Making Connections

Take a political map of the space known as Canada. Leave it blank, but then overlay it with successive transparencies. Each one displays a network filling up that space: telephone networks, broadcast networks, postal networks, arts centres, architectural and symbolic networks. The space looks denser, richer, spun into a finer skein.

Giving us a sense of that tapestry and how it came to be is Jonathan Vance’s project in Building Canada. He weaves his argument successfully, entwining a number of disparate activities within a pattern, that of creating a national infrastructure. Not an infrastructure of pipes and sewers, but of communications networks. It has become a cliché, the Canadian interest in communications theory (Innis, McLuhan), but this treatment gives legs to the idea. Here is how the material structures that convey all those messages that we theorize into the media got built. It’s a significant story, as Vance tells it. There is more than one way to draw a...