The reading  “Critical Thinking, Deviant Knowledge, and the Alternative Press” by Thomas Eland talks about how we are at the mercy of major corporations and do not realize it. This may be caused by the mass media which is such a significant force in the shaping of our way of life, resulting in the negative aspects being filtered out. Some of these multinational corporations also control various aspects of mass media and profit, all in the the name of capitalism. A good example of this was mentioned in “Research Strategies” by William Badke where the average person that searches for something on Google, usually just chooses the information from the first results page. What this does, is limit our ability to do real research.

In the article “The History and Characteristics of Zines” by Fred Wright we take a step back and see that not everything has to be tainted by commercialism. Zine works produced are non commercial publications containing a wide variety of subjects but not limited to music, comics, fantasy/science-fiction. In the years of its early beginnings zines were more of a community of fandom related to a fixed set of interests. But it has since then evolved. The growing popularity of this form of  print media can be attributed to it’s similarity social network for groups/interests on a website, but a more analog version. More importantly zines are not subject to censorship from gatekeepers like traditional media as it is self published work.