For a Political Economy of Indymedia Practice

Abstract

This article develops a political economy of Indymedia practice. After reviewing other current approaches to the Indymedia phenomenon, democratic media activism, and traditions of dissent, I draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's unique sociological perspective to offer an analysis of the Ontario Independent Media Centre as a website of social struggles against neo-liberalism. This study reveals that Indymedia practice is a simultaneously structured and spontaneous form of collective media work on the margins of the political and journalistic fields. Whether such experiments in democratic communication will survive and develop will depend on whether Indymedia centres can become more central to the educational field.Résumé : Cet article développe une économie politique des pratiques propres aux « Indymedia » (médias indépendants en ligne). Après avoir passé en revue d'autres approches courantes de ce phénomène, du militantisme médiatique démocratique et des traditions de contestation, j'utilise la perspective sociologique singulière de Pierre Bourdieu pour analyser comment le site Internet du Centre de média indépendant d'Ontario aide à lutter contre le néolibéralisme. Cette étude montre que les pratiques Indymedia sont une forme de travail média-tique collectif à la fois structuré et spontané qui existe à la lisière des champs politiques et journalistiques. La survie et le développement de ces expériences en communication démocratique ne sont pas assurées, cependant, et dépendront de la capacité des centres Indymedia à occuper une place plus centrale dans le domaine éducatif.

Internet revolution revisited: a comparative study of online news

“…Their utilisation of the global technology of the internet is perpetuating, sometimes in a modified form, a national editorial legacy. 17 The reality of what is happening has been partly obscured by the way in which scholars have tended to concentrate attention on a small number of alternative, international websites such as International.OhMynews (Dencik, 2012), openDemocracy (Curran and Witschge, 2010) and the exhaustively studied global activist network, Indymedia (Atton, 2004;Coyer et al, 2007;Jankowski and Jansen, 2003;Hanke, 2005;Miloni, 2009;Morris, 2004;Pickard, 2006;Platon and Deuze, 2003;Salter, 2006, among others). These websites are both cosmopolitan and politically progressive, seemingly fulfilling widely shared perceptions of the impact of the internet.…”

From the “War on Poverty” to the “War on the Poor”: Knowledge, Power, and Subject Positions in Anti-Poverty Discourses

“…OCAP activists are perhaps considered undeserving because they refuse to be silent (cf. Hanke, 2005). Discursive formations are premised upon who is speaking, taking action, and wielding power.…”

The professional boundaries of journalists in Hong Kong: Strategies of accepting and dismissing citizen journalists

“…When does one start to be a citizen journalist and when does it stop to be one? Based on this definition, there is no difference between citizen journalism platforms such as OhMyNews (see Chung & Nah, 2014 for details) or Indymedia (see Hanke, 2005 for details) and the driver who captured with his dashboard camera the crash of the 2015 TransAsia 235 flight in Taiwan. Allan’s definition is not much different than that of ‘random acts of journalism’, a concept that will be discussed in the coming sections.…”