Page 229 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

208 Interventions and change

events, issues and explanations largely ignored by corporate media, and in doing
so foregrounding struggles over media power (Curran and Couldry 2003).
Committed to decentralised structures, combined with collective decision-
making, Indymedia built an ‘open publishing’ model in efforts to create open
source, automated systems for posting, archiving, editing and syndicating
networked information.
Indymedia has been heralded as illustrating a new and continuing challenge
to the infrastructure of global media power, taking advantage of the affordances
of the Internet to create a global means of self-representation, and changing the
scale on which social conflicts are played out. The Internet ‘opens up public
space beyond the nation-state and, thereby, to some extent, bypasses, or rather
escapes, state and market colonization’ (Bailey et al. 2008: 153). As a mobilising
resource for activists, the Internet offers an audience-building capacity greater
than most resource-poor groups and social movements groups have hitherto
assembled. Also highlighted is the capacity to overcome the narrow reach and
limited distribution that has been a feature of much radical, resource-poor
media; the Internet makes it easier to distribute beyond activist circles, and for
Internet users to access and encounter radical communications.
Discussions on the potentialities of the Internet for alternative media follow the
contours of larger debates on the Internet (chapter five). What is more distinctive
though are concerns about what kinds of power relations are challenged in terms
of content, form, who speaks and who is heard. Indymedia has served to highlight
limitations within alternative media, including the (hidden) subsidies of time,
money and computing resources that enable speakers to participate. Such
resources are unequally distributed according to gender in that women’s ‘free’
time in households with children tends to be considerably less than men’s.
Occupation, wealth and location are other critical factors in differential access to
computing resources, stable electricity, connectivity. This does not diminish the
value of critical communication, nor the resource-building capacity that even
poor Internet capabilities can bring to communities and individuals worldwide,
but it does suggest that alternative media do not escape the effects of global
orderings of wealth and social power, even if they mobilise to contest them. A key
limitation remains the ‘enormously unrepresentative social base’ (Bennett 2003)
for Internet activism.
A study of openDemocracy, a web-based magazine of politics and culture
produced with the avowed aim of ensuring that ‘marginalised views and voices
are heard’ from around the world, found that most contributors came from elite
backgrounds: in 2006–8, 78 per cent of authors (mostly unpaid) were academics,
journalists or professional writers; 72 per cent were men and 71 per cent came
from Europe and the Americas with only 5 per cent from Africa (Curran and
Witschge 2009). Important claims can be made for openDemocracy’sefforts to
foster international dialogue but discussions of new media democratisation must
take account of the unrepresentative and skewed social base of online participation,
the relatively marginal space of political engagement online, and the distance