU students recently decided they’d had enough of heavily centralized, corporate-minded social networking sites. They took on the task […] More »

A new generation of designers propose products and buildings that are energy efficient and elegant Rick Mercer’s quip during the Copenhagen climate conference last December summed it up best: “So [Stephen] Harper flew to Copenhagen to have a club sandwich and hide in his room?” The post-Copenhagen doldrums were still bringing us down when Thomas […] More »