In Digital Mosaic, David Taras both embraces and challenges new media by arguing that coinciding crises bring exciting opportunities as well as considerable dangers to democratic life and citizen engagement in Canada.

Acknowledgements

1. The New Architecture of Media Power
Understanding Media Shock
Media Change and Canadian Public Spaces
Looking Ahead

2. Identity and Citizenship in Canada.ca
The Unlikely Country
The Public Participation Scorecard
Turbulent Times: the Effects of Economic and Media Change

3. The Ownership Juggernaut
The Powers That Be
The Power of the Powerful
Corporate Rules: Values, Ideology, and the News

Democracy Insurance

4. Me-media and Political Connectedness (or Not): Cable, Blogs, and YouTube
The New Debate about Media Effects
The Cable Explosion
The Blog Hierarchy
YouTube and Video Politics
The Politics of Me-media

5. Connecting and Disconnecting on the Social Media Frontier
Is Facebook Your Friend?
"Put Down Twitter and Slowly Back Away?"
Welcome to the New World

6. Falling Stars: The Future of Newspapers and Conventional Broadcasting
"Every Newspaper Reader That Dies Leaves No Heir"
The Great Canadian Television Crisis
Music and Radio: Hits and Misses
Are the Traditional Media Doomed to Extinction?

7. The Ever-shrinking World of Public Broadcasting
Triple Jeopardy: Budget Cuts, Hockey Night in Canada, and Big TV
Re-imagining the CBC

8. Are Journalists and Politicians Abandoning the Public?
Blind Spots, Cutbacks, and the Decline of Political Reporting
Totally Scripted: Avoid, Bypass, and Stick to Your Message
Nowhere to Hide: The Value and Politics of Debates
The Last Disconnect

9. Finding Citizenship in the Digital Mosaic
It's Time to Do Better

Bibliography
Index

In Digital Mosaic, David Taras achieves what no one else has even tried: he makes coherent sense of the massive and ongoing upheavals in journalism and Canada's media industries, the rise of social media, and how all these changes have fractured longstanding links to citizenship, culture, privacy, national identity, public policy, and democracy. Taras masterfully explains how it has all happened, raises concerns about the directions these changes are leading us in, and calls on Canadians and their governments to be active and creative in their responses. It's cliché to say it should be required reading for all, but it should be.

In Digital Mosaic, David Taras achieves what no one else has even tried: he makes coherent sense of the massive and ongoing upheavals in journalism and Canada's media industries, the rise of social media, and how all these changes have fractured longstanding links to citizenship, culture, privacy, national identity, public policy, and democracy. Taras masterfully explains how it has all happened, raises concerns about the directions these changes are leading us in, and calls on Canadians and their governments to be active and creative in their responses. It's clich to say it should be required reading for all, but it should be. -- Christopher Waddell, Carleton University Rich in detail and written in an engaging style, Digital Mosaic is a timely and thoroughly researched look at what changes in the local, national, and global mediascape mean for Canadians. -- Patrick McCurdy, University of Ottawa David Taras provides his readers with a deeply researched account of how changes, evolutions, and revolutions in communication practices impact our daily lives and citizenship, for better or for worse. Drawing on the Canadian experience, and often comparing it with other national contexts, Digital Mosaic is a thought-provoking essay that anyone interested in political communication should read. -- Thierry Giasson, Universite Laval