Title: Indymedia and contested understandings of participation online
1Indymedia and contested understandings of
participation on-line
Jenny Pickerill Department of Geography,
Leicester University
2Introduction
- 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
3Key themes of discussion
- Sharing by design
- Creating space for different voices?
- Internal political organisation
- Global audience, Local agenda?
4What 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
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7Indymedia
- 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
8Melbourne.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
9Sharing 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
10Sydney media lab
11Creating 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)
12So 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
14Internal 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
16Global 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)
17Woomera2002
- 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
18Conclusions
- 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
19www.jennypickerill.info