Cox, Laurence and Mattoni, Alice and Berdnikovs, Andrejs and Ardizzoni, Michela (2010) Voices of Dissent: Activists’ Engagements in the Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media. Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2 (2). pp. 1-22.

Download (147kB)

Abstract

In her seminal work on citizens’ media in Latin America, Clemencia Rodriguez points out the pivotal role that alternative media practices have in empowering citizens to develop new understandings and images of themselves outside the corporate space of mediation created by mainstream media channels and outlets. The expression “citizen media”, however, is only one of the many labels employed to speak about alternative media at large. For many years a marginal field of investigation, in recent decades many monographs, special journal issues and edited volumes have been devoted to alternative media. The emancipation of this subject, which is today considered a respectable academic topic across many disciplines, has gone hand in hand with the flourishing of terms and expressions related to those media messages, outlets and channels which are created and diffused outside commercial informational circuits (Atton 2007). In the academic literature, various labels are used to name the grassroots creation of channels and/or contents outside commercial media and/or opposing the dominant system of meanings. These range from “radical media” (Downing 2001) to “citizens media” (Rodriguez 2001) and from “critical media” (Fuchs 2010) to “social movement media” (Atton 2003). Hadl (2007) has addressed the epistemological reasons for such diversity and richness in the academic field. Each expression, obviously, has different connotations and implies a different explanation of the main qualities characterizing alternative media. Without dismissing these important differences and the theoretical debates revolving around them, here we employ the broad and encompassing label “alternative media”, which signals the existence of media that are alternative to corporate media in terms both of their production and their diffusion processes (Atton 2002).

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Activists’ Engagements; Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media; Interface; social movement;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Item ID:	2300
Depositing User:	Dr. Laurence Cox
Date Deposited:	09 Dec 2010 09:50
Journal or Publication Title:	Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads