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Indymedia and contested understandings of participation online

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Title: Indymedia and contested understandings of participation online


1
Indymedia and contested understandings of
participation on-line
Jenny Pickerill Department of Geography,
Leicester University
2
Introduction
  • Indymedia designed to offer new forms of
    alternative media and to widen the possibilities
    for those online to participate openly in its
    construction
  • Interviews with 18 participants of Indymedia
    collectives in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and
    Sydney

3
Key themes of discussion
  • Sharing by design
  • Creating space for different voices?
  • Internal political organisation
  • Global audience, Local agenda?

4
What is participation?
  • Engagement in (everyday) politics
  • Necessary for socially-just and environmentally
    sustainable decisions
  • Prefigurative politics of activists
  • Online space
  • Beyond an information source, or even a place to
    connect with others
  • Place of experimentation in alternative forms of
    participation
  • Potential of online interaction leading to
    participation and mobilisation

Save Ningaloo Rally, Western Australia, Dec 2002
Protest.net
5
(No Transcript)
6
(No Transcript)
7
Indymedia
  • Structured around the premise that media
    production and consumption should be a
    many-to-many process
  • lt 130 websites operating worldwide
  • Offices, media labs, infoshops or social centres

8
Melbourne.indymedia.org
Details on how to publish
Upcoming events
Open publishing newswire
Feature categories
Details on how to get involved
Features written by editorial collective
9
Sharing by design
  • Indymedia is a community project thats written
    by everyone together and the way to keep that
    flowing and moving forward and working as a
    community of equal individuals is make the code
    open source (John, Sydney Indymedia)
  • Situated its core premise around being open
  • open source software
  • open management
  • open up the space of contribution
  • open up spaces of access
  • contributions could be used openly
  • This openness also leads to risk from potential
    attack from users and the State

10
Sydney media lab
11
Creating space for different voices?
  • Who is the audience (meant to be?)
  • a new broadcast model vs. insular movement
    network
  • Theres this ongoing struggle a real
    conservative element in international Indymedia
    where people continually fall back into wanting
    to preach to the converted and exclude anybody
    who is racist or sexist so that we never have
    anybody posting on Indymedia or reading Indymedia
    except the enlightened (Hugh, Sydney Indymedia)

12
So what is Indymedia?
  • An international news organization
  • A participatory media production and distribution
    platform
  • A decentralized social and digital network
  • A peoples CNN
  • An activist communications network
  • An experiment in global democracy
  • A social phenomenon
  • An advocacy network
  • A bulletin board
  • An organizing tool
  • A chat room
  • A laboratory for social and technological
    innovation
  • An incredible experiment in self-governance and
  • A pioneer in the communication landscape
  • Sheri Herndron, 2003

13
  • Open use of contributions
  • Used the principles of copyleft to ensure that
    all contributions could be used openly
  • Indymedia is first hand accounts all of which
    is interesting and lively and engaging but its
    a definitional thing about what left wing
    journalism is, because theyre seeking to quite
    radically redefine it weve still tried to
    follow professional left wing journalism
    Indymedia is more anarchist or autonomous
    influenced (Sean, Green Left Weekly, Sydney)

copyleft
14
Internal political organisation
  • Editorial policies
  • promote racism, fascism, xenophobia,
    homophobia, sexism etc, or any other form of
    discrimination, that incited violence, were
    obviously incorrect or devoid of content
  • Consensus decision-making online
  • passive consensus and modified consensus

15
  • Technical and cultural barriers
  • some of the Aboriginal people actually got
    quite defensive about our involvement, afraid
    that we were like other media organisations,
    there to use and abuse them (Hugh, Sydney
    Indymedia)
  • Paul (Sydney) felt it is still very much a
    western radical media there isnt any sort of
    international participation because not many of
    them know English and not many of them as
    activists in the Third World want to know the
    dominant imperialist language

16
Global audience, local agenda?
  • The network seeks to assert the importance of
    locality, of place-based collectives and their
    autonomy
  • Thus the local is of key importance
  • Things that are generated in the region are
    always going to be more appropriate for that
    region. On the global list theres people wanting
    to have a whole control of how Indymedia should
    be but it should come in different forms and
    flavours appropriately for the area. (John,
    Sydney Indymedia)

17
Woomera2002
  • IMC site run by Melbourne collective
  • MP3 files of refugees testimonies loaded via PIMP
    system

Destruction of perimeter fence, Woomera, April
2002
PIMP system icon
Recaptured refugee
18
Conclusions
  • Opening the possibilities for participation?
  • Using the premise of openness to define
    organisational form and democratic engagement
  • 2 factors were crucial to the success of this
    participatory experiment structures and
    scale

19
www.jennypickerill.info
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