C) The Cultural Clash

    A number of studies consider that time-sense is one of the most obvious cultural consequences of television on Inuit social behaviour. However, it is well worth comparing this evolution with our own experience in old Europe.
    Our present time system dates back to the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, in spite of a common unit of measure, European and North American railway companies came to experience great technical difficulties with time: each city had its own sun-based time and handling schedules was really difficult. For this reason, some railway companies began to use a common time for all their schedules and, gradually that "railway time" was used by most of the population. It was quite easy for countries with a north-south axis such as France (e.g. Le P.L.M. Paris-Lyon-Marseille) but it was less obvious for a huge east-west country such as Canada.
    In 1873, a Canadian Pacific Railways engineer, Sanford Fleming, proposed to choose 24 meridians, every 15 degrees among the 360 degrees of the Earth's circumference and consider that two consecutive meridians delimit a single hour zone. This project was implemented and the Prime Meridian, going through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was chosen for the creation of the Greenwich Meridian Time or Coordinated Universal Time. To cut a long story short, we can say that the present time convention was created to ease railway transit, i.e. for industrial reasons.
    Meanwhile, time had appeared in workshops and factories where it represented the power of the boss over the proletarians. Which is why, for Marxist philosophers, the symbol of the Industrial Revolution is not the steam engine but the clock which quantified work, identified time with money and alienated workers from Nature.
    At the end of the day, it is quite clear that time-sense in our society is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. To put it differently, the clock marked the passage to modernity. As Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum notes:

L'horloge n'était pas et n'est pas seulement la condition et le moyen d'un rapport avec le temps quotidien, qui a d'abord été typiquement européen et s'est ensuite propagé dans toutes les sociétés industrielles; elle symbolise aussi le processus de la modernisation européenne, et décrit l'expérience des différences de mentalité entre l'ancienne Europe et le monde moderne, entre les sociétés européenne, nord-américaine et japonaise, et ce qu'on a appelé le tiers monde. Le rapport avec le temps quotidien, la détention et l'usage d'horloges sont des indicateurs de modernité.(8)

    The same applies to the Inuit. Clock-time or rather television-time was one of the stages of Inuit's passage to modernity. According to Gail Valaskakis, television reinforced "the identification of time as a commodity, the measurement and segmentation of which is reflected in economic and social relationships, emphasis on efficiency and activity and future orientation" (Valaskakis, 1976, p. 7)
    We have to point out that before television, life in the Canadian North was, in some ways, timeless. Meetings, church services, school and even the "scheduled" flights were quite loosely timed and for this reason Inuit did not wear watches. When television arrived, for the first time the population as a whole had to deal with an activity that used the official time and not a rough approximation: television is timed to the second. In order not to miss a second of their favourite programs, Inuit had to resort to wrist-watches and clocks.
    As a result, the whole community began to use clock-time in everyday life and to plan activities according to television schedules. In Rankin Inlet, this evolution even affected the local school:

A notable episode at the school was negotiation by students for earlier close of the school day, so that all could get home in time for "Gilligan's Island" at 3:30 pm[...]. As reported, this negotiation involved a deal whereby everybody concerned, children and school staff, would concertedly arrive on the dot for a precise start of the school day at the official time, something which up to that point had tended to be a bit vague and lax as with other Rankin Inlet institutions.

(Watson, 1977, pp. 116-117)

    This sudden and insidious invasion in a sanctuary like school confirms the idea of alienation from nature: watching television is not a natural need but it has become a priority. Television, an object created by man, began to impose its own tempo by quantifying something that looked like life (e.g. a sitcom is everyday life in 22 minutes) and making viewers dependent on its schedule. Inuit viewers willingly surrendered their power on the machine and accepted to organise their lives in tune with the rhythm of the machine. According to Jean Baudrillard, this is one of the consequences of Consumer Society, another emblem of modern societies:

Comme l'enfant-loup devient loup à force de vivre avec eux, ainsi nous devenons lentement fonctionnels nous aussi. Nous vivons le temps des objets: je veux dire que nous vivons à leur rythme et selon leur succession incessante.(9)

    Before studying the content of television and its effects as regards consumption, it is quite relevant to take a closer look at the container, the medium. Television is one of the symbols of Consumer Society for it created the consumption of "electronic ubiquity". According to Jean Baudrillard, television turns everything (politics, culture, history, commercials) into news items and thanks to electronic ubiquity makes viewers experience or rather consume the "miracle" of reality:

Ce qui caractérise la société de consommation, c'est l'universalité du fait divers dans la communication de masse. [...] Partout ce qui est recherché, c'est le "coeur de l'événement", le "coeur de la bagarre", le in vivo, le "face à face" - le vertige d'une présence totale à l'événement, le Grand Frisson du Vécu- c'est-à-dire encore une fois le MIRACLE, puisque la vérité de la chose vue, télévisée, magnétisée sur bande, c'est précisément que je n'y étais pas. Mais c'est le plus vrai que le vrai qui compte, autrement dit le fait d'y être sans y être, autrement dit encore le phantasme.

(Baudrillard, 1987[1970], p. 31)

    When we consider the message, it appears that southern society, as it was portrayed on television, became more and more attractive, particularly because of its profusion of goods (dishwashers, VCRs ...) and services (banks, shopping malls, movie theatres...), in other words: ways to spend money. For Inuit, it was clear that spending one's money was a major leisure activity in the south. It has to be said that even though television was not always realistic (the "dream factory"), southern Canadians were definitely frenetic consumers in comparison with the Inuit. The trouble was that in the Northwest Territories there were no malls, no banks, no theaters, no department stores, no car dealers and above all ... no money. Most of the Inuit were unskilled workers and as Linvill Watson notes, there were "for very many of them, severe limits to their discretionary income" (Watson, 1977, p. 112). As a result, the fact that they could not afford goods and services advertised on television because they did not have enough money but also because all these things were simply not available in the North was a great source of frustration and increased their desire to consume.
    Aside from regular programming and its latent message, commercial television can also overtly influence viewer behaviour through advertising. As we mentioned before, most commercials were deleted on the CBC Northern Service. Still, some of them would slip through the net and appear on Northern screens. Once again, most of the services promoted on television were not available in the Arctic and as for staple goods, Northern stores such as the Bay would generally carry one single brand for each item. However, commercials and their true-like rhetoric (coming from a foreign culture) led Inuit consumers to assert their tastes and to ask for a greater diversity of products (they would sometimes mention goods seen on television) and more choice. They had entered Consumer Society.

    The absence of Inuit or regional culture in the programming (including the use of Inuktitut) was often considered as a major deficiency of television service by the Inuit. Inuit parents were asking for more Native culture in television programming not only because it conveyed a foreign culture but also because children's devotion to the small screen would make it difficult to interest them in traditional activities.
    It is true that even in the early 1980s there was very little in the schedule that was directly relevant to the Inuit or to Northerners as a whole. As Nelson Graburn reports:

Less than 5% was in Inuktitut (the predominant Native language of the Canadian North), and only 10% or so was directly tailored to the North, in news, weather and other programs with discernible northern content or interest. [...] Most of the rest of the programming consists of standard CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) fare - national news, Canadian entertainment and sports, discussions and specials, the remainder of the programs are typically made in the U.S.A. - movies, soap operas, family dramas, comedies, cartoons and Westerns.

(Graburn, 1982, p. 12)

    The situation was even worse if we consider that Northern programs were produced with greatly restricted means and received very little attention. Mainstream programs were the most popular but they would reflect a totally different cultural framework even when they featured situations the Inuit were supposed to be familiar with as an Inuit leader told CRTC commissioners in 1978:

Likewise with wolf films. They tell about how wolves are just about like humans in the Qablunait films where we would look at the wolves as , oh, wouldn't that make a nice fur lining for a parka.

(Quoted in Kirkaldy, 1984, p. 38)

    The absence of representation of Northern and Inuit values had great consequences on Inuit cultural heritage. For many young Inuit, their culture was not represented on television because it was not worthwhile. Being on television was a factor of validity, an official recognition and southern culture was on television because it was good. The danger was to turn this assertion around and deduce that Inuit culture was not good enough since it was not represented on television and thus not shared with the other. Yet, sharing one's experience with the other (e.g. southern audiences) is an essential element of communication. As Edmond Marc Lipiansky notes:

A côté de son aspect instrumental la communication a une fonction existentielle fondamentale: elle permet de trouver chez l'autre un reflet de soi-même, un renfort dans ses points de vue et ses convictions, une compréhension de ses sentiments et de son vécu, une confirmation de la manière dont on s'éprouve ou de l'image que l'on souhaite donner.(10)

    The absence of cultural recognition in media can prove very damaging to an ethnic group because it creates a destructive situation of one-way communication and alienation: the image one has of oneself is not reflected by the other and one feels it is denied. According to Lipiansky who opposes denial (le déni) and reject (le rejet), it is like being told one does not exist:

Dans le déni, cette prise en compte n'existe pas; le rejet ne porte pas alors sur la vérité ou la fausseté de ce que le sujet tente d'accréditer; il porte sur l'auteur même de la définition. [...] Le déni équivaut à "Vous n'existez pas".

(Lipiansky, 1992, p. 158)

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