Alternative media and voice

Abstract

What value motivates the making of ‘alternative media’, and defines its success or failure? Let us first define ‘alternative media’ as media whose operations challenge the concentration of resources (particularly the symbolic resource of making and circulating images and information) in large media institutions (Atton and Couldry, 2003; Atton, 2002). This definition by itself does not, however, make clear why people should be involved in the enterprise of alternative media. After all, control over many resources, such as basic utilities, is concentrated, but few are interested in challenging the centralisation that allows, say, water to be distributed. Indeed, the idea that ‘the media’ provide a basic utility in the domain of information held back for decades the idea of building and researching alternative media: the centralisation that came with the size of large media was, some thought, a basic and irreversible fact of large modern societies (Garnham, 1990). Now, however, in the digital age, when it is easy, or at least easily imaginable, to make media, with or without a large institution, the resistance to ‘alternative media’ is less automatic. But the value that motivates people and communities (rather than large corporations) to make media still has to be explained. Two things quickly show us that this question of value is far from straightforward.First, value has shaped the competing names for what we research: alternative media, community media, radical media, citizens’ media (Atton, 2002; Fuller, 2007; Downing, 2001; Rodriguez, 2001). These varying titles each tell their own story of the purpose and values of small-scale media. Second, the question of value has become an issue within the field of research itself. One form was John Downing’s (2003) insistence that alternative media research had neglected the audience: who indeed was watching, reading or listening to alternative media, and how much did this matter? It mattered a lot on some conceptions of these media’s purpose, and not so much on others. But some resolution of this point is necessary: if alternative media were just a matter of making media without regard to whether anyone was listening, such media would risk being self-serving and irresponsible. The ease of basic media production in a hyperlinked digital world sharpens the issue: no one is served, quite clearly, by acacophony where everyone is speaking (that is, making media) and no one is listening (Dreher, 2009; MacNamara, 2013). The only way forward is to clarify what value is at stake in such possibilities of listening. I will develop that insight in this chapter through the concept of ‘voice’. Voice,properly understood, is the value that motivates the production of alternative media, and enables us to assess whether such production is effective in terms of those media’s goals: effectiveness must involve, to some extent at least, the possibility of being listened to. More specifically, I will explain in the next section how voice can be understood in two linked ways: voice as process and voice as value. It is the understanding of voice as value that was missing, at least as an explicit term, from much earlier debate on alternative media. From that starting point, I will in the chapter’s second section explore some contrasting cases which illustrate the multiple ways in which alternative media may, or may not, be seen to embody the value of voice, that is, to succeed or fail.