Page 227 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

206 Interventions and change

capitalised and institutionalised media that identifies ‘alternative’. Atton favours
the term alternative over that of radical media for the former’s embrace of a
wider range of media types, and freedom from revolutionary connotations,
which may or may not be present in the various media. Rodriguez (2001: 20)
rejects the term ‘alternative’ as likely to ‘entrap us in binary thinking: main-
stream media and their alternative’, and limit the ‘potential of these media to
their ability to resist the alienating power of mainstream media’. Her preferred
term is citizens’ media, which implies

first that a collectivity is enacting its citizenship by actively intervening and
transforming the established mediascape; second, that these media are contesting
social codes, legitimized identities, and institutionalized social relations; and
third, that these communication practices are empowering the community
involved, to the point where these transformations and changes are possible.
(Rodriguez 2001: 268)

Bailey et al. (2008) identify four approaches to alternative media: as media
that serve specific communities and facilitate participation; as ‘alternative’ to
mainstream (in organisation and content); as part of civil society; and their pre-
ferred rhizomatic approach focusing on the fluidity of the boundaries that
structure the other approaches, whereby relationships between alternative media
and with mainstream media are recognised as sometimes transient and elusive,
but also complex and overlapping. Culture-jamming activists use a mixture of
street, old and new media, mainstream and alternative media to circulate their
jams. The part-professional, part-citizen journalist OhmyNews, in South Korea,
for instance, demonstrates ‘a hybrid structure of publication organization, com-
bining elements of traditional commercial organizations with those typically
regarded as alternative’ (Kim and Hamilton 2006: 544). Such approaches can
help shift from definitional debates, to theoretically informed yet grounded analyses
of different media practices in their political, social and geocultural contexts.
They can also bridge divisions between media-centric analysis, political science,
and civil society/social movement research, by examining relationships between
social movement media and social change (Downing 2008; De Jong et al. 2005;
Cammaerts and Carpentier 2007). Other analysts have favoured radical media
as a term associated with the history of revolutionary, communist, socialist and
anarchist media. ‘Radical’ media have a rich history (Pajnik and Downing 2009),
including the Levellers pamphlets of the English Civil War, the smuggled pub-
lications that helped to foment revolution in eighteenth century France, and
onwards. CPE has an affinity with radical media and delineating the extent of
radical media activity today is critical to debates on the Internet.
Alternative media, argue Bailey et al. (2008: 153) range from

some totally independent of market or government, some dependent on the
state for their resources, others drawing on advertising to finance their