Indymedia's Independence

Article: Indymedia's Independence: From Activist Media to Free Software. By Biella Coleman

URL = http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=coleman0704&page=1

The global, decentralized, grassroots network applies open source principles to reporting the news.

Excerpt

Biella Coleman:

"Indymedia is an aggregate of loosely affiliated activist media centers scattered across the planet. Its ascension captures the confounding contradictions of modern globalization. While forces backed by the FCC centripetally consolidate media outlets into a few corporate behemoths, a countervailing current pulls some news media in the opposite direction; Independent Media Centers ("IMCs") are a prime example. 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.

Indymedia centers 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. Where traditional journalism holds editorial policies that are hidden in the hands of a few trained experts, Indymedia provides the alternative of "open publishing," a democratic process of creating news that is transparent and accessible to all, challenging the separation between consumers and producers of news.

The emergence of the first IMC marked the beginning of a different kind of globalization, one deliberately constructed by activists as an alternative to the system of global media privateers and the neoliberal logic of free market idealism; they imagined a "globalization from below" challenging the assertions made by politicians that free markets naturally lead to economic development and democracy.

At the time of formulation, the initial organizers did not architect Indymedia as a model for export. Yet, this 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." (http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=coleman0704&page=1)