By Phillip Vannini, Core Faculty, School of Communication and Culture
Photos of RRU in late November taken by Dan Anthon, RRU Media Technologies

As a social scientist, it’s my job to look for deeper meaning in seemingly mundane things like snowfalls in late November on the southern Pacific coast. Perhaps those jabs from former Ontarians who talk about surviving the great blizzards of the 1970s are actually a kind of cultural renewal, a socialization of people to unique cultures?
 

Hatley Castle as it was in late November 2006. It was the first snowfall of the winter.

Even though this snow deal is a raw one, largely because of our unfamiliarity with it, we are free from the jaded attitudes that so-called ‘real’ Canadians hold toward it. For us snow is a novelty, rather than a habit we make sense of in ingenious, insightful and uniquely reflective ways. By doing this we arguably understand better than the rest how we relate to our biophysical environment and our cultural climate.
Atmospheric events have clear social significance. Yet strange weather also has the potential to allow us to discover deeper meaning in the snow. Meanings that are further removed from awareness, covered under perennially frozen layers of human habits. But how does the snow acquire meaning, and what meanings do people give it?

Can you spot the deer peering out from snow-blanketed brush?

When people talk about it, shovel it and generally complain about it, that’s when snow comes to mean something more than frozen rain dropping from the sky. That’s also when it becomes more social and cultural than at any other time.

On snowy cold days, like those that Southwestern B.C. has experienced this winter, weather talk trumps all other conversation topics. These conversations make it easier for us to understand the significance of the white stuff. National and global news concerns become secondary in local sources for news. All of this continues to inform the way we make sense of snow and by doing so we render its strangeness more familiar.

Snowfall reports feature seemingly endless talk on broken historic records and the setting of new ones, not unlike watching a B.C. Lions offensive drive in the first game of the CFL regular season. So-called human interest stories replace the antics of Tom Cruise and Jennifer Aniston. These trifles are now hidden behind our otherwise-almighty centennial cedars now snapping under the weight of the snow, or by the frozen paws of a pampered dog and the sheer spectacular might of awesome traffic gridlock. That’s how we make the snow amusing and turn local newscasts into a good show, with the media right there feeding the goat and trying to get the biggest audience share.

The value of snow-as-spectacle is clear when we look at the relationship weather has with technology. During the snowfall, manifesting the typical love for the outdoors of any well-adjusted West Coaster, I hiked home by trekking with my step-son through Ladysmith’s Holland Creek Trail. As we sank deeper and deeper into the fluffy powder, and further and further away from houses, roads and cars, I began to think for a few seconds that this must have been the way the Western Frontier looked to First Nations and later to David Thompson and Alexander McKenzie.

Suddenly my PDA/compass/geo-caching toy buzzer went off, notifying me—with a puzzling timeliness—of a snow-warning in effect for both south and eastern Vancouver Island. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “I’d better get home and tune in to my favourite local TV channel; I can’t miss the show." And so I did. Television weather reports and barometric pressure maps confirmed my layman's impression: it had been snowing and it was cold.

The Italian Garden under snow.

Of course, the irony of this was that all that radio, television, PDA, and Internet-mediated information was absolutely useless, for as much as we like to believe that to live in a society that is highly dependent on mass media, snow accumulation soberly reminds us that the exchange of ideas through a communication medium still matters less than movement of physical bodies across icy space. It reminds me of a Canadian who recognized the importance of the fur trade to Canadian culture. That’s what Harold Innis gave Marshall McLuhan and in this case, the snowflake is the message.

Snow also plays an important role in creating collective memory. Coastal British Columbians derive a sense of common history and a feeling of collective identity in the face of adversity as they recall events like the storm of ’96. At the same time other islanders sneer with contempt at such claims. Some wonder wisely, “If (more) snow falls outside of Victoria and Vancouver and the media aren’t there to report it, did it actually snow?”

Ties to both history and place are essential components of a regional attachment to the place you live. In this way, snow can be used as an extraordinary and sometimes spectacular extension of the self, something visible to peg our identities to – something people can see and experience – something that has meaning.

Phillip Vannini is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria. He specializes in helping to bring meaning to the mundane. He lives in Ladysmith, B.C. where it only snows enough to make it significant every time.