{"id":765,"date":"2022-11-25T00:23:40","date_gmt":"2022-11-25T00:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/?page_id=765"},"modified":"2022-11-25T13:03:37","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T13:03:37","slug":"critical-fieldnotes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/notebook\/critical-fieldnotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Critical Fieldnotes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a thought exercise, the contrarian position can offer unique insights into further research directions, poke fun at established orthodoxies, and in the process study the economies of cultural influence and soft power politics that dominate so much of today\u2019s mediascape. However, a critical posture towards self-presentation and professionalization rituals is discouraged and has remained underdeveloped. Throughout these notes, which I approach as applied ethnographic work, I make a case that it is important to continuously imagine counter-positions and to offer alternative visions, in order to test current perspectives and to deepen our understanding of how media shapes us. These fieldnotes are a point of departure for further discussion. They tend towards experimental probabilities, alternative analysis, and commentary that frequently deviates from the original source. As Marshall McLuhan once noted<\/a>, \u201cAny understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.\u201d Because media reflects our psychic and physical reality, it is critical to peek behind the scenes and to examine how these environments are organized, by whom, and how the ideas that pervade and to become the common sense of the era come to be so.<\/p>\n\n\n