Page 176 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Global Commun ty Med a | 1

Surveying what has happened since then, we would point as well to transistor
radios, tiny video cameras, cheap digital editing equipment, cell phones, and
the expanding rate of Internet access—all of which give the public the potential
to generate their own communications outside their immediate circles, at long
distances, today often almost instantaneously.
Benjamin’s argument, however, was about much more than hardware (or
even software). He interpreted the public’s eagerness to take up and use these
media technologies when they became available as a signal of the expansion of
people’s self-assertiveness in the modern era, of a historical decline of political
passivity.
He himself linked this shift in attitudes to the Russian revolution and the rise
of communism, though he wrote at an earlier epoch when there was much less
information than there needed to be of the terrifying developments in Soviet
Russia under Stalin, and when the international image of the Soviet Union was
for many a beacon of hope in the struggle against Nazism and fascism in 1930s
Europe. We need not and absolutely should not, with hindsight, support his en-
dorsement of Soviet-style communism, but given Benjamin’s overall values, we
should rather link popular media usage with the upsurges in labor demands,
women’s rights, anticolonial insurgency, civil rights, and global social justice
movements.
Of all these media developments, the expansion of easily accessible radio has
been by far the most widespread across the planet. As of the time of writing,
many parts of the world have no access to television or the Internet, or indeed
telephony. Illiteracy rates are very high in many places. As Alfonso Geerts and
other writers point out, very cheap radio sets and the ever-growing number of
community radio stations are probably the most important community media
sector globally. In affluent territories, radio is often forgotten, defined simply as
one of a series of delivery mechanisms for music. This assumption is miserably
blind to the realities of life in the Southern Hemisphere (though there is nothing
wrong with popular music, which is globally important).

Two oThEr ExamPLEs

Many examples can be found in Atton (2001), Rodríguez (2001), Downing
(2001), Couldry and Curran (2003), Opel and Pompper (2004), Rennie (2006),
and the further reading they reference. Two cases, however, which deserve a
particular mention from the end of the century and the outset of the twenty-first
century, are the global Indymedia network, and the emergence of blogging and
file sharing.

Indymedia
The Independent Media Center (IMC) network (“Indymedia”) emerged in
late 1999 in the context of the global social justice movement protests against
the World Trade Organization. There are currently about 200 hyperlinked In-
dymedia centers around the planet, concentrated more in North America and