Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Corporate media grab: are we already Foxed?
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Andrew Lowenthal

indymedia journalist and media activist

My name is Andrew, I work with a thing called indymedia.

I’ll just give a bit of background into indymedia. Everything we’ve heard so far, last night and this morning, have been fairly negative, in terms of a lot of problems which people are aware of, and we need to have an understanding in order to move forward. For me at least, in terms of the net, and the media activism I do, I see a whole lot of possibility for amazing things to happen by connecting people and utilising new communications tools.

Indymedia began in 1999 at the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation. The original software was written by a group in Sydney called Catalyst - Community Access Technology. The basic idea was that people were going out to protest against destructive trade policies, environmental degradation, infringement on labour rights – bad corporate practices and a whole gambit of social issues. And those corporations where connected with the same corporations who own the media. General Electric who make nuclear power plants and are involved in the arms industry, also own NBC. Westinghouse, also involved in the nuclear and weapons industry, also own CBS. CBS and NBC are the biggest broadcasters in the US. We don’t necessarily have as extreme examples here in Australia but the same thing holds true. Also, public broadcasting in the US is very limited, so there was the desire to allow people to be able to speak for themselves.

The possibility that the internet opened up was that the mediators, also called journalists, where no longer needed. The idea was that you could tell your own story, you create a space for subjective telling of truths. This space was opened up on the web where, without having too many technical skills, you could easily publish video, audio, text and photos. It’s based on the principals of open publishing, where anyone with access to the web could publish. During the time of Seattle, more people went to the indymedia site than to CNN. There were more than 400 people going around in the street as accredited indymedia journalists so the pool of collective intelligence that could actually be aggregated was amazing. The story telling that was going on was passed back to the people who were actually involved. And you also got a whole lot more accurate reporting. They were actually participating and in the streets for long periods of time unlike the corporate reporters who were flown in to a street corner for 15 minutes where they took images of the most menacing people and then used them to say what a bunch of idiots the protesters were. Indymedia opened up the space for people to say, “No, we’re not a bunch of idiots, we have a real basis and legitimate grievances.”

From Seattle, there was a period for two or three years when there were a series of summits, from the IMF to the G8 and the World Economic Forum, when these types of global institutions and governments met. When protesters would turn up and invariably they’d set up an indymedia centre, or IMC. They’d create a platform for people to tell their own stories. It kind of syndicated out, beginning with these global protests and then became a daily thing.

The one here in Melbourne started for our S11, the protest against the World Economic Forum at Melbourne’s Crown Casino, not Osama’s S11. It’s been going now for 5 years as a daily platform for people to tell their own stories. Use goes up and down. Not everyone will check it on a daily basis, but if there’s a big protest going on, like the escape from Woomera, then lots more will check it for the duration of that particular event. The content fluctuates because it’s based on all volunteer participation and you can’t make up the news. Where as large well funded organisations have the ability to send someone out to take a picture of a boy who has fallen off a horse and broken his arm. And it fluctuates in quality as all sorts of content goes up. For example, the former NSW Police Minister, Michael Costa tried to shut Melbourne indymedia down before the mini-ministerial of the WTO in Sydney in 2002, claiming that it advocated violence. People had put up posts saying ‘let’s go to the demonstration and smash stuff’, and we didn’t remove it because of our policy. Also because leaving it there, there is also a space for people to comment and make suggestions that it isn’t such a good idea, and discussing tactics.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have editorial policy. We do take things down if they are racist or homophobic for example, we discourage that. We walk a fine line between publishing anything that is not going to get published anywhere else and creating an open space where disempowered groups feel welcomed, and free to participate in it. We deal with free-speech in a practical, daily and ongoing way. My version is much more creating a space where people feel free to speak rather than free to say whatever they want. So I hope that gives people a bit of an idea and people that have gone to the site will have a bit more of an understanding.

To go back to the genesis and growth of the idea, at the moment I think there’s 150 indymedia centres (IMC’s) around the world. In five and a bit years, a new site has come on line every eleven days. Some IMC’s have sub-collectives, Italy for example has perhaps a dozen.

Where Shane was talking about a place for community voices to be heard, we are open in that way, but we do have and foster a set of politics, we are not such the broad church that community radio might be. Our politics are left and libertarian, but also making it participatory and having people engage. So I guess that’s always the thing with community media or media within soocial movements where you become so broad that you become gaseous and too broad that you move around with no trajectory for what you’re doing, or you become so defined that you become the ice and you don’t move. For me, the space you want to be in is a fluid space where you can create currents, spaces and trajectories without being too fluffy or tied down and not going anywhere. So we try and walk that tightrope and to a certain extent have been successful and to another extent are fairly limited in terms of our model. The model is very much a new way of working that came out of what people referred to as the anti-globalisation movement. It is based on the idea of networks and collaboration, and things coming up from the base. Not having a small group of people at the top saying this or that is the direction, but working on that collective intelligence and saying that the most efficient way to do things is actually in a democratic way, not automatically taking it from a moral or ethical standpoint, which is also important, but saying that ‘hey, we cant compete with the corporate or government media’. The people and the human resources are the most valuable resources that we can have.

So, how do we set in motion a movement - the movement of those people - to actually produce the media themselves? When the republican convention happened in New York there were 600 indymedia journalists in the streets producing the content, getting the interviews, making the videos, writing the stories, phoning in reports, having a streaming radio station that other local radio stations could pick up the stream from the net and rebroadcast anywhere around the world.

Those network-based collaborative models are very much what indymedia is trying to push. A break from the traditional modes of organising, which where top down, with the committee directing the mass membership to march, there or here, and then get on the bus and go home. It’s actually very disempowering for people and a real waste for human resources. While the IR demonstrations where incredible it seemed that they all got shipped in and shipped out. Those 100 000 people, if they were able to create a space of collaboration and co-production are a lot more powerful than just as bodies shifted and shunted. We have to move to a decentralised and collaborative model. That’s not only because ideologically I don’t believe in hierarchies, but I think that in a productive capacity humans can do more working in collaborative, non-hierarchical structures. We can create a more intense movement that has a lot more power if you can get people doing more then just marching down the street and being told what to do. Which requires a lot more engagement and intelligence. My big thing is there are places like the net that are opening up that space for people to build new types of social relations.

Increasingly our lives are being mediated by telecommunications technologies and these technologies create a particular type of social interaction. Television creates a social relation where this group of people speaks and everyone else listens. Talkback radio has tried to subvert that to a certain extent and does, but it’s not till the net comes along do you get to see a different way of people communicating with each other, it becomes more horizontal, more networked and it begins to provide more egalitarian social relationships. Especially when we’re analysing the problems within society. It’s not just about who controls the means of production but what social relations do the means of production create. Even if you had nice boss in the factory, and the workers were paid well, this still hasn’t changed the fundamental relationships of power, and this is what actually needs to be changed. The new communications technologies - whilst obviously limited, costly, add to that a critique of consumer society and what all that means – provide a possibility to create something new.

Mobile phones are a famous example from Manila. Estrada was partly brought down by a thing called swarming, text-messaging each other with the locations of the demonstrations and people poured into the streets. There wasn’t one or a few people up the top saying, ‘go here’, there was what some people refer to as ‘swarm intelligence’, or collective, or collaborative intelligence. Suddenly you have people behaving more like a flock of birds or a swarm of bees, where there isn’t necessarily a committee in charge but a massive intelligence being generated through a large body. I think I’m getting into abstract biology now, but I’m interested to bounce these ideas off people as a model.

I see a shift going on in terms of how people are organising in social movements and they are increasingly being organised through communications technologies. Therefore, how can we use that to our advantage because I think they do open up spaces and give us the ability to reach a much wider audience than people have had before. The problem again, and I think it’s been mentioned, is attention. The limiting factor is actually getting people’s attention to begin with. We can compete but we have to compete on a very different basis. We don’t have billion dollar advertising budgets, we don’t have all the marketing strategies and hundreds of employees. So we have to be smarter. Creating consistently good content is something that activist and community media can often fall down on. They are two of the limitations that I see, but in terms of distribution we are beginning to be able to stand on an equal footing with the corporate and government media.

Another project I’m involved with is building an online video distribution channel for up to broadcast quality on the web. We are aiming to create a distribution system that will enable you to download video that’s as good quality as the stuff you see on TV so people can therefore rebroadcast it on their community TV stations anywhere around the world where they’ve got the broadband access to be able to download it – as the technology increases and broadband downloading capacity increases, as I hope it’s going to in the next few years. I may have too much of a technological focus, as I’m sure you’ve all realised. I’m not saying that the net is going to save us, it’s still people marching in the streets and meeting face to face that is going to remain the most powerful form of communication, but the capacity is there. I don’t share the pessimism of people like Margo Kingston or Guy Rundle.

I’m interested in the creation of new geographies of resistance and the ways in which new media can create affinities and different spaces. What resonated with me with what Guy Rundle was saying was that we need to look beyond the national theatre of change because the things that are actually shifting aren’t national in nature. There are particularities in Australia, but there are global processes going on. Therefore what we do has to be post-statist to a certain extent, it has to go beyond the nation state and create those new geographies and one way that we can do that is through new media.

indymedia oceania website

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