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Breaking Through The Information Blockade
Independent Media Centers revolutionize the online alternative press
By Gene Hyde
- Protesters hit the street in Ottawa
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Impact
While criticism of corporate media has been growing, Independent Media Centers have actively covered alternative viewpoints, and have successfully used the Web to broadcast news. Using information technologies in a fashion unforeseen by the corporate world, the rapidly growing number of Independent Media Centers are providing an outlet for scores of disaffected and disenfranchised groups to report differing versions of the news than the mainstream press. Activists, journalists, and academics have all commented on this movement. Writing in Dissent, sociologist Jackie Smith notes that Indymedia's "ongoing critical commentary on local and global events" is in the forefront of a larger "dialectic between cyber subversion and the growing concentration of power that shape the politics of the new millennium."
On one side of this dialectic are corporations and corporate-owned media, criticized by Harvard's Nieman Reports for defining "the narrow parameters that actually are put forth for public debate. Every notion that falls outside of those parameters, such as the possibility for universal health care. . .is generally derided or ignored by the mainstream press." On the other side are Independent Media Centers and the diverse communities they represent. While Indymedia won't replace the mainstream press any time soon, they are growing at an impressive rate. They will continue to research their stories, cover issues aggressively, and take time to report on issues shunned by the mainstream press. Indymedias and the communities they represent are a force to contend with, because as the Columbia Journalism Review observed, they're "organized, they're global, and they're not going away."
Gene Hyde is a librarian and a graduate student in Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee. *
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