Canadians, being just outside of the familial hive of the United States, have always had a unique perspective on American culture and media. Surely it is no accident that Walt Disney, Marshall McLuhan and William Gibson--leading purveyors respectively of the mass market cultural icon, oracular media criticism and the inventor of 'cyberspace'--originated in a time and space outside and distinctly north of American boundaries. Arthur Kroker says that Canadian identity and technology are intrinsically intertwined for "a sustained and intensive reflection on the meaning of the technological experience is the Canadian discourse" (Kroker 12). Canadians are always aware of infrastructures, of the margins, of the gaps and ruptures between things. Canadians understand space and fragmentation and edges. In The Medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan celebrated "'space' as the locus of modern experience" and Harold Innis wrote Empire and Communications to call for "a reintegration of 'time and space'" (Kroker 15). Perhaps hypertext and Canadians share innate sensibilities living as they do as spatial, temporal and cultural translators. Translation is a cross-pollenization of varied media discourses that engenders a new orality and spatio-temporal aesthetics. Canadians speak in the gaps (and can hear the echoes) between the words of American cultural institutions.

On a musical note, the Toronto piano virtuoso Glenn Gould is cited by Michael Joyce as one of the earliest hypertextual thinkers:

in his [Gould's] essay "Strauss and the Electronic Future" (1964), he envisions a "multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap." He expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, "The Prospects of Recording" (Gould 1966): "Because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing." Obviously these referred to musical technologies but the thinking is hypertextual... (qtd, Joyce, 1998).

Existing always in opposition, there is a long tradition in Canada of a vibrant fringe culture and of alternative discourses, including sound poetry (see Ron Mann's bestselling CD-ROM Poetry in Motion), documentary film and comic books. The origins of Superman, Yummy Fur, Peepshow and Palooka-Ville ("The ABCs of Alternative Comics") were north of the border. The only comprehensive history of comic books, the documentary Comic Book Confidential, was also made in Canada by Ron Mann using bpNichol's comic book collection (as legendary as the man himself) and has recently become available as a hypertext CD-ROM translation. Even more recently Patricia Seaman's graphic novel, New Motor Queen City, has been published by Coach House Online Editions and animation is a key element of Pascale Trudel's dream-like hypertext, Amazone, part of the Maid in Cyberspace exhibit.

On other fronts, the National Film Board is internationally famous for its animated shorts and was also responsible for the creation of the world's only all-woman filmmaking unit in 1974. bpNichol might be better known for his music and lyrics on Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock or as a member of the sound poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen (featured on Mann's CD-ROM above), but at home, as a poet of legendary versatility, he produced whimsical cartoon-based, visual poetry and as far back as the 1980's dabbled in electro-poetics on his Apple II. (Some of these have recently been translated into Java by Tim McLaughlin).

The world's first online literary magazine, SwiftCurrent, was a Canadian effort, the brainchild of Coach House editor and literary critic Frank Davey, poet and critic Fred Wah and Dave Godfrey. It was born on a VAX 750 in Toronto in 1984 and, until it ceased publication a couple of years ago, it lived at York University (The Electronic Labyrinth). SwiftCurrent operated by subscription and was best known for its radical editorial policy, which permitted any subscriber who was already a published Canadian author to publish work without any sort of screening by an editorial board. Another Canadian business venture, by Northern Telecom, Quest Communications and Cisco Systems, is presently working to create what is being called the 'new' internet, an inconceivably faster, more efficient version for the 21st century.