The `Indymedia' Experiment

Abstract

The history of the Indymedia network - a group of open-domain web sites around the world, which grew rapidly from its inception in late November 1999 to more than 140 sites by May 2004 - embodies opposition to strategies of propertarian information control by agents of a radical ‘anarchic’ perspective hostile to ‘corporatism’. This binary tension, however, fails to capture the range of implications of ‘peer to peer’ - p2p - web exchange that Indymedia embodies. By weaving together a theoretical framing showing the inadequacy of conceiving p2p exchange in terms of ‘corporate-anarchist’ binaries, on the one hand, with empirical analysis of interviews with key figures from three continents who helped create Indymedia, on the other, the history of Indymedia developed here clarifies how to map struggles over control of the Internet as a communication technology. Such issues speak not only of understanding contested models of access to new communication technologies - exemplified by the tension between the p2p model and older sender-receiver broadcast models - but also to ways that the institutional framework, through which such technologies are deployed, shapes social movements and public will formation.