Canadian Counterculture Essay by Top Papers

In the CBC Digital Archives collection entitled "Hippie Society: The Youth Rebellion" we can see how the Canadian media - in the form of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - represented the counterculture youth movement of the 1960s from a Canadian perspective. This essay will examine the Canadian counterculture of the period using these video and audio clips as primary historical sources, with a range of secondary sources being deployed to critically interrogate both the "lens" - the perspective - of these primary sources, as well as their content. The thesis will be argued that the English Canadian counterculture of the 1960s was a complex generational rebellion that - in terms of its representation in the mass media - functioned as part of a hegemonic process by which the dominant culture reshaped itself against an acceptable subculture, while downplaying more challenging subversive forces. As will be seen, these primary historical sources exist as both fascinating windows into an historical periods as well as examples of the process by which a dominant culture and ideology attempts to retain dominance through a dynamic tension with countercultural ideologies.