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Are radical, collective, independent media projects still possible?

Corporate Watch | 18.03.2011 20:30 | Indymedia | Other Press

The following piece about the present and future of independent media projects was included in the latest issue of the Corporate Watch Magazine, which has just been released, on so-called free newspapers. And since it concerns Indymedia more than any other project, we thought it should be reposted here as well, with the hope that it would contribute to a much-needed debate among IMC UK volunteers and users about the issues raised.

With the aim of exploring the present pitfalls, and potential future directions, of radical, anti-corporate media projects, Corporate Watch have put three virtual Independent Media Centre (Indymedia) volunteers (IMCers) into a virtual pub, i.e. an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) room named 'pub', to see what our imaginations could produce.

Our three characters are 'T', a techie who, years ago, helped build one of the open-source content management systems (CMS) that many Indymedia sites still run on; 'M', who helped moderate the UK news wire and write middle-column features for years before burning out; and 'F', an independent photographer and film maker who used to contribute frequent action and protest reports before getting a paid job and setting up his own blog.

Here is the log of their half-drunken chat.


T: Hello F. We were just talking about the problems and dead ends that Indymedia and other independent media projects are facing in the age of blogs and the so-called 'information society'.

M: The main points that we mentioned are the lack of resources; slow development compared to corporate technology; political and personal disagreements; and, above all, what seems to be a decline in these projects' relevance to grassroots movements, which seem to prefer using, for one reason or another, other more readily available platforms provided by evil corporates like Youtube and Facebook.

M: And I was saying that both Indymedia and the IT world have changed so much that different people seem to want different things from the project. I have often noticed that people mean different things when they say 'Indymedia'.

T: But we were trying not to limit the discussion to Indymedia, as many similar, though smaller, projects are struggling with the same issues. We are, rather, using Indymedia as an example.

F: So what do you think makes an independent, grassroots media project different from a blog or any other news site?

M: Well, first, the politics behind it: grassroots, anti-authoritarian, horizontally organised and all the rest of it, which you cannot really reconcile with corporate platforms if you are to keep some integrity. Then there is open publishing, which was quite a revolutionary thing at the time, but nowadays setting up a blog or website without much technical knowledge is available everywhere. However, OP is more than that: it is the ability to post content anonymously and securely, which most of these corporate platforms don't provide.

T: Yes, when we started Indymedia, everyone understood that 'our media' included establishing our own infrastructure (servers etc.) and all the other means of production, material and non-material. Today's 'media activists' seem to be happy to be consumers, however radical the content of their consumption might be.

F: I would add the collective, collaborative way of working. From my experience, blogs have managed to individualise collective media activism and fragment collective political identities.

M: But I also think that Indymedia and similar projects have bred a generation of 'media activists', as opposed to activists doing their own media. And F here is one example ;-). I would argue against professionalisation, however radical.

F: Yeah, I admit that's true. It's quite disheartening to see more cameras, often standing to the side, than actual protesters on demos and actions.

T: Also, I don't know if we can call it a problem, but the reality is that Indymedia has grown so much, with various projects that have quite different approaches and internal logic kept under the same umbrella. I wonder if this line of thinking (one CMS for everything) has been part of the problem.

F: The supermarket logic ;-)

M: I would disagree actually. I think the brand, or identity if you like, is also important to the credibility and continuity of projects.

T: Yes, but there is no reason why we can't separate various sub-projects, technically speaking, and keep the brand name for all of them. The open source movement is a good example of things developing much quicker and better if you don't attempt to control everything.

F: True.

M: The other problem, in my opinion, is the unanticipated challenges that open publishing posed or created: trolling, disinformation, security risks and so on. Also, if open publishing has worked well for sourcing news directly from the street, it doesn't seem to have worked for features and other more laborious tasks – as you know, Indymedia features are often wholly written by one single IMCer, without involvement from others, even to fix typos.

F: Yeah, we haven't really worked hard on promoting the collective collaborative production of media, the way Wikipedia has done, for example. And I'm not only talking about dedicated IMC volunteers, but about the wider audience, given that one of Indymedia's missions was to overcome the division between the reporter and reported.

T: God, this is so depressing.

M: Yeah..

F: Perhaps we should talk about solutions? Even if they may seem unrealistic for now...

T: What I would like to see on Indymedia is more local and community news from a grassroots perspective. Action reports and covering big mobilisations are not enough any more. If we really want to be a serious alternative to the mainstream media, we have to break out of this activist bubble.

F: An alternative, grassroots, open-publishing news agency :-)

T: Exactly!

M: What I would like to see is more collective production of different types of media. Imagine if people could easily upload video, audio and text reports from their mobile phones etc., which would then be pooled and put together into comprehensive pieces.

T: And allowing people to edit audio and video pieces or features online... Provided that we find a solution to potential abuses and security risks.

F: Obviously these things need us all to put our forces together to realise them, rather than us sitting here and dreaming. It's always easier said than done, innit?

Corporate Watch
- Homepage: http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3912

Additions

yes

19.03.2011 14:43

I think you should be working on live streaming of london demos. Mixing webcams feeds with footage from several andriod mobile phone cameras. Similar to propratory "USTREAM PRO". Then put on the main newswire feature LIVE!

Otherwise folks will be stuck with APTN Direct/sky news/BBC news. Which do have great footage but terrible commentary and copyright issues.

I cheer at mass photography actions, but there needs to a proper debate. At G20 it worked really well. Whereas the students kids violently refused it, then later asked for photos for legal support.

If you are going to wire up a kettled bloc, think about leccy, 3G/wifi/wimax etc.

The beeb techies are working on a 3d model of a street with blended in cam footage. They trialed it at wimbledon so they could show the tenis court from various angles. This has potential for central london street situations. In the future this could be on the main newswire feature LIVE!

IMC branded toy UAV cam? balloon cam? kite cam?

The footage needs to get out more, eg. broadcast on satalite TV. I saw one schnews video on "showcase 2"/"PSTV"


Encouraging good practise on the newswire is better than a meeting commanding it. There should be far more supportive positive comments eg. I agree with the article. When obviously 30% of "Jo-public" are going to disagree with any controversal content.

R:


Making the most of our best qualities.

19.03.2011 19:49

The thrust of this article is further development and efficiency of Indymedia.

"The beeb techies are working on a 3d model of a street with blended......."

We should always guard against considering new ideas on the basis of how cool, flash, or clever it sounds. The BBC and modern media waste millions trialing and proto-typing technology which, on paper, makes perfect sense, but when rolled out, prove utterly useless. IMC does not have that money to pour down the drain, so should limit itself to enhancements in technology or processes which are KNOWN to work and deliver results.

What IMC must do is make the material it already has retrievable so that this material can be used as content to provide a mix of current reporting, historical analysis and commentary. The best articles will entail all three.

So I think one suggestion for the future could entail an internal, information rich, search engine allowing retrieval of material that IMC already has. IMC must have thousands of articles, photo's and video/audio sitting on its servers built up over the last decade. Good, solid analysis is always going to come about by responsible use of first hand accounts and eye witness testimony, something IMC has a wealth of.

I don't see how a news agency could work in the traditional sense, that being that incoming content could be 'edited' by a small core of editors prior to publication. The material is often gathered by those individuals who want to keep control of how the material appears to the outside world. It is this process which brings about IMC's unique voice and allows it room to move in producing in depth content.

But a news agency could work at the local level by providing all of IMC's contributors with the material they would need to put local actions alongside national events, thereby building a more comprehensive picture of public opinion on a national or international level. For instance, during reporting of the Iraq war protests, a more efficient approach would have been to tool those contributors working in London with material that was gathered in local areas with localised actions. This is where all the regional IMC's could have put their material into a single repository model, copied onto other servers as needed for use by everyone. At the moment it is possible to do that, but entails searching each collective. But even so, many contributors are not web savvy when producing content, and therefore their material doesn't always appear when using generic search terms.

One thing about easily searchable content which is well presented is to have the effect of allowing contributors to think holistically, to build a wider picture about an issue and to approach article writing with a broader, more careful and considered mind. It is the case in the MSM that searchable content can often, simply by being viewed and looked at, provide ideas for articles that hadn't previously been considered. Overall, information that is coherently searchable, and logically presented, has the effect of encouraging diligence which in turn leads to better abstraction and a tendency toward more comprehensive analysis. The essence of good article writing.

I think the newswire at present is full of ideas and emotive sounding off, but little in terms of in-depth content beyond the regular "Global Research" "WSWS" regurgitation of heavy text-rich content. There is often more enlightening information in the public comments which follow an article, than appears in the article itself. The comments, and the energy put into the comments, would clearly be better utilised by producing content.

IMC is now over a decade old. Where is the historical analysis? That analysis which can look back on past events in order to better inform new activists about the heritage they belong too.

Q


IMC is good, now get on with it.

19.03.2011 20:12

"Encouraging good practise on the newswire is better than a meeting commanding it. There should be far more supportive positive comments eg. I agree with the article. When obviously 30% of "Jo-public" are going to disagree with any controversal content."

So very true and the easiest, and strongest way to do that would be to make 'evidence' freely available to contributors when they are writing articles. Joe public might disagree in percentages on any given story, but if that story is backed by evidence, those percentages decrease.

IMC is a specialised entity but being specialised is no way to correct for the distorted practises of the MSM. What we need is a more focussed approach to make the most out of the evidence we have, built up worldwide over the course of the last decade.

That evidence needs to be more freely available. Arming our contributors with this evidence will command better practice and better practice will lead to more in-depth authoritative content.

The Independent media must come to be more comfortable with itself, and must learn to shake off the endless negativity and hostility directed toward it by those who would rather it didn't exist.

Independence means accountability. Always a troublesome concept!

Q