Media Metacommentary and the Performance of Expertise

This paper considers the extent to which media metacommentary – or, the critical comparative reflection about media formats – constitutes a new form of expertise. We begin by tracing out the history of critical discourse that seeks to explore the possibilities and limitations of different cultural formats, arguing that this is linked to institutional development of critics and the larger aesthetic discourse about modernity. Next, we consider how mediatization has altered the conditions under which media metacommentary can be mobilized as a performance of expertise, or the display of an expert identity. Ultimately, we argue that the the proliferation of new media technologies and the growth of transmedia culture have fundamentally transformed the social organization of expert discourse.