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Abstract
A grassroots-based and technologically sophisticated effort to counteract media oligopoly, online Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) enables activists to appropriate technologies of globalization, thereby promoting democratic access to citizen-produced knowledge. Combined with the efforts of some 150 Independent Media Centers (IMCs) worldwide, the Indymedia movement as a whole illustrates how citizenship is both global and local. This essay uses examples from online Indymedia and my local IMC to address questions of new media and democratic access, corporate media reform, postmodern resistance, and alternative news production. I argue that Indymedia's citizen-generated news production is a powerful response to corporate media consolidation.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to kindly thank Stephen Hartnett, Robert Ivie, the two anonymous reviewers, members of the Urbana-Champaign IMC, facilitators of the Public i, and her graduate student colleagues for their valuable feedback at various stages in the writing process.
Notes
1. Robert McChesney, “Why We Need In These Times,” In These Times, 18 January 2002, http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/06/feature1.shtml, para. 18 (accessed 22 February 2002).
2. Jackson is quoted in Norman Soloman, “Corporate Versus Independent Media,” The Humanist 60 (2000): 3.
3. See Noam Chomsky, “The Meaning of Seattle: An Interview With David Barsamian,” Zmag, http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/july00barsamian.htm (accessed 21 August 2005); and for more online media activism, see AlterNet.org, MoveOn.org, Fair.org, DemocracyNow.org, FreePress.net, PublicCitizen.org; and The Center For Digital Democracy, www.democraticmedia.org
4. “Indymedia's Frequently Asked Questions,” How did the Indymedia … (19 September 2001), http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/FrequentlyAskedQuestionEn (accessed 21 August 2005).
5. The list as of 1 August 2004 follows by region. In Africa: Ambazonia, Nigeria, Canarias, Estrecho/Madiaq, South Africa; in Canada: Alberta, Hamilton, Maritimes, Montreal, Ontario, Ottawa, Quebec, Thunder Bay, Vancouver, Windsor, Winnepeg; in East Asia: Japan, Manila, Qc; in Europe: Andorra, Antwerp, Athens, Austria, Barcelona, Belgium, Belgrade, Bristol, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Euskal Herria, Finland, France, Galiza, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Istanbul, Italy, La Plana, Liège, Lille, Madrid, Nantes, Netherlands, Nice, Norway, Ost Vlaanderin, Paris, Poland, Portugal, Prague, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Thessaloniki, United Kingdom, West Vlaanderen; in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chiapas, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Qullasuyu, Rosario, Sonora, Tiujana, Uruguay; in Oceania: Adelaide, Aotearoa, Brisbane, Jakarta, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney; in South Asia: India, Mumbai; in the United States: Arizona, Arkansas, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Danbury, DC, Hawaii, Houston, Idaho, Ithaca, Los Angeles, Madison, Maine, Michigan, Milwaukee, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New Orleans, North Carolina, North Texas, New York Capital, New York City, Oklahoma, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Richmond, Rocky Mountain, Rogue Valley, San Diego, San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Seattle, St. Louis, Tallahassee, Tennessee, Urbana-Champaign, Utah, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, Worcester; in West Asia: Beirut, Israel, Palestine.
6. For sources that problematize “anti-globalization” as a term and as a social movement, see for example Michael Albert, “Who Owns the Movement?” Zmag, available www.zmag.org/who_owns.htm; Phyllis Bennis, “Going Global: Building a Movement Against Empire,” The Institute for Policy Studies, 16–17 May 2003, www.ips-dc.org/comment/Bennis/empire.htm; David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002): 61–73; Bruce Robbins, “Disjointing the Left: Cultural Contradictions of Anticapitalism” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 29–38; and Immanuel Wallerstein, “New Revolts Against the System” New Left Review 18 (November/December 2002): 29–39.
7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
8. Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 54–77; on the discursive relationship between globalization and economics, see Randy Martin, “Globalization? The Dependencies of a Question,” Social Text 17, no. 3 (1999): 1–14; on the current historical moment and what he calls a “democratic deficit,” see Robert Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 2 (2002): 277–85, which is part of a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs on the topic of “Deliberative Democracy.”
9. Mission statement from an IMC site set up especially for the Free Trade of the Americas protest in Miami, November 2003, http://www.ftaaimc.org; please note that “new media” is used throughout the essay generally to refer to that which is digital and interactive.
10. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 192; for similar claims about Internet consumption, see Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: Public Affairs, 1999); for a textbook collection of essays demonstrating how media have become central in the production of culture in an age of globalization, see Andrew Beck, Cultural Work: Understanding the Cultural Industries (New York: Routledge, 2003); for an empirical study on happenstance media encounters, see David Tewksbury, Andrew Weaver, and Brett Maddex, “Accidentally Informed: Incidental News Exposure on the World Wide Web,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2001): 533–54.
11. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, Slyvere Lotringer, ed., Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze, trans. (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1988), 15.
12. Barbara Warnick, “Rhetorical Criticism of Public Discourse on the Internet: Theoretical Implications,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28, no. 4 (1998): 75.
13. On mainstream media's coverage of the so-called anti-globalization movement, see Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51; Norman Solomon, “‘A Different World is Possible’: Porto Alegre vs. the Corporate Media,” AlterNet (accessed 11 April 2002); on other instances of corporate mainstream media's failure to cover globalization activism, see also Norman Solomon, “The Porto Alegre Media Blackout,” AlterNet.org, 1 February 2001: available http://alternet.org/story/10420/; for more on the spectacular nature of activism, see DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999); and for a critique of non-productive agendas of “anti-” versus idealistic reformative/alternative which are unrealizable, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization and Emancipation: From Local Empowerment to Global Reform,” in Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, ed. Barry K. Gills (London: Palgrave, 2000): 189–206.
14. Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, “The New Media and Our Political Communication Discontents: Democratizing Cyberspace,” Information, Communication & Society 4, no. 1 (2001): 1–13; on socioeconomics and civic participation, see Erik Bucy and Kimberly Gregson, “Media Participation: A Legitimizing Mechanism of Mass Democracy,” New Media and Society 3, no. 3 (2001): 357–80; Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993) is still widely cited by those asking questions about online communities; see also the Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org; for a historical exploration of the concept of American community in the twentieth century, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); for a compendium of relevant literature in communications and the field of media studies on public responsibility and Habermasian dialogue, see Tanni Haas, “What's ‘Public’ About Public Journalism? Public Journalism and the Lack of a Coherent Public Philosophy,” Communication Theory 9, no. 3 (1999): 346–64; and for social–theoretical questions of consensus informing this essay and for a way to cling to enlightenment hope amidst postmodern despair, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984 [1981]).
15. Jeff Chester, “The Threat to the Net,” Nation, 9 October 2000: available via the Center for Digital Democracy, http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/articles/threattothenet.html; see also Chester and Gary O. Larson, “Something Old, Something New,” The Nation (7 January 2002): accessed online; while this section of my project focuses on American issues of technology, the idea of access is also pertinent and equally pressing in a more global context and especially in the southern hemisphere. Ellen Kole, for example, writes about NGOs and access to network technology, pointing to the “digital divide” between north and south. Sub-Saharan Africa barely has one telephone line per 100 people, much less the climate-control necessary to house computers. The digital divide as it relates to race and poverty would better be treated in an entirely different project but warrants mention here if only to reiterate the vast dominance of American capitalism; see Ellen S. Kole, “Between Grassroots and Netizens: Empowering Nongovernmental Organizations,” Cyberimperialism, ed. Bosah Ebo (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 205–21.
16. Jeff Chester and Steven Rosenfeld, “Stealing the Internet,” TomPaine.com, 4 August 2003, www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8528/view/print.
17. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6.
18. Andrew F. Wood and Matthew J. Smith, ed. Online Communication: Linking Technology, Identity, & Culture (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001), 169. Reviewing the entire body of literature on how technology affects communication, how media is embedded in culture, and how alternative forms of organizing may or may not change the ways knowledge is produced would be an impossibly daunting project. In addition to authors and works those cited throughout the paper, scholars in the field of rhetoric might also be interested in James Arnt Aune, “Catching the Third Wave: The Dialectic of Rhetoric and Technology.” in Thomas Rosteck, ed. At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999): 84–100; Gerard Hauser and Susan Whalen, “The New Rhetoric and New Social Movements,” Emerging Theories of Human Communication, Branislav Kovačić and Donald Cushman, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997): 115–40; Bruce Gronbeck, “Citizen Voices in Cyberpolitical Culture,” in Gerard Hauser and Amy Grim, ed. Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), 17–31; and Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), which addresses the appropriation of technologies for anticapitalist resistance.
19. McChesney, “Power to the Producers: A Response to ‘The Daily We’,” Boston Review (Summer 2001), http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/mcchesney.html; see also Sunstein, “The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy”’ Boston Review (Summer 2001), http://www.bostonreview.net/BR26.3/sunstein.html; Boston Review in fact has an ongoing forum on “new democracy” where scholars and activists can converse on a number of wide-ranging and fascinating topics, including the questions raised here about new media, technology, and democratic citizenship.
20. Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 13.
21. Powell quoted in Frank Rose, “Big Media or Bust,” Wired, available http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/mergers.html, second-to-last paragraph.
22. A report from the Center for Public Integrity exposes even more about Powell and his role in the Telecommunications Development Fund, a venture capital fund created by Congress in 1996 that lobbies on behalf of the telecomm industry, pays its executives hefty salaries, and walks a dubious line between being a government entity or private company—reaping benefits from both; see also Bob Williams, “The FCC's Strange Non-Profit: FCC Chairman Michael Powell runs venture capital firm that claims it's private,” www.openairwaves.org/telecom/report.aspx?aid = 31; for more on Powell, concentration, and the telecomm industry, see Nicholas Lemann, “The Chairman,” The New Yorker, 7 October 2002, 48–55; see also Robert McChesney and John Nichols, “Up in Flames, The Nation, 17 November 2003, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i = 20031117&s = mcchesney; and for a swashbuckling editorial by Powell himself on the FCC changes, see “New Rules, Old Rhetoric,” The New York Times, 28 July 2003, A17.
23. Jonathan S. Adelstein, “Statement of FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein: A Dark Storm Cloud is Looming Over the Future of the American Media …” (2 June 2003), published by CommonDreams.org, http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0602-13.htm
24. See FreePress.net for the ongoing quibbling over FCC rules; quotation from an e-mail on the free press activist list-serv entitled “The FCC rollback hoax,” 27 November 2003; a conference on media reform held in November 2003 in Madison, WI featured a respectable set of speakers on the issue, an overview of which is available through FreePress.net; see especially Bill Moyers’ keynote address at this conference, http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1112-10.htm
25. David Shaw, “Heard the Local News? It may Soon Be Harder to Find,” Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2003, E12.
26. Frank Ahrens, “Senate Approves Measure to Undo FCC Rules,” Washington Post, 17 September 2003, A1.
27. Released 22 May 2003. Full report and link to database, http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/report.aspx?aid = 84; see also the Center For Public Integrity at www.publicintegrity.org; and Media Reform.net at www.mediareform.net
28. Mark Crispin Miller, “What's Wrong With this Picture?” The Nation, 7 January 2002: accessed online; The Nation, 7 January 2002, identifies “The Big 10” media corporations as: AOL/Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Inc., Walt Disney Co., Liberty Media Corporation, AT&T Corporation, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal, and Sony.
29. Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larson, “Something Old, Something New: Media Policy in the Digital Age,” Nation, 7 January 2002, 12; see also Jeff Chester and Gary O. Larson, “How to Prepare for the Era of the Speedy Internet,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 18 May 2000, accessed via Center for Media Democracy on 31 March 2002, http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/articles/prepareforspeedynet.html; see the weekly Nielsen report online at www.nielsenratings.com for updates on when, where, and how people are using the Web; and on how online news reading differ from traditional newspaper reading see Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury, “Patterns of Internet and Traditional News Media Use in a Networked Community” Political Communication 17 (2000): 21–45.
30. Miller, 9.
31. Reported by CorpWatch.org; see Mafruza Khan, “Media Diversity at Risk” CorpWatch, 29 May 2003, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id = 6850.
32. Shaw, “Heard the Local News?”
33. “Telecommunication: High Speed Internet Access,” Opensecrets.org (28 February 2002), http://www.opensecrets.org/payback/issue.asp?issueid = HS1.
34. Bill Moyers, “Journalism & Democracy,” The Nation, 7 May 2001: accessed online, para. 11; on the importance of the 1996 Telecommunications Act within the neoliberal trajectory that has led to corporate domination in the political, public realm of media, see McChesney, The Problem, 51–56
35. See Bob Herbert, “Cozy With the F.C.C.,” New York Times, 5 June 2003: A35. For the report, see Bob Williams of Center For Public Integrity's “Behind Closed Doors: Top Broadcasters met 71 times with FCC officials,” 30 May 2003, http://www.publicintegrity.org
36. “Telecommunication,” OpenSecrets.org.
37. Quoted in New York Times, 3 June 2003: C8.
38. Ahrens, “Senate Approves.”
39. NOW press release, “New FCC Rules Threaten To Shut Out Women and People of Color From Media Industry,” 4 June 2003; see also Stephen Labaton, “Ideologically Broad Coalition Assails F.C.C. Media Plan,” New York Times (28 May 2003): accessed online.
40. “Indymedia's Frequently Asked Questions,” How is Indymedia …
41. Indymedia.org, “Structure,” available at http://www.ucimc.org/mod/info/display/structure/index.php
42. Gal Beckerman, “Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism,” Columbia Journalism Review, 11 September 2003, www.alternet.org/print.html?storyID + 16762
43. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988): quotation on page 306.
44. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978): 162; for a history of the press in America, see Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
45. Graham Meikle's Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002) is a book-length study of how activists and have used the Web to mobilize; in a similar vein and more specifically regarding MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice as online mobilizations, see Andrew Boyd, “The Web Rewires the Movement,” Nation, 4 August 2003: accessed online; and for another interesting take on the Web's liberatory potential see Cnet news.com, “FCC debate—is the Net enough?” Business Week Online, 22 June 2003, http://news.com.com/2100–1028_3–1011850.html.
46. Robert McChesney, “Why We Need In These Times,” In These Times, 18 January 2002, http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/06/feature1.shtml, para. 11.
47. McChesney, “Why We Need,” para. 8; on the possibility of bringing independent content into the mainstream, see Mark Wigfield, “FCC won't revive rule helping independent TV producers,” Wall Street Journal, www.mediareform.net, (13 June 2003): 87.
48. Naomi Klein,“Reclaiming the Commons.” New Left Review 9 (May/June 2001): 84.
49. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) develops the idea of a logic of re-mediation.
50. “Indymedia's Frequently Asked Questions,” How is Indymedia …; also, follow links to Indymedia's recommended essay on the concept of open publishing by Matthew Arnison.
51. “Indymedia's Frequently Asked Questions,” Of What …
52. Ibid., Are you ‘activists’ or ‘journalists?’
53. Ibid., How is Indymedia associated …
54. For a detailed explanation of how Indymedia created a separate “hidden” file as a compromise between its anti-censorship mission and practical implications, see Beckerman.
55. Lyotard, 10.
56. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, 54.
57. Lyotard, 16.
58. Examples are taken from www.ftaaimc.org/en/index.shtml, which I monitored closely, along with other Indymedia sites and alternative and mainstream news sites, on 20–23 November, 2003.
59. Quotations demonstrating the minute-by-minute developments are from the “Breaking News” section of newswire, between approximately noon and 5pm 21 November 2003, http://ftaaimc.org/en/index.shtml
60. Tom Hayden, “Miami Vice,” AlterNet, 20 November 2003, http://www.alternet.org/story/17234
61. See http://ucimc.org/newswire/display_any/14166 for one article published prior to the protest and responses with further links to Public Citizen and New York Tmes; type “FTAA” into the UC-IMC site (www.ucimc.org) for more.
62. A short editorial, “Free Trade, a la Carte,” on 22 November 2003 in New York Times exposes among the Bush administration a consistent pattern of siding with narrow protectionist interests including US corporations and agribusiness as well as Brazil, which pressured the WTO to quit talks in Cancún in September of 2003; see also Simon Romero, “Hemisphere Trade Talks in Miami Are Reported to Hit a Bump,” New York Times, 17 November 2003, which predicted the a la carte outcome of the talks. Both archived articles available www.nytimes.com.
63. Celia Dugger, “Report Finds Few Benefits for Mexico in NAFTA” New York Times, 19 November 2003, A8, with graphic.
64. Steven Greenhouse, “Demonstration Turns Violent at Trade Talks in Miami,” New York Times, 21 November 2003, A25.
65. For security questions and comparisons to Seattle, see Susannah Nesmith, “Security Boosted for FTAA Talks,” Miami Herald, 10 November 2003, A1; for money figures see Douglas Hanks III, “Miami Secures Money to Run Americas Free Trade Talks,” Miami Herald, 6 November 2003: accessed through LexisNexis, University of Illinois Library on 29 November 2003.
66. See 20–24 November 2003, for example; the police and ACLU letters dated 30 November 2003 are available http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/7370084.htm
67. Solomon, “‘A Different World’,” 8.
68. For various perspectives on social movements and globalization see Pierre Hamel et al., ed., Globalization and Social Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Larry Ray, Rethinking Critical Theory: Emancipation in the Age of Global Social Movements (London: Sage, 1993).
69. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, form letter, 30 July 2003.
70. See Doug Ireland, “After the MoveOn Primary,” TomPaine.com (1 July 2003), www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8247/view/print
71. Lyotard, 5.