The area of communications that I find particularly interesting is mass media, and it’s role in developing opinions on disenfranchised groups of people and their struggles, especially the first nations.
2. Why do you find this topic interesting and important? (500 words)
There are many interesting aspects of this, like what kinds of stories get published where, for example Aboriginal stories are generally much easier to come by in the Globe and Mail than they are in the Calgary Sun, and why stories in those papers would be much more likely to to depict natives in accordance with stereotypical …show more content…
From positivism, I would include some hard data, perhaps I would keep track of how whether left or right wing paper publish more aboriginal stories, and how many stories from each side conform to existing stereotypes compared to how many stories challenge them and present natives in a different light. I would also come up with clear operational definitions for key terms, such as what qualifies a paper as being either left wing or right wing, and what makes a story count as stereotypical or not.
From hermeneutics I would look into whether or not aboriginals really feel like they have a voice in mainstream Canadian media or not, how media framing of natives and native issues contributes to tension between natives and non-natives,, their behaviour, the behaviour of non-natives towards natives, and the expectations of natives that are held by both groups.
From critical theory I would unpack current issues to gain insight into how they developed. I would look at historic relations between natives and non-natives and if first nations have been represented by the media in a stereotypical fashion for so long that some ideas about them are no longer thought of as being stereotypical but just as common sense, whether or not media outlets are too close to the government to be truly objective in the way that they portray aboriginal …show more content…
When the media come out with new claims involving shocking statistics, are these numbers accurate and do they actually represent what you would expect them to? The BBC’s More or Less podcast is quite good for getting to the bottom of numbers in the news, and I like it, but other than that I generally do not identify too much with the positivists.
Hermeneutics
Because of my interest in fields such as psychology and anthropology, I would say hermeneutics speaks to me more than positivism. If humans are involved, issues are generally considerably more complex than issues concerning physical science, and so I appreciate that the hermeneutic approach takes this into account.
Critical Theory
I do think it’s important to deconstruct things to gain an understanding of how things work or have come to be, but honestly, I don’t really go through life with this approach in mind as I try to make sense of the world. I’d say it resonates more with me than the positivistic approach, but less than the hermeneutic