M/C Reviews: Are There Alternative Media after CMC?

	Are There Alternative Media after CMC? Chris Atton
		12 Apr. 2000

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Bit 1		Since its famous deployment by the Zapatistas (the 'first informational guerrilla movement', according to Manuel Castells, 79), computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been employed by a multiplicity of oppositional groups, using it to present mobilising information, alternative news reports, video and Webcam feeds, Internet radio, archives, discussion lists, chat rooms, bulletin boards and sound files. This article examines the McSpotlight protest site, in order to shed light on how CMC has transformed notions of alternative media.
Bit 2		In 1990 five members of the anarchist group London Greenpeace were served libel writs by the fast food company McDonald's for publishing and distributing a leaflet allegedly containing defamatory statements about McDonald's, claiming that the company was responsible, inter alia, for the destruction of rainforests to provide land for beef cattle, infringing workers' rights, cruelty to animals and promoting unhealthy eating. Three of the five apologised to the company; Helen Steel and Dave Morris decided to fight the company in court. The defendants were unemployed and not eligible for legal aid, and were therefore compelled to conduct their own defence. The 'McLibel' case, as it was known, became the longest ever British libel trial, beginning in June 1994, with the judge not delivering his final verdict until June 1997 (see McSpotlight's 'The McLibel Trial Story'). The McSpotlight Website was set up by supporters and sympathisers of the two in February 1996.
Bit 3		This represented a huge advance in the information and communication strategies so far used in the campaign, which had previously relied on small-circulation radical newspapers and magazines, and on the distribution of flyers and pamphlets produced by London Greenpeace. The site contains two major archives: one is the full trial transcripts, the other an attempt to exhaustively archive print media references to McDonald's. It also hosts a 'debating room', a discussion list, DIY protest guides and campaign leaflets ready to print out 'in over a dozen languages' -- even a compressed version of the entire site 'to help ensure that McDonald's will never be able to stop the dissemination of this information'. The site is 'constructed' by a network of volunteers working from 16 countries and continues to call for help: 'HTMLers, programmers, typists, researchers, artistes [sic], people with skills we didn't even know we needed till you contacted us' (all references from http://www.mcspotlight.org/help.html).
Bit 4		The site's purpose was not exhausted by the end of the trial: it continued to campaign against McDonald's, as well as becoming a 'protest node' for a number of campaigns against anti-environmental corporations. McSpotlight not only connects activists to information, it enables communication amongst them. The grounding of the site's content in actual struggle is emphasised by the foregrounding of campaign information and leaflets and the assumed requirement for these to be available in print for distribution at protest sites, on demonstrations, in high streets. A primary aim of the site was to publicise the McLibel trial in the face of a largely disinterested national media; yet it also delights in citing those media in its own publicity. This ambivalence, coupled with the mass media's own fascination with the form and use of the site (over and above its content) complexify the site's characterisation of 'alternative media', particularly in terms of its processes and its relation to the mass media. It was through this publicity aroused by the form of the site that its content came to a publicness that political and media lobbying could never have reached.
Bit 5		This raises some significant questions about the status and relation of alternative media and its audiences under the conditions of CMC. First, in the case of McSpotlight, we may note first the apparent contradictions in the site's approach to publicity. At the same time that the site seeks to publicise its causes to as wide an audience as possible (the site may be freely accessed at point of use; no membership or other fee is required), the site is also freely available to download. McSpotlight is attempting to bring in as many visitors -- whether committed to the cause or not -- to view its contents. That it offers its site download free of charge might also be seen as encouraging unlimited use, free of the constraints of continued Net access, line rentals and connection charges. Ostensibly, though, the download option is to frustrate any attempt by McDonald's to shut the site. Here the appeal is to the committed audience, the environmental activist and the supporter of free speech. This plurality is only contradictory if we expect alternative media to adhere to some notion of 'purity' -- to set limits on its audience and its reach either by economic or geographic circumstance (that is, with limited materials) or by design and purpose (desiring to build and retain an élite audience, whether for reasons of security or ideological purity). The very publicness available to a Website weakens the grip of such limits. The activities, information and involvement that McSpotlight promotes are available not simply to 'members' of an essentialised social movement or to an already-committed audience -- they are available to all: the sceptical, the uncommitted, the sympathetic, the antagonistic, as well to the committed and the activists. And to all of these all at once.
Bit 6		Second, McSpotlight offers a centre. Its activities may be diverse, its audience and reach diffuse; in the end, though, it is a focus for a protest without a geographical or temporal centre. Around it (inspired by it, even) have arisen numerous sites, for the most part unco-ordinated. There is a tendency for protest nodes to arise, to gather information, offer spaces and resources for activists, and then either to disappear as the protests conclude or to evolve into other campaigns. Activists employing CMC are able to adapt their resources, to continually transform and re-invent themselves with a facility only partially available to print media. Whilst print media can make use of varied formats, special issues, changes in frequency and 'emergency' issues, the processes of print production entail slower responses. There are also the conventions of periodicity (an audience expects regularity of publication in print) and of stability (few titles would vary a format indefinitely). The use of CMC by new social movements privileges fluidity, interpenetration, non-linearity. This strengthens the argument against essentialising new social movements as comprising fixed sets of aims, motives, strategies and tactics that are directed towards a clear, largely unchanging set of social-change objectives.
Bit 7		Third, where print media offer information directly and the possibility of communication only indirectly, CMC offers them both directly and thus confuses the two. Where sites still offer periodical publications as part of a wider structure of networked information and communication, periodicity is often eroded, only weakly present in the 'last updated' legend common to Websites. But there are also less liberating consequences of such erosion. Linking to other sites on the Net is to radically re-interpret the practice of editing a publication. Selection may well be made positively and thoroughly when choosing to link, but there is little evidence that the volatility of all Websites is taken into account by linkers. Linked-to sites might well change their content radically, yet still be considered 'editorially' part of the home site. Changing URLs, lapsed telecommunications subscriptions and unpaid bills can all render these rhizomatic enterprises fragile and make them liable to collapse, disruption and incoherence. Further, the facility with which links may be made encourages 'saturated linking' -- what is benignly termed 'surfing' can often be a perpetual consignment to a maze of increasingly irrelevant data. Unmoderated discussion lists also present complications: the reliability of information in posts; the security of data; managing the information flow; dealing with inappropriate responses ('flaming' and 'spamming'); simply making the time to make sense of it all. Boundaries dissolve, edges disappear -- the very notion of 'publication' is challenged.
Bit 8		Where do the distinctive features of alternative media lie under the conditions of CMC? Does it make any sense to talk of alternative media in cyberspace? Where the processes of production are available to anyone, where the horizontal, networked flows of information and communication are inbuilt, where anyone can become their own publisher, their own polemicist, does a specific set of media called 'alternative' have any identity? Some distinctive processes of alternative print media production are no longer radical on the Web: non-hierarchical methods of communication and ease of participation in creating and commenting on media texts are now normalised in Internet practice. The experimental nature of much alternative print publishing is called into question: either it is no longer a meaningful practice (the small print run) or it has become absorbed into a dominant practice of Web publishing that ordinarily entails transformed roles and social relations that were once the province of alternative media production (anyone can be a writer or a publisher). Experiments with blending informational and communicational forms are common, however -- though this is a further instance of normal Web practice. The exclusiveness of alternative media as a communication process is also eroded. The narrowcast nature of much alternative media entailed small audiences (it guaranteed it) and it restricted access to those who knew where to go for such media. Some media producers preferred this, either for reasons of elitism or for security (Atton).
Bit 9		Whether desirable or not, the Internet entails publicness, though there persists the possibility that no one will find your information, so lost is it in the welter of electronic data. Perhaps the only significant constant in print and CMC versions of alternative media is content, particularly the origins of that content. For new social movements that content comes from lived experience. In order to sustain a notion of alternative or radical communication in cyberspace we must, as Kevin Robins has urged, let the real world break in on the virtual one. It is through the use of CMC by new social movements for collective political action that we best see such an irruption in action.

Bit 10		References Atton, Chris. "Anarchy on the Internet: Obstacles and Opportunities for Alternative Electronic Publishing." Anarchist Studies 4 (October 1996): 115-32. Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume II: The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Robins, Kevin. "Cyberspace and the World We Live In." Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. Eds. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. London: Sage, 1995. 135-55.

Bit 11		Citation reference for this article MLA style: Chris Atton. "Are There Alternative Media after CMC?" M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000. [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/altmedia.html>. Chicago style: Chris Atton, "Are There Alternative Media after CMC?," M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000, <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/altmedia.html> ([your date of access]). APA style: Chris Atton. (2000) Are there alternative media after CMC?. M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000. <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/altmedia.html> ([your date of access]).

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Links:
McSpotlight
McLibel Trial