Indymedia's Independence: From Activist Media to Free Software

This paper traces trends in "Indymedia", a global, decentralised, grassroots network that applies open source principles to reporting the news. Author Biella Coleman explains that these media centres "are run as local collectives that manage and coordinate a news website; some also operate an affiliated media resource center for local activists. These websites give any user of the site (regardless of whether or not they are part of the collective) the ability to create, publish, and access news reports of various forms - text, photo, video, and audio. The result is a free online source for unfiltered, direct journalism by activists, sometimes uploaded in the heat of the moment during a demonstration or political action. Although individual centers are autonomous, each is connected to the others through a global infrastructure of technology and workers who share a commitment to open publishing...[,] a democratic process of creating news that is transparent and accessible to all, challenging the separation between consumers and producers of news."

Coleman highlights Independent Media Centers (IMCs) as a prime example of growth in this type of media.

Excerpts from the paper follow:

A confluence of opportune events led to the creation of the first IMC in Seattle. These colliding rivulets included the success of the Seattle 1999 anti-WTO protests, accessible web and Free Software technologies, a growing public reliance on online news, and the insight and labor of activists. Internet technologies have been the basis of Indymedia's operations and growth, and in many ways the political objectives of the IMCs are reflected by their use and production of Free Software. The deployment of Free Software web publishing systems has also become integral to the IMCs' mission. This fascinating interconnection between political values and the technological context of the IMC emerges from an analysis of Indymedia's development over its first five years.

...[T]his ingenious idea - to become the media instead of relying on or reforming the established media - has taken hold worldwide. In the first 10 months, 33 IMCs appeared in over 10 countries on four continents. In the last year Indymedia has been setting up popular media labs and training events in the West Bank, in Andean indigenous and campesino communities, in MST landless peasant camps in Brazil, in squatted banks and piquetero community centers in Argentina. Today there are more than 110 IMCs around the world, on 6 continents, in over 35 countries, and using over 22 languages. Now, just as we can point to what has been aptly coined as the "digital Wal-martization" of the "mainstream" media, we can also web-click into hundreds of distinctly textured autonomous nodes of media...

In 1999 the time was technologically ripe for a decentralized network of independent media nodes. In some respects, virtual and decentralized alternative media had been underway for two decades. The "lower-tech" era of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) offered thousands of virtual ponds of community-based news for users that dialed into their favorite forum. In the mid to late 1990s, this form of tele-communications was replaced by a roaring sea of many leagues: the Internet..."

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