Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16762

 

 

Indymedia: Between Passion and Pragmatism

 

By Gal Beckerman, Columbia Journalism Review

September 17, 2003

 

Who wants to be design coordinator this week? " The question comes from Nandor, a

red-bearded trollish man moderating an evening meeting of New York City's

all-volunteer Independent Media Center. He is composing the table of contents

for the next issue of the collective's biweekly newspaper, the Indypendent.

 

 

 

A pair of fans swish warm air around in the low-ceilinged Manhattan loft. The

thirty members of the print committee sit in a circle beneath an upside-down

American flag and pass around a packet of trail mix. Someone named Jed, not

present at the meeting, is finally nominated to be design coordinator, partly

because no one else seems to want to do it: " What about Jed? He's unemployed,

isn't he? "

 

 

 

The meeting lasts one hour and five minutes; Nandor clocks it on his watch. Like

all things at the center, the process has been precarious, democracy teetering

on the edge of anarchy. There are some rules – people raise their hand to speak

– but the collective believes everyone should have his or her say. Tony wants to

report on union labor and summer fashions. Someone else knows a columnist who

has a piece to contribute " It's about the deportations, but it's really funny. "

Don, in his seventies and by a few decades the oldest member of the collective,

has an idea for a historical piece about the Spanish-American War. " It's about

how we have been misled into past wars, " he says. Everything makes it in. There

is no editor to say otherwise. At least not yet.

 

 

 

Meetings like this one, experiments in democratic media, have been taking place

all over the world in increasing numbers. New York City's Independent Media

Center is just one piece of the rapidly expanding Indymedia movement, a

four-year-old phenomenon that grew out of the trade protests of the late 1990s,

and now encompasses a constellation of about 120 local collectives from Boston

to Bombay. Each collective has a diverse palette of mediums it uses, including

radio, video, print, and the Internet. Each is driven by political passions its

volunteers don't find in the mainstream press, and each struggles to make the

process of covering news as inclusive and empowering as possible for the

community in which it exists.

 

 

 

Although the individual collectives have their political and cultural

idiosyncrasies, they are united through their Web sites. To join the worldwide

collective, a new Independent Media Center must have an online presence. This is

the kernel of the experiment, the clearest expression of the movement's vision.

The concerns and interests of these activist-journalists are immediately

apparent on any of the local Indymedia sites. Go to the Melbourne, Australia,

site, for example, for an article about aboriginal elders protesting the dumping

of nuclear waste on their land; or to the Washington, D.C., site to read about

the USA Patriot Act's many alleged violations of the Bill of Rights; or to the

United Kingdom site for a piece titled, " New EU Constitution Threatens Free

Education. "

 

 

 

The sites all have a similar format and feature a newswire that employs a

technology called open publishing. This allows a writer to post a story directly

to the newswire from his or her own computer, without going through an editor.

Using a simple form on the site, you merely paste in your file, click " Publish, "

and immediately see a link to your article appear at the top of the Web site's

wire.

 

 

 

The open wire usually appears on the right side of the homepage of the local

sites, while the center column is reserved for particularly relevant stories off

the wire that a committee of volunteers has decided to highlight. The network of

collectives also maintains a global site (www.indymedia.org) that pulls content

from all the local sites. More than any other element of Indymedia, the

accessibility of open publishing has allowed activists from Brazil to Italy to

Israel to Los Angeles to answer the revolutionary demand that inspired this

grass-roots movement: Don't hate the media. Be the media.

 

 

 

But Indymedia volunteers are also learning that being the media is not so

simple. An open, representative form of media may be a worthy ideal, but in

reality is often a messy thing. As the collective evolves, the volunteers are

faced with difficult decisions many members never contemplated – about their Web

site's usefulness, about editorial policy, about money. Whether they thrive or

fade into irrelevance will ultimately depend on how well they keep their most

extreme tendencies at bay. It won't be easy. Pure democracy can be chaotic,

spontaneity can tip into incoherence, absolute independence might just mean

poverty.

 

 

 

At their best, Indymedia Web sites serve as a sort of activist bulletin board

and a space to report on and support a wide range of left-leaning causes from

environmental extremism and anarchism to fair-trade advocacy and universal

health care. One IMC in Urbana, Illinois, for example, relentlessly reported

about the detention of a local pro-Palestinian activist, Ahmed Bensouda, who was

being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after 9/11 for a minor

violation. After a few weeks of constant attention, he was released. Because

each posting can be followed by potentially endless comments, Indymedia sites

have also facilitated difficult debates within the activist community. A graphic

photograph posted on the Prague IMC site of riot police being hit with a Molotov

cocktail during that city's September 2000 International Monetary Fund/World

Bank meeting inspired a contentious online discussion about whether violence was

an acceptable form of resistance.

 

 

 

Indymedia's reporter-activists believe that no journalism is without bias. They

criticize the mainstream media not simply because, in their eyes, the networks

and newspapers work to maintain the status quo, but because they believe the

mainstream's claims to neutrality mask these biases. Indymedia journalists say

they are not afraid to admit their own bias: journalism in the service of

upending the status quo. They make the argument that this unabashed commitment

does not conflict with fairness and accuracy. At many collectives, Indymedia

reporters are advised not to participate in direct action at protests they are

covering. But as a whole, this journalism is argumentative, angry, and often

written without the basic journalistic concessions to attribution and balance. A

recent issue of the Indypendent, for example, was headlined " Liar! " next to a

photo of President Bush.

 

 

 

" The majority of IMC people I know don't believe in objectivity, " says Chris

Anderson, twenty-six, a volunteer at the New York City collective. " They think

everyone should have an opinion and make it known. In this way, Indymedia goes

back to the partisan press of the nineteenth century. "

 

 

 

Indymedia first went online amid the tear gas and tumult of the Seattle World

Trade Organization protests in 1999. The belief that the mainstream media were

never going to explore deeply the downside of globalization, and the story of

the various groups trying to fight it, had taken root throughout the mid-'90s.

Activists concluded that if they wanted their story told with nuance and depth,

they would have to do it themselves.

 

 

 

Early inspiration came from deep within the jungles of the Chiapas region in

southern Mexico, where Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked leader of the

Zapatista movement, articulated the case for an independent alternative media.

In a videotaped message to a 1997 gathering called the Media and Democracy

Congress, he made the argument that would have the greatest influence on the

founders of Indymedia. " The world of contemporary news is a world that exists

for the VIPs, the very important people, " Marcos said. " Their everyday lives are

what is important: if they get married, if they divorce, if they eat, what

clothes they wear and what clothes they take off these major movie stars and big

politicians. But common people only appear for a moment when they kill someone,

or when they die. "

 

 

 

Instead of simply conforming to this reality or becoming paralyzed with

cynicism, Marcos proposed a third option. " To construct a different way to show

the world what is really happening, to have a critical world view, and to become

interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner

of this world. "

 

 

 

As the WTO meeting neared, a group of Seattle activists began building this

" different way " in a 2,500-square-foot space that was donated to the group by a

local nonprofit housing advocacy group. It became the first Independent Media

Center, a place where reporters could bring their articles, as well as video and

radio reports, to be uploaded to a central Web site.

 

 

 

The activist community in Seattle coalesced around this center. Unlike previous

efforts to coordinate the often fractious groups, the IMC became an energetic

hub of collaboration. " It was like we were high, " says Sheri Herndon,

forty-three, one of the founding members of Indymedia. " The right people came

and we plugged them in. And one of the things that was pretty powerful is that

we weren't really fazed about working together. We had a short-term common goal.

The smaller differences, you just let them go. "

 

 

 

The use of open publishing made the Seattle Indymedia experiment revolutionary,

even though the original motivation for the technology was practical. It would

take too long to upload all the reporters' accounts manually in one location.

The solution came from an Australian computer programmer involved with Indymedia

who, three weeks before the protests, adapted an open-source code that enabled

the activists to use any computer to simply post accounts or photographs of what

was happening on the streets. " With open publishing, your experience of the news

is different, " says Jay Sand, thirty-one, another of Indymedia's early

volunteers. " You really feel like you were there, even more so than TV. On TV,

you are seeing one image at a time. Real life is more confusing and this comes

through on the IMC site. "

 

 

 

The result was a street-level collage of text and image: a photograph of a

legion of police in riot gear. An account of a protester whose nose had just

been broken. A video of the anarchist group Black Bloc smashing the windows of a

Nike store. An analysis of the trade talks over fishing rights happening that

day inside the convention hall. An explanation of the cause that drove activists

to dress up like sea turtles.

 

 

 

Unwittingly, the Indymedia organizers had found a technology that fit

philosophically with their ideas about how to transform the media. Everyone was

now empowered to contribute to the creation of the news.

 

 

 

In the four years since the Seattle protests, it wouldn't be farfetched to say

that Indymedia has become a brand, although that might not be the word activists

would choose. From the time the first Web site was set up, Independent Media

Centers have proliferated at a rapid pace, about one new one every eleven days.

It soon became clear that the Indymedia format was attractive to activists

around the world, not just as a way to cover protests but as a day-to-day

accounting of the local and global concerns of social-justice and

antiglobalization advocates.

 

 

 

Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the crucial " tech geeks " of the Indymedia network,

has seen Indymedia grow from the Seattle collective to a universal prototype

that can now be found even in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he is temporarily

living. " It blows my mind sometimes how much Indymedia has spread, "

Henshaw-Plath says. " In every place I have gone to present Indymedia, it's not

been something I have ever had to convince somebody of. The first thing people

say is, 'We want to start one.' "

 

 

 

The ideal of creating a media source that would be totally inclusive has had to

endure tremendous tests. Open publishing, the purest form of the idea, has

become, in some instances, Indymedia's greatest liability.

 

 

 

The New York City IMC is typical. It was started in the spring of 2000 in

anticipation of that fall's UN Millennium Summit for the world's heads of state.

A space in midtown Manhattan was donated to the group. In the three years since

its founding, the print committee has been dominant, putting out the

10,000-circulation Indypendent. And the collective has grown exponentially.

Financially, it scrapes by, as most collectives do, by putting on benefits and

selling merchandise like T-shirts and U.S. maps featuring nuclear power plants

and army bases, what the volunteers call the United States' " infrastructure of

terror. " The volunteers are also typical of American IMCs. As John Tarleton,

thirty-four, one of the founders of the New York IMC, who supports himself by

picking blueberries during the summer, says, " Volunteers are mostly in their

twenties and thirties, unmarried yet largely college educated, predominantly

white, struggling to make ends meet, underemployed or unemployed. "

 

 

 

The Web site (www.nyc.indymedia.org) became a place were the city's diverse

activist community could inform itself about coming protests and events. Stories

about police brutality or unfair housing laws appeared side-by-side with leftist

political analyses of the war on terrorism. But the site was also deluged with

posts that had nothing to do with the people's struggle; anti-Semitic rants,

racist caricatures, and pornography all competed, democratically, for space on

the wire. Although an editorial board of volunteers decided what stories to

highlight in the center column, the wire itself became almost unusable. " That

wasn't what Indymedia was set up for, " Tarleton says. " Many people stopped using

us as a place to post. "

 

 

 

Because the network had grown so fast, there was no process or editorial

principle to mediate what went on the newswire. " Personally, I started out as a

total free-speech libertarian, " says Chris Anderson. " My thoughts were that

people were smart enough to know what's trash and what's not. Is it our business

to tell them what is acceptable? Two years later, I was the one pushing for more

moderation of the wire. So I guess there was an evolution, which does mirror the

evolution of the movement. "

 

 

 

In response, the collective came up with a compromise of sorts – a hidden folder

where all unacceptable posts could be dumped without being erased. Eventually, a

policy emerged that defined what was prohibited. This was a painful process,

since it seemed to highlight the tension at the heart of the Indymedia

experiment: Was the site a place for free speech or was it a place to express

the views of the antiglobalization movement? " It is maybe a slippery slope when

you start hiding posts, " says Tarleton. " But we are already heading down a

slippery slope when we turn our newswire over to crackpots. "

 

 

 

In the end, a piece of the democratic ideal had to be discarded to save the

rest. But it is a shift that many watching Indymedia from the sidelines saw as

inevitable. Robert McChesney, author of " Rich Media, Poor Democracy, " says he

always believed that " the Indymedia movement is not obliged to be a movement for

every viewpoint under the sun. They need to make tough editorial decisions, and

that's not something to be despondent about. The problem is not that you have to

make decisions. The important thing is that you make them based on principles

that are transparent. "

 

 

 

A similar clash of values came in the middle of 2002, when the global Indymedia

network, desperate for funds to maintain aging equipment and to help local

collectives pay rent, was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in

response to a proposal submitted by a few volunteers. What should have been a

boon to a struggling organization was a cause for consternation among Indymedia

activists. There was no process yet for reaching a consensus on whether to

accept the money and, if it was to be accepted, how to distribute it. To some

extent, the global network – run by a committee composed of at least one

volunteer from each collective, who communicate via list-servers in more than a

dozen languages – had outgrown its founders. As with the creation of the " hidden

folder, " process generally followed crisis. Now the network was on the verge of

receiving much-needed resources, and the only decision-making method available

was one of passive consensus, where if no one disagrees, it

is assumed everyone agrees.

 

 

 

Suddenly, the democracy so treasured by the network – now grown to at least

5,000 volunteers – became its greatest handicap. A number of IMCs outside the

United States, including Brazil, Italy, and Argentina, were opposed to taking

money from the corporate world. Although many of the American volunteers thought

the collective should take the money as long as no strings were attached, the

bitter arguments became too much for the network to bear. In the end the grant

had to be returned because no consensus could be reached and the debate

threatened, as Sascha Meinrath, a volunteer at the Urbana-Champagne IMC, put it,

to " create fissures in the network that would take years to fix. "

 

 

 

Slowly and carefully, Indymedia organizers are beginning to deal with the

internal tensions that made this crisis inevitable. A consensus seems to be

building that Indymedia will survive and grow only if it becomes more organized,

efficient, and useful for the activist community. In the sticky domain of

financial issues, Meinrath has helped form fund-raising group called the

Tactical Media Fund, independent from Indymedia and able to make decisions

without a network-wide consensus.

 

 

 

For the newswire, new technology is being developed by the tech geeks to make it

easier to sift through the information and find the news a reader is looking

for. Instead of deciding which posts are acceptable and which are not, Indymedia

volunteers can be librarians, categorizing posts so that at a click one can find

everything having to do with bioengineering, for example. The idea is to make

the sites easier to use. The next step is to create themed Indymedia sites

(about the economy, Israel-Palestine conflict, environment, etc.) that would

include all related stories funneled from local sites.

 

 

 

There is a surprising amount of talk about the need to expand the rules and

processes and guidelines that govern Indymedia. " The ideal has not been

abandoned, " Chris Anderson insists. " But the great thing about Indymedia people

is that they are not ideologues, they are pragmatists, not hung up on things.

They have ideals but are also very practical. "

 

 

 

This flexibility will be necessary to confront the challenges that lie ahead.

IMCs continue to multiply. A group of young Iraqis are trying to set up one in

Baghdad. They have begun work on publishing a newspaper, and British activists

are helping the Iraqis with their Web site. A radio station in Amman, Jordan,

has sent people to get them started in that medium. All this would have been

impossible a few years ago

 

 

 

But to build something truly alternative and useful will require discipline

along with the creative joy that was so manifest that winter in Seattle. Sheri

Herndon, who has observed Indymedia's evolution, was referring to the content as

much as the attitude that drives the network when she said, " Ultimately, it's

not enough for us to talk about what we are against. We have to articulate what

we are for. It's not enough to slow the rate of destruction. We have to increase

the rate of creation. "

 

 

 

Gal Beckerman is an assistant editor at CJR.

 

 

 

NEW WEB MESSAGE BOARDS - JOIN HERE.

Alternative Medicine Message Boards.Info

http://alternative-medicine-message-boards.info