This book is a study of an ‘alternative Internet’. Through a sequence of case studies it explores the use of the Internet as a set of information and communication technologies (ICTs) produced by a range of individuals, groups and organisations whose philosophies and practices I have chosen to term ‘alternative’. By this I mean a range of media projects, interventions and networks that work against, or seek to develop different forms of, the dominant, expected (and broadly accepted) ways of ‘doing’ media. These projects might be explicitly political in intent, such as the media activism of radical, ‘amateur’ journalists who make upthe Indymedia network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs). They might be political in less progressive ways, such as the use of the World Wide Web by political formations on the far right. Some projects deliberately challenge the economic status quo and by so doing seek to overturn received notions of property ownership. This is particularly notable in the anti-copyright and open software movements, where philosophies of communitarianism and usufruct offer alternatives to the political economies of copyright ownership and intellectual property rights. These issues have come to popular attention through the development of file-sharing and peer-to-peer programs such as Napster and Gnutella. The philosophy and practice of the open software and open source movements has led to new ways of thinking about what it means to be a creator.

In their study of online fanzines produced by women, Cresser, Gunn and Balme (2001: 470) state that ezines represent ‘[a] unique medium for communication’. The ezines examined in the previous chapter have shown us that to make such a bold statement is not only dangerously iconoclastic, it is far from accurate. We have seen the powerful historical links that persist between the printed fanzine and its electronic successor (though that is not to say that the latter has usurped the former – there remain large numbers of printed fanzines). Whilst, as we have seen, communication between fans may have been ameliorated through the Internet, it is mistaken to think that the formation of an international taste community was impossible or unsustainable before the Internet. As both the previous chapter and Chapter 4 have shown, international networks of fans have long histories. It is to some extent a matter of degree – the use of the Internet as an occasion for the construction and development of alternative media has multiple outcomes. Alternative media producers might simply seek to replicate the media forms and relationships abiding in print – for example, the fanzine or the radical journalism site as a space for the presentation and discussion of particular forms of knowledge. They might seek to extend those forms and employ the Internet's capacity for ‘interaction’ to accelerate political organising.

INTRODUCTION

Radio as a contemporary public medium tends to be considered primarily in terms of its industrial and cultural arrangements. We may identify five broad types of radio broadcasting: public service broadcasting, commercial radio, state radio, community (or micro) radio, and pirate radio. The first of these, perhaps best known in the West through long-established services such as the BBC, is predicated on providing services that, whilst funded largely by government, are independent of direct state control and are ideally free from commercial imperatives. The ideal of public service broadcasting, in the classic Reithian formulation, is to educate, inform and entertain, aims which are legally enshrined. By contrast, the commercial sector is under no such legal and social obligations; instead its aim is the maximisation of profit through the maximisation of audiences and the generation of advertising revenues. Radio under the direct control of the state is largely unknown in the West and tends to be associated with dirigiste regimes (whether secular or religious) which seek to standardise and limit content and formats to produce programmes that function as essentialised, arguably propagandist, attempts at national social control through the delimiting of debate and discussion. By contrast, community or micro radio operates at a hyper-local level, often as a result of the low power of transmitters, broadcasting (or better, ‘narrowcasting’) to specific, local geographic communities (whether cultural or social), determined by location or the interests of communities or both.

INTRODUCTION

In an insightful essay that argues for the necessity of a cultural studies approach to the Internet, Sterne has pointed to the prevalence within academic studies of considering the Internet as a ‘millennial cultural force’ (1999: 258, original emphasis). He finds that the most common approach in these studies is to treat the Internet in terms of binary oppositions, most typically those of revolution/alienation and technophilia/technophobia. These approaches, he argues, assume the technology is autonomous from other forces (social, political, cultural) and suggest a highly deterministic place for the Internet. Lacking these contexts, such studies fail in their attempts to understand the Internet in two key ways. First, following Bourdieu, Sterne argues that it is the careful construction of the research object that these studies fail to undertake. What, precisely, in other words, does it mean to study the Internet? Is it, for instance, to study a communication tool, an information resource, an electronic network, a mass medium, or even a set of industrial practices? Without clarity on what is being studied we can learn nothing. Too often, it seems, the academic is essaying an investigation that is founded on rhetorical claims (‘the information superhighway’, for example), rather than critically examining the nature and provenance of such claims and their location within culture. Second, and proceeding from that, there appears a tendency to treat the Internet as a largely autonomous site, for study negates contexts, whether historical, economic, political, social or cultural.

INTRODUCTION

The primary aim of this chapter is to present an overview of the main features that characterise the critical, ‘public’ journalism that has emerged on the Internet, largely through the media of new social movements and radical political organisations and institutions. It will examine the dialogical and popular methods that inform many of the radical journalism projects on the Internet through a case study of the Indymedia network, described by one commentator as ‘to date the pinnacle model of citizen participation in the media’ (Giordano 2002). A key feature is the egalitarian mode of address, where intellectuals share media platforms with activists and where it is hoped that elitism is eroded. Here we find the new media used both by grassroots activists and by dissenting academics and other intellectuals participating in a counter public sphere.

This is not to suggest that radical journalism on the Internet has evolved ahistorically and without reference to mainstream journalism practices. As emerging research suggests (Atton 2002b), there are fascinating interrelations between the two types of news cultures (for example, the radical use of tabloid style by alternative journalists, the erosion of expert hierarchy in radical news). Finally, the chapter will critically examine some of the theoretical claims that have been made for this type of online journalism and in particular ask whether it represents as radical a shift in notions of doing journalism as some of its celebrants believe.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 4 we explored how the Internet has been employed by musicians and fans to shift the emphasis of musical production away from corporate control towards more libertarian and collectivist ways of production and circulation. The use of open source licensing is one such attempt to encourage radical ways of making music. The discussion of Internet radio in Chapter 5 developed these issues further, demonstrating the ways in which the application of new technology to a traditional medium might prompt audiences to create their own forms of creative communication. The present chapter focuses on these audiences as fans and examines how the online fanzine has developed as a means of building and maintaining taste communities across geographic boundaries. It will develop some of the arguments made in the previous chapter through its continued emphasis on avant-garde and experimental forms of contemporary popular music. Its aim is to identify particular fanzine projects that have emerged on the Internet and to examine them in terms of their historical connections with the printed fanzine, and to assess the extent to which the online fanzine is presenting new opportunities for fan production. It will also explore the creative potential of such publications and the opportunities they offer for fans to become creative artists themselves. The shifts in attitudes towards creativity we identified at the close of Chapter 4 are not only played out in the creativity of artists and the gift economies of fans.

INTRODUCTION

As we saw in Chapter 1, the progress of digital technology in recent years has hastened legislators and commentators alike to suggest methods by which the electronic transmission of information and ideas might be monitored, some would say policed. We have already met arguments based on national security, morality and economics. This chapter explores the last two of these in relation to intellectual property rights on the Internet, and does so through an examination of the implications of the exercise of those rights for creative practices and in particular the legal and commercial threats to ‘social authorship’ (Toynbee 2001). Finally, it examines peer-to-peer file-sharing networks (such as Napster and Gnutella) from this perspective. It considers such practices as aspects of social creativity, not simply as intellectual property theft. Yet such practices have not emerged from nowhere. They are the outcome of at least three major intersections of cultural practice: the recent history of illicit reproduction of artists' performances by audiences (home taping and bootlegging) and the social networks that grew alongside these practices (tape swapping constitutes peer-to-peer (P2P) networks before the fact, as it were); the various movements (such as shareware, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, interventions such as open copyright and open publishing) that have developed on the Internet, but which also have pre-digital antecedents; and the history of creative appropriation across numerous artistic movements, including high art and the demotic (visual and aural collage, folk song, the many syntheses of popular music styles into ‘new’ genres).

INTRODUCTION

The 1990s saw a dramatic movement of the European far right towards the centre of national politics, through a series of attempts to establish ‘respectable’ electoral parties. Right-wing parties with policies based primarily on nationalism and immigration (such as Joerg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party and Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France) resonated with publics increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as centralist policies of the European Union, of a liberalism that to them appeared to favour the rights of ‘aliens’ above native-born citizens, and a globalisation that seemed to ignore domestic issues such as law and order, housing and employment. Such parties sought, with some success, to normalise a racial nationalism based on ‘whiteness as an essentialised social identity which they say is under threat’ (Back 2002b), a strategy also followed by the British National Party.

We might think of these developments in mainstream political culture as the penetration into a dominant, Habermasian public sphere of debate and opinion-formation (assisted in no small way by the mass media's coverage of these popular right-wing parties) of hitherto marginalised political groups. Parallel to this normalisation of right-wing discourse in the public sphere we find an increasing use of the Internet by fractions of the far right which essay more extremist versions of the populist rhetoric of such as Haider and Le Pen, which resonated so deeply with significant sections of their respective countries' electorates.