We Media Questions:

‘We Media – Reading the extract from the Media Lens Website pick examples of how We Media has been used to address human rights abuses or has countered state surveillance and state violence by answering the questions showcased below’

“In what way do you think some of these examples of the use of We Media are democratic?”

In today’s day in age the internet and blogosphere can now provide enormous opportunities for the expansion and increase of progressive journalism ideals in the United Kingdom and globally. Media theorist Stuart Allan celebrates the blogging that audiences use, commemorating the “extraordinary contribution made by citizens offering their first hand reports, digital photographs, camcorder video footage, mobile telephone snapshots or audio clips.” Clearly, this is “citizen journalism,” that is, challenging the professional journalists and actually feeds into the mainstream media routines and begins to reinforce the dominant news value system. Evidently, the internet and blogosphere only appear to be fascinating when they serve to challenge the mainstream media as elements in social and political movements and these are just many of the examples of the use of We Media which make it democratic.

John Hartley explains how consumers need to follow him if they plan on making a radical transformation of journalism theory. You need academics and consumers to move away from the notion of the audience as a passive consumer of a professional product to see the audience as producers of their own work, this being either written or visual media which is produced by them. Hartley even makes reference to the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ where he states that the utopian-liberal believe that every single person has the right not only to seek and receive but to actually impart and communicate information and ideas.

Website ‘Coldtype.net’ in the United Kingdom is a site attempting to bring together many of the writings by radical journalists, campaigners and academics. Freelance journalist Dahr Jamail regularly reports from a critical peace perspective on the Middle East, while ‘Democracy Now’ is an alternative US station consisting of allied websites and podcasts which is run by committed to peace journalism, Amy Goodman.

Additionally, political activists can often double as media activists, for instance ‘IndyMedia’ which emerged during the “battle of Seattle” in 1999 when thousands of people took to the streets to protest against the World Trade Organisation and the impact of global free trade relations and were met by armoured riot place which had an impact on democracy as violent clashes erupted with many injuries on both sides due to this particular protest. In response to this, 400 volunteers, rallied under the motto “Don’t hate the media: be the media” created a site and daily news sheet called ‘The Blind Spot’ which spelled out news, photographs, audio and video footage and received 1.5 million hits in its first week. Today there happens to be more than 150 independent media centres in around 45 countries over six continents. Their mission statement says:

“The Independent Media Centre is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate and passionate telling of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media’s distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.”

“How does We Media provide a valid alternative voice to ordinary citizens?” Give examples.

According to media theorist John Hartley, “Journalism has transferred from a modern expert system to a contemporary open innovation, this being from ‘one to many’ to ‘many to many’ communication.” In this question we can identify how this redefinition of journalism can incorporate many different forms of media activity and media voices into the alternative public sphere.

Firstly there is the role of radical, non mainstream journalists who clear show that they have a valid alternative voice to ordinary citizens, for example George Orwell is best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four but he was also a distinguished progressive journalist who concentrated most of his writing on obscure, alternative journals of New Leader, Left Forum, Left News, Polemic, Progressive, Politics and Letters. From 1943-1947 he was a literary editor of the leftist journal, Tribune and as he wrote his regular “As I Please” column, he developed a close relationship with his audiences. This was a very crucial relationship which added to the flowering of Orwell’s journalistic imagination.

While Orwell’s realised mainstream journalism was basically propaganda for wealthy newspaper proprietors, at Tribune he was engaging in the crucial political debate with people who mattered to him. They were an authentic audience compared with what Stuart Allan has called the “implied reader or imagined community of readers” of the mainstream media.

Other ways in which ‘We Media’ provide a valid voice to citizens it that there’s the role of radical intellectuals such as the American historian Tom Engelhardt. Other radical intellectuals famous in the blogosphere have included people such as the late Edward Said, Naom Chomsky, Norman Solomon, James Winter, Mark Kurtis and the recently deceased African intellectual campaigner and journalist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. In the United Kingdom, activists such as David Edwards and David Cromwell edit the radical media monitoring site which monitors the mainstream media from a radical Buddhist perspective and in support of the global peace movement. What is more, is that Professor’s David Miller and William Dinan are also part of the collective running ‘spinwatch.org’ which critiques the PR industry from a radical, peace perspective, again providing them a valid alternative voice.

Citizens and campaigners in the UK and US who upload images of police surveillance or brutality onto ‘Youtube’ or citizens who report on opposition movements via blogs, these being ‘Twitter’ and other websites in authoritarian societies such as China, Burma, Iran and Egypt can similiarly be considered participants in the alternative media sphere. Commenting on the role of citizen blogs during the 2003 Iraq invasion, journalist Stuart Allan claimed:

“…these emergent forms of journalism have the capacity to bring the bear alternative perspectives, contexts and ideological diversity to war reporting, providing users with the means to connect with distant voices otherwise being marginalised, if not silenced altogether, from across the globe.”