Catching the ear of American folks by Antonia Zerbisias

Here in the Big Pink, as this country is portrayed, perhaps not so coincidentally, on all the maps, Canadians who care about more than who is going to be the next Survivor, American Idol or Apprentice can get awfully frustrated.

Love or hate U.S. President George W. Bush, most of us have opinions about him. And because what he does affects the entire planet, plus the moon and Mars, it's easy to see why Canadians, and all other earthlings for that matter, would want a say in next November's election.

Instead, we're relegated to screaming at CNN and cursing the American masses who nurse on a high-fat, low-nutrient diet of celebrity, sex, crime and entertainment-media titillation — and who don't exercise their precious democratic right to vote.

It's easy to blame the big corporate media which make billions keeping folks fat and lolling on the sofa swilling sugary drinks, feeding on junky food and swallowing the anti-cholesterol and high blood pressure pills they need to survive this "life" style.

After all, who is paying to rent their eyeballs from the networks? The pop, processed food and pharmaceutical companies, of course.

It's outrageous that CBS, which airs the Super Bowl tonight, refused an anti-Bush anti-deficit ad from the grassroots lobby group Move On (http://www.moveon.org) because it doesn't accept advocacy ads.

So how come this high moral ground doesn't apply to other advocacy ads? Why is CBS taking money from tobacco giant Philip Morris to air an "anti-smoking" spot that directs viewers to a Web site ... that defends smoking? For example, the site makes a case against raising taxes on cigarettes.

The Super Bowl is one of the last true mass-market vehicles left, reaching a wide and diverse audience. An increasingly rare beast in this fragmented media universe.

No wonder there's so much talk today of "cyberbalkanization." Go online and you can find news sites, magazines, comment forums, blogs, you name it, all over the political spectrum and cultural map.

That's great for those who seek out varied views — but most people don't. They gravitate to like-minded people on like-minded sites and so, as a result, positions get further polarized and wide public debates are muted.

Americans who are badly served by their mass media do have alternatives. It's no accident that the BBC's, CBC's and the Star's own Web sites are heavily visited by those of our neighbours seeking greater perspective on current events. But these information seekers are the exception, not the norm.

Enter Voices Without Votes (http://www.voices04.org). This ambitious project, which "seeks to foster a presidential debate unlike most others," is the brainchild of Peter Deitz, a research fellow at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.

Thursday, at a public meeting, he discussed the idea — and "ideal" — of "representative representative democracy," in which non-citizens of a nation can convey their concerns to citizens of that nation on matters of international import, perhaps influencing the outcome.

Noting that, in this digital world where borders have been smashed and citizenship now delineates countries, Deitz hopes this is "the starting point for some future form of government." Think government of the global village by the global villagers for the global village.

In other words, to get the masses to engage with each other, bypassing their leaders, media filters and other elites, and connecting equal to equal in an effort to make Americans see that how they vote in Topeka affects humans in Timbuktu, Tehran and Toronto.

The Voices site, a month old, is a rich collection of relevant news stories, commentary and foreign perspectives on U.S. foreign policy — and yet it is but a tiny sample of what is available on the Internet every day. Most Americans can't seem to find it.

"It's as if the world is writing letters to Americans but they just don't reach the target," explains Deitz whose aim is to get ordinary non-Americans talking to ordinary Americans.

You might argue that if Americans starting writing us about how to vote, we'd bristle. But it's not likely they would and, anyway, what Canada does tends not to cause death and destruction elsewhere. Besides, the U.S. rarely hesitates to intervene in the affairs of other states and change a regime or two.

In fact, Deitz would most like to have citizens of an occupied country talk directly to the people of the occupying country. Now that would be something: Imagine if ordinary Iraqis could talk to ordinary Americans, Chechnyans to Russians, Palestinians to Israelis ...

Trouble is, there is a deep divide between the digital haves and have-nots. The occupied are usually on the wrong side of the divide — while too many of the digital haves are wasting this world-changing power on googling reality-show garbage.

© The Toronto Star