Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Kate Ashley and Leslie Radford, MA students in the International and Intercultural Communication program at the University of Denver for their assistance with coding; and also to Ana Ugalde Gamboa and Claudia Fiorella Anfossi for their translation work.

Notes

1. Given the numerous definitions of feminism, the researchers decided to let respondents define this concept for themselves.

2. Maquila-type jobs are those in factories in developing countries contracted by partially or wholly foreign-owned transnational corporations to perform the last stages of a production process—the final assembly and packaging of products for export (Corey Mattson n.d.).

3. Just five transnational corporations control most of the mainstream commercial media, including Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) (Bagdikian 2004).

4. ISIS Women-Manila in the Philippines and Isis-WICCE in Uganda are sister organizations, meaning they are separate entities but collaborate with each other.

5. For example, an African women's organization called Isis-Women's International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE), uses ICTs to document women's experiences in armed conflict and to conduct training in peace-building and conflict resolution (ISIS – WICCE Uganda 2005).

6. In Ecuador, for example, an alternative media project called Altermedios was created in 1998 to meet the needs of people to have a voice, because they felt excluded from mainstream media. This project provided an open participatory space for people to produce their own information and knowledge, “with the objective of deepening of cultural, political end economic democracy in the country” (Altermedios 2001, p. 24).

7. The study was a collaborative effort involving a university researcher and part-time FIRE producer, along with the co-directors of FIRE, based on the assumption that personal experience is an asset and provides a form of “robust reflexivity” (Sandra Harding 1998).

8. An online survey in Spanish and English included questions about why respondents visit the FIRE web page, what they do when they visit the FIRE web page (read the articles, listen to archived sound files, look at photo galleries, etc.), what sources they use for news, what differences they see between FIRE and other web pages, and how they use the information from FIRE.

9. A unique user (with unique IP address) constitutes one “visitor” to the FIRE web page.

10. An access of a web page or a file will generate a “hit” on the web server. For example, if a web page contains ten pictures, a visit on that page will generate eleven “hits” on the web server, one hit for the web page, ten hits for the pictures.

11. The Omar Dengo Foundation is a private, non-profit institution that has provided computer access and training for girls and boys in marginalized schools in Costa Rica during the last 12 years.