Page 231 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

210 Interventions and change

exciting, emergent activities. The reshaping of media through participation,
citizen journalism, user-generated content and ‘mass self-communication’ (Castells
2009) is likely to be a central focus for future research. Yet, like the Internet in
the early 1990s, the topic of citizen journalism is suffused with investments and
claims, from solving the crisis of journalism to achieving democratic renewal and
deepening political participation. Such important hopes, however, need to be
assessed soberly and concretely across different media and political systems,
against both empirical evidence and analysis of contending forces. Citizen journalism
promises a more diverse array of viewpoints than either prevailing forms of
market censorship or state censorship permit, ‘yet the idea that citizen media is
more representative, or open to “everyone’s voices” [Gillmor 2004: xiii] … is as
mythological as the idea that traditional journalism could ever have been
objective’ (Tilley and Cokley 2008: 109).
The Internet has been a proven tool to challenge ‘existing political hierarchy’s
monopoly on powerful communications media’ (Rheingold 1993: 13), yet
researchers need to grasp the contradictions and variables that continue to delay
such universalist utopian predictions. As one study (Kluver and Banerjee 2005: 40)
concludes:

Although the Internet does indeed increase the potential for mobilization
and organization for certain wired segments of society, in much of Asia this
means that politics becomes less democratic, as the greater bulk of national
populations remain without access to political information and mobilizational
capability, and without democratic power.

New media facilitate reactionary as well as ‘progressive’ counterpublics; the
Internet contributes simultaneously to new forms of social solidarity and frag-
mentation, to shallowing as well as deepening participation, to fostering net-
worked inclusion and new exclusions, to contesting and sustaining social power
and inequalities. The best CPE work is alert to such contradictions, to openings
and possibilities, as well as constraints and restrictions (Raphael 2001). This is
then an expanding research agenda that engages CPE’s concerns throughout.
CPE’s distinctive contribution lies in its attention to resources, the resources for
sustaining forms of public communication, and the social, cultural and economic
resources that shape production and participation in communications (including
the class and gendered organisation of time, cultural competencies, and such
factors as feedback and the forms of legitimisation that sustain ‘voluntary’ work
and activist participation). CPE can also overcome the much-criticised binarism
of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ through its broader concern with the shifting
relationships and interconnections between mainstream and alternative media,
professional and ‘citizen’ journalism.
The irresolvable debate between optimists and pessimists would matter less
were it not linked to implications for public policy. For a powerful range of
interests from liberal academic commentators to transnational corporations, the