Mademoiselle Sauve-Qui-Peut Press
The following press release about this web site to the Canadian News Wire’s Canadian Comprehensive List is an example of a reflexive ethnographic intervention.
On September 20, 2006, using the device of a News Release that Rogers’ Director Corporate Communications used to broadcast the corporations version of events following the media frenzy around 2005’s Christmas rush, I sent out a release from a press called MSQP Press (see above).
News Release
MSQP PRESS
Rogers Complains about Law Professor’s Web Site
TORONTO, Sept 20/CNW/ – The web site set up by Susan Drummond to outline her debacle and legal dispute with Rogers Wireless Inc has itself become the subject of a legal complaint by Rogers against the Canadian law professor. Professor Drummond came to national attention in December of 2005 when she and technology journalist Harry Gefen leaked a story about Rogers’ CEO Ted Rogers’ cell phone having been cloned by a group linked with Hezbollah. Prior to that story breaking, Rogers Wireless had been trying for months to force the law professor to pay over $14,000 for charges racked up on her stolen cell phone. As a result of the leaked cloning story, Ted Rogers himself called to apologize for the behavior of his corporation and agreed to meet the couple in their home for tea.
Apology aside, in September of 2005 Professor Drummond sued Rogers Wireless Inc for breach of contract. Rogers recently amended its pleadings in that case to complain that the law professor has set up the web site www.rogersandme.ca to bring negative publicity to the corporation. Professor Drummond responded by noting that, in her opinion, the entry of the web site address into the court record now immunizes media who cite the web site from potential libel suit from Rogers.
The Small Claims Court trial, originally set for September 11, 2006, was adjourned on Rogers initiative. Rogers wants to move to quash Professor Drummond’s Summons to Witness of Edward S. Rogers, also known as Ted Rogers.
And then I sat back and waited, and watched – and, when I have moment, am still watching.
This web site, an ethnographic inquiry into the relationship between the court of public opinion (also in the form of the media) and the formal legal system, cycles back on itself like a Möbius strip.
And if I had done nothing…well my silence would have reinforced the conventional relationship of powerlessness between the ordinary consumer and a Canadian communications giant. Not to act would have been an intervention in the world – though probably one that would have contributed in a more predictable way to the rather arbitrary world of the taken-for-granted that we often assume is an imbedded and immutable aspect of the natural world.
By cycling self-consciously back into the ethnographic inquiry, MSQP’s News Release provides an example of reflexivity.