Indymedia and contested understandings of participation online

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Indymedia and contested understandings of
participation on-line
Jenny Pickerill Department of Geography,
Leicester University
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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

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Key themes of discussion

• Sharing by design
• Creating space for different voices?
• Internal political organisation
• Global audience, Local agenda?

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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
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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

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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
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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

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Sydney media lab
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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)

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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

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• 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
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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

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• 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

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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)

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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
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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

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www.jennypickerill.info