Alternative Mediamaking as a Form of Protest
transmitter | 15.04.2005 22:47 | Indymedia
Looking for descriptions of how the reporting of big events works, I came across an article called "A r/c tivism in Physical and Virtual Spaces". Here is an extract about the G8 protests in Evian, 2003. Please add more experiences...
"Near-ly" - G8 Protests in Evian
* You were in Evian, weren't you?
* Yes, I mean no - I wasn't in Switzerland, but I was in the chatroom.
I spent the seven days of protest against the G8 summit in Evian on the "other" side of the communication space: not on the streets, blockades or in activist villages, but rather in chatrooms, streams, web sites, electronic mailing lists, Twikis. Physically, I was completely detached from the outside world, as though glued to the computer. Mentally/emotionally or even just based on the amount of adrenaline produced, I was in the midst of it, nearly. Mind and heart were working full blast, always focused on what was happening "there", but nearly also nearby, here in the communication space that my screen represented, which I shared with people all over the world, into which information streamed through every possible channel. Dozens of IMCistas produced a continuous, overwhelming density of information and thus an almost real workspace and meeting point on the Internet. I could nearly simultaneously be in the chatroom with colleagues from Spain, Germany and the UK, additionally in the complex system of the jointly and multilingually used "dispatch" rooms, in which information was exchanged, checked, processed and publicized.
In this situation, being a media activist, for me, did not mean "reporting about", but rather "protesting" - specifically not only at the moment when the people in the media center in Geneva reported live on the storming of their "real space" and concretely requested help.
The Internet was no longer a tool that I used as one would use a telephone, but instead became a place due to the intensity of the communication, one that implacably demanded presence like a physical meeting place - when I am in the chatroom, I can't be carrying on a conversation at the kitchen table or go to the cinema at the same time.
"It was exciting, but at times, it was too much, even though we were more people than ever before. The fastness, the urge to do 10 things at a time, a lack of pre-structuring and priority setting pushed us to the limits - no teargas for the webheads, but exhaustion after days on end at the computer, completely forgetting about basic physical needs. It was matrix. One person stayed online for 36 hours. Direct media. The dynamics of 'being there' spread from the streets to the virtual world." [20]
Modes of communication and interaction from "meatspace" are reinvented for text-based web communication. One learns not only to understand, but even to feel icons and tags like and as smiles, winks or annoyance. In chat practice, the symbolic force of words can become so charged that even "spaces" and times for eating and drinking together can be created. In conjunction with these kinds of social interactions, intensive discussions conducted in parallel in workspaces and chatroom private rooms as the almost equivalent of corridors or coffee bars, also produce an emotional closeness that is nearly indistinguishable from face-to-face encounters in its intensity.[21]
Cyberpunk? I don't think so. Many media activists (the same as private persons, business people, professionals, gamers) are quite unspectacularly already right in the midst of the matrix, which William Gibson described as a darkly alien threat. Actually existing cyberspace today does not (yet?) consist of bio-technological apparatuses that connect the human body to electronic networks via electrodes. It emerges through the use of information technology tools of communication. In spring 2003, Indymedia alone was affiliated with 600 to 700 electronic mailing lists, over 600 users gather around the 2723 pages of the collective content management tool Twiki, not to mention the rarely less than 60 IRC chatrooms. Innumerable media groups are becoming more self-confident in dealing with radio and video streams, the RSS syndication of web sites, satellite dishes, wireless connections and, not least of all, the use of the non-commercial open source operating system Linux. This practice is not a virtual reality as it was imagined in the eighties as a graphical simulation of reality. It takes place at the keyboard just as much as in the technicians' workshops, on the streets and in the temporary media centers, in tents, in socio-cultural centers and squatted houses.
* You were in Evian, weren't you?
* Yes, I mean no - I wasn't in Switzerland, but I was in the chatroom.
I spent the seven days of protest against the G8 summit in Evian on the "other" side of the communication space: not on the streets, blockades or in activist villages, but rather in chatrooms, streams, web sites, electronic mailing lists, Twikis. Physically, I was completely detached from the outside world, as though glued to the computer. Mentally/emotionally or even just based on the amount of adrenaline produced, I was in the midst of it, nearly. Mind and heart were working full blast, always focused on what was happening "there", but nearly also nearby, here in the communication space that my screen represented, which I shared with people all over the world, into which information streamed through every possible channel. Dozens of IMCistas produced a continuous, overwhelming density of information and thus an almost real workspace and meeting point on the Internet. I could nearly simultaneously be in the chatroom with colleagues from Spain, Germany and the UK, additionally in the complex system of the jointly and multilingually used "dispatch" rooms, in which information was exchanged, checked, processed and publicized.
In this situation, being a media activist, for me, did not mean "reporting about", but rather "protesting" - specifically not only at the moment when the people in the media center in Geneva reported live on the storming of their "real space" and concretely requested help.
The Internet was no longer a tool that I used as one would use a telephone, but instead became a place due to the intensity of the communication, one that implacably demanded presence like a physical meeting place - when I am in the chatroom, I can't be carrying on a conversation at the kitchen table or go to the cinema at the same time.
"It was exciting, but at times, it was too much, even though we were more people than ever before. The fastness, the urge to do 10 things at a time, a lack of pre-structuring and priority setting pushed us to the limits - no teargas for the webheads, but exhaustion after days on end at the computer, completely forgetting about basic physical needs. It was matrix. One person stayed online for 36 hours. Direct media. The dynamics of 'being there' spread from the streets to the virtual world." [20]
Modes of communication and interaction from "meatspace" are reinvented for text-based web communication. One learns not only to understand, but even to feel icons and tags like and as smiles, winks or annoyance. In chat practice, the symbolic force of words can become so charged that even "spaces" and times for eating and drinking together can be created. In conjunction with these kinds of social interactions, intensive discussions conducted in parallel in workspaces and chatroom private rooms as the almost equivalent of corridors or coffee bars, also produce an emotional closeness that is nearly indistinguishable from face-to-face encounters in its intensity.[21]
Cyberpunk? I don't think so. Many media activists (the same as private persons, business people, professionals, gamers) are quite unspectacularly already right in the midst of the matrix, which William Gibson described as a darkly alien threat. Actually existing cyberspace today does not (yet?) consist of bio-technological apparatuses that connect the human body to electronic networks via electrodes. It emerges through the use of information technology tools of communication. In spring 2003, Indymedia alone was affiliated with 600 to 700 electronic mailing lists, over 600 users gather around the 2723 pages of the collective content management tool Twiki, not to mention the rarely less than 60 IRC chatrooms. Innumerable media groups are becoming more self-confident in dealing with radio and video streams, the RSS syndication of web sites, satellite dishes, wireless connections and, not least of all, the use of the non-commercial open source operating system Linux. This practice is not a virtual reality as it was imagined in the eighties as a graphical simulation of reality. It takes place at the keyboard just as much as in the technicians' workshops, on the streets and in the temporary media centers, in tents, in socio-cultural centers and squatted houses.
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