Ucalgary 2018 Willerth Melanie.Pdf

Ucalgary 2018 Willerth Melanie.Pdf

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2018-07 What Really Happened that Night in Kingston? A National Conversation Willerth, Melanie Lyne Willerth, M. L. (2018). What Really Happened that Night in Kingston? A National Conversation (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32811 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/107630 master thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY What Really Happened that Night in Kingston? A National Conversation by Melanie Lyne Willerth A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATIONS STUDIES CALGARY, ALBERTA JULY, 2018 © Melanie Lyne Willerth, 2018 Acknowledgements It would not have been possible to complete this Master’s Degree without a village of people supporting me, and for their support I am forever grateful. I would first love to thank my supervisor, Dr. Gregory Taylor. Working remotely with me was not always an easy task, but Dr. Taylor continually showed grace and understanding. He helped me make sure my fandom did not get in the way of the academic process, and he was always willing to steer me back to the focus of my paper. Thank you, Dr. Taylor, for the many hours you helped me over the past year. I would secondly like to thank my support group. Without the support of my husband, parents, in-laws, and friends who act like family, my degree would have taken many years. You all stepped up and helped out with housework, childcare, and cooking meals when I was immersed in the school/life/work balance. I am forever in debt for the times you cooked for me, the times you picked up Marshall from school for me, and the times that you checked in to make sure all was going well. Thank you; I love you all. Next, I want to thank my cohort of classmates who became friends and confidents. No one else in my life quite understood exactly the stress of this particular degree in the same way that you did, and you were always willing to let me vent or cry to you. Thank you for keeping me through this, for not letting me quit, and for welcoming me as a friend. Finally, I want to thank my son, Marshall. Though you are just six years old, I want you to know that I did this degree not only for me, but also for you. I know there were many nights where I wasn’t home, and many days where I spent more time with my computer than I did with you, but I want to thank you for loving me through it all. Thank you for understanding and thank you for also giving me an excuse to take a break from my studies. I hope you always know that there is no limit, and it is never too late or too much work to educate yourself if you put your mind to it. I dedicate this whole project to you. 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4 2. Literature Review--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7 2.1 A history of the CBC--------------------------------------------------------------------------------7 2.2 The Tragically Hip, a Background---------------------------------------------------------------16 2.3 Media Events----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------20 3. Theory---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------25 3.1 Cultural Studies---------------------------------------------------------------------------------25 3.2 The Public Sphere------------------------------------------------------------------------------30 3.3 Theory of the Spectacle------------------------------------------------------------------------35 4. Methods-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------37 4.1: Qualitative Interviews-----------------------------------------------------------------------------37 4.2: Social Media Methodology-----------------------------------------------------------------------43 5. Interview Analysis-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------48 6. Twitter Analysis----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------62 7. Discussion----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------67 8. Conclusion---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------78 9. References----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------81 10. Appendix A Letter of Initial Contact---------------------------------------------------------------------91 11. Appendix B Formal Letter of Request--------------------------------------------------------------------92 12. Appendix C Consent Form---------------------------------------------------------------------------------93 13. Appendix D Interview Questions--------------------------------------------------------------------------96 3 1.0 Introduction Canadians have mixed emotions regarding the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Being Canada’s only publically funded national broadcaster ensures that the CBC is continually in the spotlight, and that many Canadians have an opinion on how it should or should not run. In June 2014, the CBC launched its new strategic framework which was meant to take it into the digital world. This strategic framework, entitled A Space for Us All, was laid out the plan to engage Canadians in the digital realm, and the CBC hoped to have all of the different elements implemented by 2020. A Space for us All documents how the CBC wants to be at the heart of conversations for all Canadians, and it believes that the new framework is a way for it to stay relevant (CBC, 2018). The CBC has struggled in recent years with ratings and relevancy, and most notably has grappled with finding a continuous audience since it lost the exclusive rights to Hockey Night in Canada in 2013 (Taylor, 2016, p. 356). The CBC has also gone through changes in the past decade, and questions of its worth and its place in the lives of Canadians have come into question. With some new aspects of commercialization, there are times when watching the CBC that the content could easily be swapped for information found on CTV or Global, so people began questioning what, exactly, the CBC is doing as a publically funded corporation (Yakabuski, 2015). The CBC is in a place where it needs to define its role and its future in the lives of Canadians in order to stay or become relevant as the years progress. Just two years after A Space for us All was released, in the spring of 2016, the Canadian band The Tragically Hip announced that their lead singer, Gord Downie, had stage four brain cancer. In the same announcement, the Tragically Hip also said that they were going to do a tour across Canada to celebrate their new album, Man Machine Poem. The final concert of the tour would be held in their home town of Kingston, Ontario, after touring in cities starting at the West Coast. The Tragically Hip had long been heralded as Canada’s band (Fraser, 2016), though Gord Downie has never seemed to embrace a nationalist attitude in the traditional sense. The band has been together since 1983, with their original members, and many Canadians have connected with the band on 4 some level. Though the band began playing cover songs in little bars, their fan base grew exponentially where they were able to sell out large arenas on Canadian soil. Thus, when the Tragically Hip went online and announced Gord Downie’s terminal brain cancer and that they would be going on one final tour in the summer of 2016, tickets for this tour sold out within minutes (Johnson, 2016), which left fans reeling. Many of those tickets were purchased by scalping companies, and then were sold for prices much higher than their original cost (Johnson, 2016). There was a lot of backlash on social media against both Ticketmaster and the Tragically Hip, with people taking their frustration to Twitter, accusing scalpers of “profiteering off of a man dying” (Johnson, 2016), and people were asking what the Tragically Hip was going to do to make this right. It seemed that Canadians felt it was their right to be able to see this concert, and even though sales for the Tragically Hip had dropped in recent years, fans came out of the woodwork desiring to see the concert believing that it would be the last that the Tragically Hip performed (Johnson, 2016). Fans began petitions and started asking the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) if they would air the final concert on the public broadcasting corporation since so many people felt like they were ‘missing out’, and so the CBC announced that they would air the final concert live on June 17th, 2016 (Wong & Watters, 2016). Prior to the petitions that began circulating, the CBC stated that they had already been formulating ideas on how they could air the concert for Canadians

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