When Ants Move Mountains: Uncovering a Media Theory of Human Agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Just as Smythe argued communication was the "blindspot of western Marxism," western communication and media theorizing itself suffers a blind spot, when it places media power in the hands of dictators and captains of industry as if no others might put pen to paper and change history.Meanwhile, theoretical explorations of how media praxis might be understood and employed for emancipationnot subjugationemerged through the experiences of people in the Global South and Indigenous communities.This article examines and contrasts the theoretical silos, seeking moments of cross-over and synergy between static, top-down conceptualizations of Western mass media theory, and the more people-powered media praxis of colonized people seeking liberation.Building on the literature of differing experiences, the author draws a framework to encompass the full spectrum of media power.Here scholars, policy planners, and media practitioners alike may find common ground from which to recognize and support grassroots media producers as agents of meaningful social change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".