Page 177 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Global Commun ty Med a

Western Europe than elsewhere, but in some measure touching much of the
globe.
An IMC consists of a connected server and a collective of people who staff it,
normally on a volunteer basis. This unit seeks admission to the IMC network,
and on satisfying certain basic political and technical standards, is admitted as
a member. (Thus, at the extreme, a neo-Nazi, or homophobic, or commercially
driven, or religiously evangelistic group, without computer skills, would be ex-
cluded on both ideological and technical grounds.)
The content on active IMC sites is often updated daily or at least frequently,
with some sites at certain times even placing some 30 postings a day. It is open to
people with all views, outside the fundamentally hostile category, to place post-
ings. Its links to all the other sites enable users to check instantly on events from
France to Indonesia, from Mexico to South Africa. There is an archive of earlier
discussions and postings. Most sites carry photos, audio files, and video files.
The focus is on news concerning global struggles for social justice. The pre-
dominant language across the sites is English, but not only are other languages
dominant in national sites (Portuguese in Brazil, for instance), there are also
translations offered on some sites for some items. Regional languages also play a
role on some sites (e.g., Galician in northwest Spain, Quechua in Bolivia).
While there is some control over registration as an IMC in the interests of
coherent organization at the most basic level, in many respects the IMC net-
work is a body without a head, and thus a fascinating example not only of very
low-cost global/local communication, but also of the potential enabled by a
participatory, self-managed operation.

The Blogosphere

The other case can be addressed much more briefly, and it is the growth more
or less simultaneously of blogging and file sharing. Extreme exaggeration of their
significance was endemic in their early days. There were visions of the imminent
collapse of organized news media and of the recording industry, and a complete
Pandora’s box of cost-free democratic sharing and diffusion.
All that hype aside, both movements, although composed of people with
hugely different goals and contributions, signified the appetite and the poten-
tial for more significant and unhampered lateral communication, in contradis-
tinction to the vertical media hierarchies that still bestride the globe. The sharp
distinction between “mass” communication and “niche media” showed signs
of becoming blurred, with the prospect of a richer cultural environment being
actually short of utopian.

ConCLusions
So far from being a trivial field for those obsessed by the irrelevant, the study
of small-scale “community” media on a global scale shows itself to be a very
serious pursuit. In the era of nanotechnologies and the genome project, that
should not come as a surprise.