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alternative media alternative media chris attan 'SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi © Chris Atton 2002 First published 2002 Reprinted 2003, 2005, 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing ofthe publishers, or in the case ofreprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver's Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd B-42 Panchsheel Enclave PO Box 4109 New Delhi 110017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-I0 0-7619-6770-2 (hbk) ISBN-13 978-0-7619-6770-5 (hbk) ISBN-I0 0-7619-6771-0 (Pbk) ISBN-13 978-0-7619-6771-2 (Pbk) Printed on paperfrom sustainable sources Typeset by SNA Math Setters, Chennai, India Printed digitally and bound in Great Britain by BiddIes Limited, King's Lynn, Norfolk contents Acknowledgements VIl1 Introduction 1 1 Approaching Alternative Media: Theory and Methodology 7 Preliminaries 7 Defining 'alternative' and 'radical' 9 Downing's theory of radical media 19 Beyond the political: attitude versus position in alternative and radical media 23 Towards a model of alternative and radical media 24 Alternative media as a field of production 29 2 The Economics of Production 32 The alternative press in its 'ghetto' 33 Finance 35 Reprographic technologies 38 Circulation 39 Distributive use in the alternative public sphere 42 Anti-copyright 42 Open distribution 44 Alternative fora as methods of distribution 45 The limits and freedom of 'alternative economics' 49 3 What Use is a Zine? Identity-building and Social Signification in Zine Culture 54 A little history of fanzines 55 Zines and sociality 58 Cases: Bamboo Girl, Cometbus, Pilgrims and MAXIMUMROCKNROLL 61 Zines and communication 67 Zine culture and e-zines 68 vi ALTERNATIVE MEDIA Towards cases: The Etext Archives and Labowitz's E-zine List 69 E-zine cases 71 4 Alternative Media and New Social Movements 80 The British new social movement media in the 1990s 80 Approaches to organization and production 88 Do or Die 88 Squall 91 SchNEWS 93 Green Anarchist 95 Participation and control 98 5 Writers, Readers and Knowledge in New Social Movement Media 103 Readers as writers 103 Knowledge production and knowledge producers 105 Conceptualizing alternative news as 'native reporting' 112 Radical populism and language 118 Activists as intellectuals 120 Examples of knowledge production 121 Coherence and coverage 126 Readers as readers 128 6 Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Alternative Media 133 Anarchist perspectives on the Internet 134 Anarchists' use of the Internet 136 Assessing the constraints 138 Progressive librarians and McSpotlight 144 Hybridity and 'purity' 151 Conclusion 153 Bibliography 157 Index 167 illustrations Box 1. A typology of alternative and radical media 27 Figure 1. Darnton's communication circuit (after Darnton, 1990) 26 acknowledgements would like to thank my colleagues in alternative media studies, Jay Hamilton and Nick Couldry, who were generous enough to read and I comment on various draft chapters of this book. John Downing read the entire first draft and offered much pertinent criticism: I am in his debt. Their encouragement kept me going at dark moments. Natalie Fenton, Simon Frith, Peter Golding and Tony Harcup provided much welcome enthusiasm, support and criticism for this project. Sharif Gemie and Jon Purkis at Anarchist Studies trusted me: had they not, much of this work would be undone. Parts of the book began life as my PhD thesis: I thank my supervisors David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery and Desmond Bell for their support and criticism, also my examiners George McKay and Ian Welsh. Numerous colleagues in the Popular Culture Association and the Media Studies, Communication and Cultural Studies Association pro vided much opportunity for discussion of the main themes of this work. I must also thank those editors, writers and readers who so generously and patiently answered my questions. Lucy Green at Popular Music cheered me up at an important moment. Thanks to Earache Records, Cyclops Records and Champagne Lake Productions for sonic refresh ment in the final stages. Julia Hall, my editor at Sage, placed much faith in me -I hope it is repaid here. As is customary, I end by thanking those who had to endure this project out of hours: Kate, Daniel and Jacob. And Godzilla. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as 'A Re-assessment of the Alternative Press', Media, Culture and Society, 21(1), January 1999, 51-76. Parts of Chapter 6 appeared in earlier forms as parts of 'Are There Alternative Media after CMC?', M/C Reviews, 12 April 2000. <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/altmedia.html> and 'Anarchy on the Internet: Obstacles and Opportunities for Alternative Electronic Publishing', Anarchist Studies, 4(2), October 1996, 115-132. The material on Green Anarchist in Chapters 4 and 5 first appeared as part of 'Green Anarchist: A Case Study in Radical Media', Anarchist Studies, 7(1), March 1999,25-49. introduction n his fine book Why Study the Media? Roger Silverstone (1999: 103) affirms that alternative media 'have created new spaces for alternative I voices that provide the focus both for specific community interests as well as for the contrary and the subversive'. It is all of these - the com munity, the contrary and the subversive - that are the subject of my book. Silverstone talks of the employment of mass media techniques 'to pursue a critical or alternative agenda, from the margins, as it were, or from the underbelly of social life'. How this is done and what it means to people who do it are similarly my concerns. To decide what alternative media are and how they may be considered alternative are tasks not easily achieved (indeed, a large part of this book wrestles with these fundamentals). In dis cussing my work with colleagues and friends I am most often asked two questions. The first is: Do alternative media still exist? For these ques tioners alternative media mean the underground press of the 1960s (such as Village Voice and The Rat in the US, Oz and IT in the UK). The ques tion fixes these media historically as counter-cultural emanations - it also considers them as enterprises of the past. If their aims had not been achieved, they had at least been abandoned when their editors, writers and readers moved on to more mature activities (steady jobs, families, mortgages). The simple answer is: Of course they do. Examples abound. Far from disappearing in the early 1970s alternative media have bur geoned. The rise of the fanzine as an integral part of the punk subculture of the late 1970s was instrumental in generating a second wave of underground-like publications that dealt as much with the politics of liberation, direct action and anarchism as they did with popular music. This takes us to our second question: What are alternative media? For whilst the underground press of the 1960s, the punk fanzines of the 1970s and the direct-action papers of the 1990s offer examples that are more or less culturally and politically congruent (despite their apparent differences at the time, the worst thing you could say about a punk fanzine was that 2 ALTERNATIVE MEDIA it took its influence from the hippie press) - it is unlikely that these exhaust the list of candidates for inclusion as 'alternative media'. Do we use 'alternative' as a catch-all for anything that isn't available at our local newsagents? Is it a synonym for 'underground', 'radical', 'oppositional' - even 'samizdat'? We might look beyond paper formats to video (such as the work of the Videofreex of the early 1970s or of the video activists of the 1990s); television (the radical Deep Dish satellite network in the US or the local community TV stations in the UK); radio (pirates or local micro-broadcasters); and inevitably the hybrid forms of communication and media that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled. Nor need the 1960s be our historical reference point. The radical wing of the English underground at that time took their cue from the English radical newspapers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some, such as Black Dwarf, took both their revolutionary politics and their titles from such ancestors. Might we not even consider the inflammatory pamphlets of Abiezer Coppe, writing during the English Revolution, as alternative media? On both sides of the Atlantic, working-class organizations and communities have been producing their own media for at least the past two centuries. Now firmly separate, the traditions of socialism and anarchism were at one time more closely con cerned with developing media of political value to both: such projects flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Quail, 1978). To these we can add the publications of new social movements, the political and the sexual, environmentalism, the gay and lesbian movement and feminism. Nor need we stop there. Any compre hensive audit of alternative media activity is almost impossible (which is not to say that such attempts are not without value: Atton, 1996a and Noyce, 1979 present useful guides to the literature, though both are very much products of their time). Many titles circulate in small numbers to specialist or elite groups; most never appear in newsagents or book shops.