Page 173 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Global Commun ty Med a

The headword’s three terms need to be made clear straightaway. “Global” and
“community” might seem to be opposites, signifying respectively “international”
and “cosmopolitan,” versus “local” and “real.” Here, however, “global” is used to
mean worldwide and local simultaneously, and to direct our attention to how, ever
faster, the two are coming to be interlinked. “Community” is used here to describe
media that are organically part of a social movement, and so for the most part are
underfunded, small-scale, and located at the grass roots. “Media” seems by contrast
an unproblematic word, used simply to mean broadcasting, cinema, and the press.
Here its definition is far wider, and encompasses, as well as those formats, commu-
nication activities such as graffiti, buttons, popular song, street theatre, performance
art, dance, demonstrations, certain dress choices such as T-shirts, and not least, al-
ternative Internet uses. Some writers also describe these media as “alternative,” oth-
ers as “participatory,” “citizens’ media,” “tactical media,” or social movement media.

somE EarLy ExamPLEs
A major early instance in the United States was the Revolutionary-era press,
when many pamphleteers, Tom Paine being the most famous, campaigned to
shake off British rule. To some degree it was a war of pamphlets, since loyalists
were not slow to publish their own tracts defending the British monarchy. The
often uncertain outcome of the Revolutionary War meant that the insurrection-
ary publications were especially important in helping build momentum against
colonial rule.
Only a decade later in France, a similarly energetic flood of publications, rang-
ing from satirical cartoons to angry denunciations of royal abuses to reasoned
treatises on monarchical power, was a very significant element in fomenting a
republican form of government there too.

ThE aBoLiTionisT PrEss

The abolitionist press emerged about three decades later in the United States,
though preceded by France and Britain. Some of the earliest U.S. examples
were autobiographies by formerly enslaved Africans who had escaped from the
Southern states or been freed. At least six of these were written, interestingly
enough, by merchant sailors. Because their work, unlike for most of the en-
slaved, required them to travel by sea and major rivers, they got to see slavery
systemically, and also to pick up news of African revolts in New World slaving
nations. These early books were soon followed by a stream of publications from
some white campaigning writers such as William Lloyd Garrison, and a little
later still by the leading African American writer and activist Frederick Doug-
lass, who had himself been born into slavery in eastern Maryland.

ThE LaBor PrEss

The labor press, at present almost nonexistent as a social force, was also to
be reckoned with throughout the later nineteenth century in Britain, France,