ABSTRACT

Looking back over the past twenty-five years of communications research, it might seem as if there is almost now a consensus on the need to appreciate the complexity of mediation. The interest in “practice” approaches to media bears witness to this, while the huge growth of attention to alternative, citizens’, and radical media confirms the deep resonance of the call to grasp the social in communication. This afterword starts from this point to reflect upon how the distinctive contributions of this book advance new arguments in global media and communication studies, demonstrating what media scholars elsewhere can learn from Latin American research in the face of current political, cultural, and especially ecological crises. What is needed is a rethinking of the relations between critical social practice and critical social research. Needed are practice and research that dig deep into the complexity of digital social life, listening to voices, thinking not only about what people do but also how what they do is being reconfigured by corporate forces. Only a deeply hermeneutic philosophy of social research can provide the basis for such resistance. But this is the research philosophy that underlies this book and the great tradition of cultural research that it continues.