* Interface Volume 2 Issue 2: Voices of dissent: activists’ engagements in the creation of alternative, autonomous, radical and independent media. Alice Mattoni, Andrejs Berdnikovs, Michela Ardizzoni and Laurence Cox

Below, the contents of this special issue, followed by an excerpt from the introduction.

Part One: The Contents

“This issue of Interface … proposes some thought-provoking articles about alternative media in different regions of the world.

Focusing on Scandinavian countries, Tina Askanius and Nils Gustafsson investigate what happens to alternative media contents when they are circulated/publicized through social networking sites. The article focuses on the use of Facebook and Youtube during the demonstrations during the 2008 European Social Forum in Malmö, Sweden and the 2007-2008 grassroots mobilizations before and after the eviction of the Youth House in Copenhagen, Denmark. In doing so, the article raises important questions related to the activists’ use of commercial social networking and content sharing sites to spread radical and alternative messages. Grounding their theoretical reflections in empirical material, the authors explicitly address critical questions about the commodification of protest cultures and the mainstreaming of alternative media messages.

Patrick McCurdy’s article explores the media politics of the Dissent! group around the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit. While a binary opposition, celebrating activist media and demonizing mainstream media, certainly existed within Dissent!, McCurdy argues for the emergence of a pragmatic orientation within which mainstream media are seen as a site of struggle and alternative media are seen as complementary to the mainstream. He notes the distinction between the formal rules of the Hori-Zone convergence space and (some) activist-level talk which articulates this latter perspective. Criticising the “spiral of silence” which excluded debate on interaction with mainstream media, he argues that it serves to mask the existence of more pragmatic approaches and give the illusion of consensus around “anti-media” positions.

Italian artistic activist projects are the main subjects of Tatiana Bazzicchelli’s article, exploring politically oriented forms of art which rest on (social) networking practices. She does so from a cross-temporal perspective and by taking into consideration the use of different technological supports: from the practice of mail art to Neoism, from the Luther Blisset Project to the creation of Anna Adamolo. Tracing the origins of (social) networking in politically oriented artistic practices, Bazzichelli puts social networking sites and the practices associated with them in a historical perspective. Her contribution is therefore a first step towards the development of a critical model to single out and compare different types of (social) networking in contemporary societies.

The long-lasting experience of the media art platform Public Netbase, in Vienna, is at the centre of Clemens Apprich’s article, which discusses practices of urban resistance through media art interventions. Already active at the beginning of the 1990s, Public Netbase engaged in seminal public performances related to the digital network culture and became a relevant artistic and political actor in the Viennese urban space and beyond. In 2006, however, the City of Vienna severely cut its financial resources. Apprich analyzes the practices of Public Netbase in the re-appropriation of urban space after its marginalization within the Viennese artistic scene and discusses the importance of such projects for the development of counter-hegemonic engagement in the public space.

From South Korea, Dongwon Jo addresses how activists used different types of media outlets and technological platforms during the 2008 Chotbul Protests in Seoul. These lasted about four months, initially against the U.S. beef import negotiations and then widening to a broader criticism of the government.

Activists and protest participants employed information and communication technologies creatively. The combination of mobile phones, websites and offline demonstrations resulted in multifaceted media practices that went beyond the development of grassroots journalism. Beyond the 2008 experience, this article also illustrates the peculiarities of media activism’s relationship to the South- Korean media and political systems.

Brigitte Geiger and Margit Hauser discuss the complexities of creating and recording feminist knowledge and history. The approximately 40 archives in German-speaking countries, operating within movement contexts such as women’s centres, face challenges in defining what should be included and have gone through lengthy processes of professionalisation. The article offers histories of feminist and lesbian media production since the 1970s as well as discussing changing issue focuses. The article’s methodology, highlighting the practicalities of developing movement-centred archives, offers valuable insights both into the construction of feminist and lesbian movement knowledge over time, and into the contemporary construction of movements’ own historical sense of themselves.

Margaret Gillan’s exploration of working-class community media in Ireland, drawing on an extended interview with community activist Robbie Byrne, highlights the difficulty of developing media which are accountable to, and produced by, marginalized communities in struggle. The combination – in broadcast media in particular – of capital costs, technical requirements and state regulation poses enormous challenges. Such communities have often gone through a double disappointment: first in discovering the barriers to their organized voice posed by the mainstream media, and secondly in the encounter with radical, independent producers who are keen to produce about the community but accept (or impose) technical and production requirements which in practice disempower and exclude working-class people. The article outlines some of the choices and strategies which have been used to enable media production on the terms of communities in struggle rather than those of the state or the independent / arthouse sector.

Maria Cristina Guimarães Oliveira and Odalisca Moraes’ action note “Communication: historical and cultural indicators of Pina” explores the communicative dynamics in processes of cultural resistance within grassroots development projects in the “Comunidade do Bode”, a shantytown in the neighborhood of Pina, Brazil.

The action note “Extension or Communication? Audiovisual technologies as facilitators of communication in the Olga Benário MST settlement” by Lívia Moreira de Alcântara and Elder Gomes Barbosa, discusses the effects of using audiovisual technologies for communication within the Olga Benário MST settlement, located in the Brazilian municipality of Visconde do Rio Branco, Minas Gerais.

Peter Waterman opens the special section on on alternative international labour communication by computer with discussion of an online survey which he carried out in early 2010. Waterman has developed the ideas expressed by respondents, providing his own vision of the relationship between labour movement and computer-mediated networking. In the last part of the article, under the rubric of “What is to be done?”, the author offers 26 propositions on networking, labour and solidarity in the context of a contemporary globalized and informatized capitalism. Waterman’s propositions and his general approach assume the priority of networking activities over other mobilization strategies.

Waterman’s article is followed by two responses to his survey, which suggest radically different orientations. Both respondents represent web-based international labour media projects (LabourStart and Netzwerk IT). The first response is provided by Eric Lee and it takes a sceptical view of global solidarity movement based on the web as an alternative to traditional trade union organizations. It also casts doubt upon the claim that the new media would create something utterly new, something different from and even opposed to the existing trade union movement.

The second response is offered by Dave Hollis, who prefers the network form, non-hierarchical structures and the newest global social movements rather than traditional trade union organizations. Moreover, he believes in the ability of alternative labour media to challenge, subvert or overcome union hierarchy. Unlike the first respondent, Hollis thinks that the new media, their power and effects, are underestimated.

The “key document” section includes a declaration on politics, knowledge, and art by the interesting Russian group “Chto delat / What is to be done?” which unites activists, artists, researchers and philosophers. The document outlines the main principles of organization and coordination within the group, its basic program and ideological platform. A special focus in the declaration is on the tasks of contemporary art, the importance of twentieth-century avant-garde thought for the rethinking and renewal of the leftist philosophical and political tradition, and the place of revolutionary art in a time of reaction.

Stefania Milan’s review of Rodriguez, Kidd and Stein’s Making our media: global initiatives towards a democratic public sphere highlights how this two- volume collection, documenting and reflecting on the experiences of movements involved in the OURMedia / Nuestros Medias network, deepens the field of alternative media research and creates a participatory conversation between a vast range of experiences and approaches in the service of praxis. Tomás MacSheoin’s review of Clifford Bob’s The marketing of rebellion: insurgents, media and international activism reads it as a “cookbook” for local groups seeking international (above all NGO) support and highlights the realism with which Bob reads the relationships between local campaigns and international NGOs – and the ways in which the former “market” themselves to the latter, while noting that matters might be different when the international solidarity in question is social movement rather than NGO-based.”

Part Two: The state of digitally-mediated activism today

“Despite the distinctive features of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries, this discussion highlights some practical issues which are more generally relevant, such as the obstacles to creating and employing non-digital media – which on a global scale are still far more significant than digital media – by movements of the politically excluded (such as anarchists and autonomists) or the socially excluded (such as movements of the poors, dalits, or migrant workers). These issues – which amount to the question of the “ownership of the means of intellectual production” – are in some ways reproducing the old Soviet- bloc situation in the majority world, so that a politicized minority can use alternative technologies (today, digital means rather than carbon paper) to challenge elites on their own terms, either around the political concerns of the dissident minority or through providing technical and intellectual support to the struggles of the marginalized.

Another challenge is the ability of new alternative media to overcome the general political apathy affecting wide sections of the population in many states – a particularly acute issue in the ex-Soviet region but a more general problem in the age of neo-liberalism, which relies on the relative demobilisation of the kinds of mass interest group politics that characterized Keynesian welfare states, national developmentalism in the majority world and (in its own peculiar way) state socialism.

Overcoming these challenges, in the ex-Soviet region and the majority world, may require a return to traditional awareness-raising practices such as mobilization in the workplace, grassroots organizing, street meetings, face-to- face oral agitation in public places, written / printed material (flyers, newssheets, brochures, etc.), visual material (posters, exhibits, etc.) and other forms of active interaction with the general public. It also may require charismatic leaders and dedicated agitators with a talent for persuasion and a readiness to be engaged in routine and exhaustive face-to-face meetings with various strata of society. The sporadic individual production and scattered diffusion of videos, photos and audio-recordings are hardly able to persuade wide sections of the population to change the way they think and act. In the same way, the producers of such videos, photos and audio-recordings can hardly play a role similar to that played by charismatic leaders in former times. In the ex-Soviet area, as well as in other regions of the world, contemporary independent media appear to address the organized, engaged and motivated parts of the population – although here as elsewhere studies of alternative media audiences are notable by their absence, most empirical research focussing on the far smaller group of active participants.

One obvious approach is to combine new alternative media with “old” forms of activists’ interaction with society. It is certainly wise to avoid idealizing any single method or tool. In particular, the power imbalance within movements between those with the relevant technological skills and access to the necessary equipment and those who do not, needs to be more widely thematized. At present, many movements – while accepting arguments as to the increasing centrality of media – have paradoxically relinquished all control over their own media strategy to specialists with their own preferences and agendas; a process every bit as risky as allowing a movement’s parliamentary or indeed military wing to set its own direction in isolation from the wider movement. While academics have been bitterly critical of organisational claims to “represent” movements and social groups, there has to date been little serious reflection on the appropriateness of allowing those who happen to have a computer and understand how to negotiate social media to “represent” particular movements. Another important challenge in reflecting on contemporary alternative media is what in countries of the Global North is the increasingly ubiquitous presence of portable technological devices that allow people/citizens to reproduce slices of social realities through audio-recording, photographs and video materials. At the dawn of the 2000s, the expression “media activism” was frequently employed to label activists involved in radical news-making processes which led to the production of accounts and reports presenting social movements’ point of view on contentious issues and on grassroots mobilizations.

In the last 10 years, however, portable technologies have exploded. Mobile phones, in particular, have become a daily device of personal communication, while also offering the opportunity to record in different ways what is going on around the phone user. The last generation of mobile phones, moreover, combines this function with direct internet connections. Multi-media user- generated contents can thus be easily produced everywhere with sufficient wealth and can even be uploaded immediately on the web. Potentially everyone attending a demonstration, therefore, can produce her/his own personal account of the event.

On the one hand, this multiplies the digital memories related to mobilizations and creates a dispersed archive of documents related to protest events. At the same time, however, portable and personal digital communication devices also put into question the very notion of “media activism” and “alternative media”.

The challenge is, therefore, to rethink the place of alternative media practices and to deconstruct the very concept of alternative media. The idea that the production of alternative media is based on horizontal interactions and dialogues amongst people belonging to the same (protesting) collective actor, for instance, is challenged by the individual production and diffusion of short videos, audio-recordings and photographs. Are these contents still alternative media contents and according to which definition? Are the producers of such contents still alternative media practitioners and according to which definitions?

A key issue here is the ways in which the possessors of very traditional kinds of media power (often major newspapers, the digital giants and so on) construct spaces for “citizen journalism” which generate profits for their owners from this upsurge of popular participation in media production – while simultaneously censoring, constraining or marginalising both political content in general and the possibility of generating collective action in particular. Movements are certainly able to work within and around such constraints, but often the new technologies can produce the illusion of popular engagement while undermining active control.

A telling contrast might be that between the use of SMSs – widely effective because of their minimal formal elements in organising protests in a huge variety of different contexts – and YouTube, effective at diffusing images, but more commonly feeding into the substitution of opinion (in the privacy of one’s own home) for action. An adequate comparative analysis of the different new technologies, however, has yet to be developed – not least because the investment, in time and emotional energy, in particular technologies and their associated social worlds, is substantial, and neither researchers nor activists who have invested heavily in one particular mode are keen to admit that it may be rather less effective or significant than they hoped at the start. More generally, the investment in “new technology” per se is often one which marks an individual’s academic career or movement position, and it is hard not to play up the significance of such an investment. Presumably as (or if) the new media landscape stabilizes and these new forms become less dramatically new it will be possible to develop more adequate assessments of their relative significance. In this respect, the broader “lay public” has a role to play vis-à-vis the interested claims of specialists.

Nevertheless, it is clear that – whatever final evaluation is made of the relative significance of digital media vs old media, and of different kinds of digital media, today’s proliferation of digital activism has enabled a horizontal circulation of information, in western countries in particular, that often escapes the narrow frameworks of institutionalized media. This bottom-up approach has generated a more diverse and, perhaps, democratic use of media technologies to raise awareness and challenge the status quo in a variety of national and cultural settings.

At the same time, though, the enormous effort and energy put into this kind of activism, and the associated notion of “alternative media”, has been challenged in two related ways. One is the activist concern that particular kinds of technology (such as digital petitions and online protests) can be a passive, living-room based substitute for real-world demonstrations and direct action.

As with other kinds of media, it is clear that this is not always the case, and as noted most contemporary movements in western countries use digital media as part of their organising strategy. However, no observer can deny that – just as in the past some movements “only existed on paper” – we now have movements and organisations which “only exist on the Internet”. This poses particular challenges to international solidarity (since outside observers are only rarely in a position to assess the significance of movements abroad separately from their online material) and for relationships between the metropolis and the periphery (since in peripheral contexts association with a virtual organisation may be a crucial lifeline for radicals or the marginalized, and what appears as instrumental political action may in fact be a form of personal support).

The other challenge is the observation that the relative efficacy of digital activism can be hampered by a generalized passivity of publics who feel disengaged or disempowered by the overwhelming role played by mainstream media. Present-day Italy is a case in point here. The duopolistic television system of the Rai and Mediaset groups, along with prime minister Berlusconi’s stranglehold on both print and broadcast, seem to have generated a widespread indifference towards alternative forms of media. Hence, even interesting media initiatives such as the street television network Telestreet remain as localized experiments that hardly reach beyond the confines of their target neighbourhood and thus provide little resistance to popular mainstream media.

In view of this, a key challenge faced by alternative media practitioners is that of engagement with social movements that question the practices of mainstream media. Another challenge, therefore, consists in the attention that needs to be paid to the evolving relationship between alternative and mainstream media because it is only by engaging in a dialogue that reassesses the power of institutionalized media that a more constructive critique and more effective alternatives can be proposed.

We have, of course, been here before, and in many different ways. The overthrow of absolute monarchies, dictatorships and empires has almost always taken place in the teeth of the official or mainstream commercial media (and usually in a context of severe censorship). Media monopoly is not new, even if its relative significance may now be greater; and most if not all successful movements have managed to generate their own media. Indeed, it is only in the last two or three decades that western European newspapers in particular have lost their traditional characters as representatives of particular parties, interest groups, ethno-religious constituencies and so on. The generation of newspapers, magazines and radio stations created by the upheavals of 1968 and subsequent years have taken very different routes in different cases: here reproducing the “movement-representative” character of earlier epochs, there speaking to a “niche market” defined by age and social class, and elsewhere again “mainstreaming” themselves to the point of homogeneity. Thus an over- insistence on the absolute newness of the current situation (whether in terms of monopoly or in terms of technology) can lead to an inability to evaluate its actual characteristics, which can only be done historically and comparatively. Two yet broader questions can be raised, if hardly (at the present stage of research and activism) answered in any definitive way. One is the implications of the “digital divide”, that of access to the capital, equipment and skills required to adequately produce and consume the new technologies. Shaped by gender, class, age and education in western countries, this divide becomes acute – and politically debilitating for movements – in many majority world countries, where it is a huge struggle to hold together the oral, face-to-face technologies characteristic of much indigenous, peasant and shanty-town organising in particular, the “old media” structure of many political parties, trade unions and NGOs, and the “new media” world. In some cases, these gaps are papered over rather than fully addressed, with the result that what is said on the ground, what is done in parliament and what is produced on the Internet can be three radically different things, particularly for large movements like the Brazilian landless people’s movement MST or the Indian NBA movement against the Narmada dam projects. In other cases, these different worlds exist side by side, overlapping but rarely fully.

This overlap is heightened by the tendency in contemporary capitalist production towards the generation of niche markets – in media, and in technology, as in everything else. Increasingly, the movement problem is one of creating relationships between (say) groups of middle-class teenagers skilled in the use of social media; subcultures oriented towards the production and consumption of particular clothing and music styles; on-the-ground organisations capable of distributing large numbers of flyers and posters; popular milieu oriented around particular styles of talk and sociability; academic or political professionals able to negotiate the worlds of technical discourse; and so on.

All too often, alliances fail here: in the fact that different movements, or organisations, represent such different “ways of doing things” – in the first instance, such different media and modes of discourse – that meaningful conversations across media (as opposed to the branded diffusion of a single message on multiple platforms, which is not at all the same thing) do not develop. These gaps have been bridged before; and perhaps, in the face of large- scale economic crises, they can be bridged again. This is of course in part the hope represented by the Interface project in the slightly different context of modes of discourse and article formats.”