What’s left? Towards a historicised critique of alternative media and community media

Abstract

Alternative media and community media have always confronted sizeable challenges. Yet maybe these challenges should now succeed. This sentiment may seem a bit unusual, coming as it does from someone who has written and argued for years on behalf of alternative media and community media, so let me be clear. My admiration for the commitment and creativity of these varied projects and the people who engage in them (and who study and write about them) remains undiminished. I make the opening point not about the projects and people so much as about conceptions of ‘alternative media’ and ‘community media’, whose dated pedigree is being revealed most starkly today by commercial social media. Consider for a moment how many long-standing goals of alternative media and community media they seem to meet, such as virtually open access (granting users’ literacy skills), no direct financial cost to users, real-time interactivity, mobility, seamless scalable reach from the local to the global and multimedia capability. Given these features, it would seem that social media have forever rendered conventional conceptions of alternative media and community media as a means by which regular people can communicate outside the constraints of the media industries quaint if not delusional. After all, given what social media can do, who in their right mind would prefer mimeographed underground newspapers or public-access channels on local cable television? However, all is not as it seems. While these technical goals have been met, digitalcommunications also enable unprecedented levels of data monitoring by national intelligence organisations (Greenwald, 2013). And the larger problem of sustaining progressive-left coalitions with traction in today’s world remains as difficult as ever, as the recent experiences of Egypt, Libya, Syria and others suggest. While digital communications have changed how these efforts take place, they have not been any more decisive. The increasingly questionable relevance of established conceptions of alternativemedia and community media given present conditions provides the impetus for this chapter. It is a first step into a critical inquiry of conceptions of alternative media and community media, with an eye towards retheorising the practices they label andgenerate. This exploratory effort starts to recover and clarify what constituted alternative media and community media as distinctively progressive-left practices. The chapter does not argue in favour of going back to an ostensibly better or ‘purer’ time, but of recovering its contributions more fully so as to remake them today. Due to space limitations, such an expansive topic can only be sketched, but future work can probe more fully the argument suggested here.