qualcuno sapra' gia' che in Inghilterra gia' da due settimane il
collettivo ha deciso di chiudere la possibilita' di aggiungere notizie
al newswire. qui sotto c'e' una riflessione sulla cosa, appena postata
da
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/indymedia-its-time-move/
vi risparmio le mie reazioni a caldo, ed incollo:
Analysis | Indymedia: It’s time to move on
Launched in 1999 at the dawn of the anti-globalisation movement, the
Indymedia publishing model represented a revolutionary step forward in
democratic, non-corporate media production. And yet, a decade on, it
seems the moment has arrived to ask whether it is still useful and
necessary to the social movements that it grew from.
By Behindthemask
Two weeks ago, on 31st January, the Nottingham Indymedia collective
disabled the ability to publish new newswire items. This drastic action
was taken in order to demonstrate what will be lost if the collective
folds, in the hope that those who use the site will step up to keep it
going. A meeting will be held at the Sumac Centre tomorrow, on Monday
18th Feb, to discuss the future of the project and all those with an
interest in being involved are invited to attend.
Indymedia is the name given to a particular network with a rather uneven
global reach, to which many hundreds of local independent media
projects, mostly web-based, have been affiliated at one time or another.
It is also the name for a particular approach to news media – one that
attempts to avoid hierarchal production and hence promote grassroots
reports on events.
It seems to me that the moment has arrived to examine the Indymedia
model and ask whether it is still useful and necessary to the social
movements that it grew from. After all, a lot has changed since 1999,
when the first Indymedia site was launched, both in terms of the online
environment and the outside world.
On the web, we have seen the rise of corporate empires like Facebook and
Twitter : monoliths with hundreds of millions of users and an apparent
stranglehold on dissemination of information online. Pockets of
resistance exist: open source enclaves that don’t seek property rights
on everything you post and federate with others rather than seeking
global dominion. However, these tiny anomalies are few and far between,
pushed out to the margins of a web that is increasingly enclosed by
multi-million dollar businesses.
The rise of the giants has been propelled by massive investment in
developing software. The resulting flexibility and capability of
Facebook and friends makes these sites attractive to the user who wants
to quickly and easily communicate their ideas and plans to hundreds and
even thousands of others.
The undoubtedly dirty money that the corporate monsters get through
stealth advertising, selling other people’s content and from ‘no strings
attached’ venture capital is what makes this constant development
possible. Volunteer coders who scrabble to find time for independent
projects in between day jobs and political activism simply cannot
compete, however ingenious their ideas. The result is that the
anti-corporate web is often buggier, clunkier and more out-of-date than
its capitalist rivals. Users who are often unaware or don’t care about
the politics simply opt for the slicker sites.
Indymedia collectives in the UK are no strangers to this phenomenon. The
UK Indmedia/Mayday collective site runs on a Content Management System
(CMS) called Mir that was migrated to 10 years ago. This gives the site
the look and feel of a 10-year old site: rather old in web development
terms. London Indymedia decided enough was enough and one of their techs
developed Hyperactive, a CMS that was meant to incorporate some of the
features that had been developed as part of ‘Web 2.0’ and that are now
commonplace on social media sites. It was taken up by a number of
regional sites, including Nottingham in 2010. Unfortunately the usual
time and energy constraints on the people involved conspired to thwart
the project. Hyperactive is no longer under development and Indymedia
seems to be unable to find a sustainable way of keeping up to date.
It is not just the online environment that has changed. I would question
whether a coherent user community still exists in the same way that it
did at the height of the anti-globalisation movement. The loose
coalition of anti-capitalist, environmental and anti-war movements that
protested the big summits of global power has evolved in many
directions. Many of those involved took note of the diminishing returns
of spectacular protests and looked for other avenues for their
dissidence.
Those who chose to embed themselves in local struggles whilst ‘thinking
global’ were amongst those who set up and nourished a proliferation of
local Indymedia collectives in the early years of the 21st Century. This
was certainly true of Nottingham Indymedia, which was launched soon
after the Gleneagles anti-G8 protests of 2005 in an attempt to sustain
the local activity that had been mobilised.
Fast forward to 2013 and it is clear that these movements have suffered
many defeats, police spy infiltration and repression and many activists
have burned out or moved on with their lives. Movements that came along
in their absence, such as the anti-cuts movements, have seemed ephemeral
and have not been able to sustain themselves. The younger generations
that might have replaced them look to newer, amorphous brands, such as
Anonymous and Occupy, which don’t have an obvious local manifestation.
The result is that many activists no longer seem to have affinity with
Indymedia, which has become associated with movements of the past that
have run their course.
However, I don’t just want to look at the cultural peculiarities of
Indymedia as it has manifested itself in this time and place. What of
the underlying model of media production and dissemination that
underpins these particular individual instances?
To my mind, Indymedia has three major strengths: eradicating hierarchy,
protecting privacy and enabling collective media production.
Firstly, Indymedia seeks to undermine the traditional media model of
editorial hierarchies which filter out the vast majority of content and
viewpoints according to the whims of the gatekeepers. Indymedia
encourages a proliferation of voices and stories, often through open
publishing on the web.
Whilst open publishing has become commonplace on web forums and mailing
lists, the idea of open publishing for news remains controversial,
largely because many are still in thrall to the idea that certain
viewpoints are more important and more accurate than others.
The idea behind overthrowing this hierarchy was to allow the previously
voiceless and marginalised the opportunity to speak. In practice, this
is hard to achieve. Few Indymedia sites allow totally open publishing
because soon they would be overrun with bullying, abusive behaviour,
used as a platform for authoritarian and discriminatory viewpoints and
to spread malicious lies.
Indymedia sites tend to have a set of guidelines and moderators to
remove posts that infringe them. The problem with this is that it can
reinstate hierarchy by the backdoor. The moderators can easily slip into
an editorial role, making decisions that, subconsciously or not,
influence the character and environment of the site and consequently the
user community.
For this reason, Indymedia collectives strive to ensure that moderation
is transparent and accountable to the wider community. Again, this is
the principle but the reality often fails to live up to it. Few
individuals have the time and energy to scrutinise every moderation
decision or go to collective meetings unless they are already a member
of the collective (and therefore part of the in-group). Indeed, the
recent history of Indymedia in the UK has largely been one of schisms
between different in-groups hostile to what they perceive as external
ideas about how to run their site.
These limitations aside, I firmly believe that the principle of access
to the creation of media for all has revolutionary implications and is
needed to break the hold of the media empires. A grassroots media from
below is needed to challenge the narrative of the powerful and assert
the viewpoint of those excluded from mainstream discourses. Whether the
open publishing model is the best way to achieve that goal or not is
open to debate.
The second major strength of Indymedia has been its promotion of
anonymity in a world of state and corporate monitoring and control.
Whilst mainstream sites track IP addresses and every mouse click you
make, many Indymedia sites have been robust in not logging user data and
allowing the powerless the possibility of not being scrutinised by the
powerful.
The dangers of complying with the statist aim of controlling the
internet are clear. There are numerous examples of sites giving up user
data to the authorities to enable prosecutions and repression. Indymedia
sites publishing reports of interest to the police and other security
agencies have been raided and had servers seized. Thanks to the security
measures in place, these police state measures have not led to
personally identifiable data being grabbed. Protecting the identities of
users who choose not to disclose is essential, in order to give
confidence to those who take direct action against the powers that be.
As with all of these principles, however, anonymity has a dark side.
When no one knows who is speaking, it is easy to maliciously impersonate
other people, to infiltrate discussions and derail them. But perhaps
this also encourages the reader to question what s/he is being told and
to try to dig deeper in an attempt to find the truth.
The final key ingredient to Indymedia, and probably most often
neglected, is the aim of collective creation of media. More than just a
resource, Indymedia should be a community greater than the sum of
individual contributions. When I first got involved in the network,
there was intense collaborative activity on mailing lists in order to
craft feature articles, set up media stations at major actions and share
knowledge and expertise. Over time, differences of opinion and
infighting have set in and the UK network has irreversibly broken down.
There is no longer much of a meaningful Indymedia community and very
little collaboration outside of a few small groups of Indymedia
‘professionals’.
The result is that a lot of the energy and excitement has gone and more
than a few collectives seem to continue out of duty rather than a
positive commitment to the project. Providing a platform and the
motivation for the collective creation of media were essential in making
Indymedia a rewarding network to be in and in taking its output much
further than a collection of isolated individual viewpoints ever could.
So, given all of the above, is Indymedia still important? Yes,
absolutely, as an idea. Unlike some, I am not particularly fussed about
the Indymedia name and brand; what is important is that a media from
below continues to flourish and challenge the media imposed from above.
I have tried to outline what I see as the major challenges and obstacles
that will inevitably crop up – the struggle to keep up technologically,
the necessity of avoiding hierarchical organisation and exclusion and
the need to support community and collaboration as well as giving voice
to dissent.
I think it is high time for those involved in Indymedia and other
similar projects to examine the new political and social terrain, to
evolve and adapt in order to continue what Indymedia has set in motion.
I am not content to keep banging my head against the same limiting brick
walls forever; I want to find ways of moving over them, avoiding them or
undermining them. Now seems as good a time as any to start looking for
fellow travellers.
Our decision to curtail publishing on the Nottingham Indymedia site and
call a meeting is an attempt to create a space for new ideas. We are not
interested in continuing along the slow but certain path to total
irrelevance but want to draw in new people and start off in new
directions whilst remaining faithful to the underlying principles of
Indymedia.
The mainstream media has recently been exposed once again as utterly
corrupt, devoid of ethics and manipulative. However, few independent
media outlets can come up with a sustainable alternative which gives a
voice to those who have been spoken over for so long. This article has
been written in the hope that others will reflect on the successes and
failures of the Indymedia movement and that new independent media models
can be developed from its legacy.
--
Behindthemask is a writer and activist who has been involved in
Nottingham Indymedia and the UK Indymedia network for the past 8 years.
