Marion Hamm
Marion Hammbiography
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Over the past few years, global movements have been continuously producing public spheres where the distinction between the "real" and the "virtual" is fading away. From encounters in the geographical space of large mobilisations and local preparation meetings on one hand, and the thicket of websites, webfora, email lists, chatrooms and wikis on the other, a new, hybrid communication space is emerging. The practices in this emerging communication space are by far exceeding the expectations attached to the concept of cyberspace as discussed with much fascination during the 80 and 90s. The fusion of virtual and physical spaces, body and technology turns out to be taken much more taken for granted, much more embedded in everyday life than anyone had imagined. So, what does this emerging communication space look like, what are its preconditions, in which situations does it open up and what constitutes its boundaries? The Zapatistas evoked a spot-on vision when they declared their intention to "make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances" in August 1996. This "intercontinental network of alternative communication" would be directed against neoliberalism, it would be a medium by which distinct resistances would communicate with one another. It would search to "weave the channels so that words may travel all the roads that resist". It would not be an organizing structure, nor would it have a central head or decision maker, nor would it have a central command or hierarchies. This network, so the Zapatistas, are us, "all of us who speak and listen".[1] This
intention captures something that has never been articulated
in this way: The
hybrid character of this communication space was recognisable
as early as 2000, when Naomi Klein stated: "The
movement, with its hubs and spokes and hotlinks, its
emphasis on information rather than ideology, reflects
the tool it uses - it is the internet come to life".[3]
Enter: Indymedia A particularly well-known and at the same time paradigmatic example that took on the Zapatista inspiration is Indymedia, a global network of alternative, open publishing news websites. When the first "Independent Media Center" or IMC was set up in 1999 to report about the protests against the WTO in Seattle, it almost came across as an implementation of the Zapatista calls. This perception intensifies when looking at the network of IMCs five years later: It has now grown to more than 150 websites on five continents (although the more active ones are concentrated in the Americas and Europe). According to Chris Shumway, the media activists who first attempted alternative reporting on a shared website at the occasion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1996 were in fact inspired by the Zapatistas. But it took three more years until all the elements for a global, interactive network of communication had come together: alternative media-workers, functioning software, and the concept of open publishing.[5] At
first glance, an Independent Media Center or "Indymedia"
is simply a website providing counterinformation, thus
contributing to an alternative public sphere: Reports
about local and global protests, calls for meetings
and events as well as reports about them, topics like
anti-racism, gender, militarism, social struggles, or
biotechnology.
Open Publishing is Free Software The most outstanding feature of Indymedia websites is the system of Open Publishing: Everyone with access to the internet can upload documents, without login, without password, without any kind of authentification. On most Indymedia sites, these postings appear instantly on the startpage as part of the so-called "newswire". This creates the precondition to "make your own media" in true DIY fashion. Anything from simple text via photos and audio files up to videoclips can not only be produced, but also made accessible for a networked public. In the era of blogging and broadband connections, the technical possibility to upload various types of media seems self-evident. In 1999, this type of software had to be built from scratch. The first version of the Indymedia software, conveniently called "active", was originally developed for the local activist community in Sydney. On 18 June 1999, it was successfully tested on a global level to report about the global action day "Carnival against Capitalism", and eventually used for the first IMC in Seattle. The
emphasis on "do it yourself" is characteristic
for Indymedia. In combination with "writing code",
this approach has an additional, already established
meaning. All Indymedia websites are running on "free
software", i.e., everybody is free to examine the
code of the programs, to use, copy, distribute and change
them according to his or her own needs. Free software
is protected by the GNU public licence, which ensures
that the sourcecode remains freely accessible and can
therefore be further developed. Free software programs
rely on the largely internet-based collaboration of
countless individuals. The rapid improvement and growing
distribution of the free software operating system Linux
over the last three years points to the potential efficiency
of this type of collaboration. Free software signifies
a radically open invitation to participate, limited
(besides access to the internet) only by the willingness
to familiarise yourself with the respective topic and
to accept certain rules as no smalltalk, be accurate,
and "RTFM". This openness effectively activates
a collective intelligence, which can theoretically extend
all over the globe, and practically includes at least
those geographical regions with access to the internet,
and those social groups who are able to use this access.
Bodies and Acting in Virtual Space The Indymedia websites with their protest reports from all over the world are only the surface of a complex network of communication. In spring 2003, it's digital part consisted of 600 to 700 email lists, a wiki[9] with more than 600 users on 2723 pages and an average of 70 chatrooms. In addition, there are countless face-to-face encounters at protests against G8, worldbank or WTO as well as the meetings of local indymedia collectives and various gatherings and conferences. In the days of Seattle, Maurizio Lazzarato sensed the presence of "collective statement arrangements", expressed through bodies in real space as well as through messages in the virtual realm: "A combination of bodies (with their actions and passions) composed of individual and collective singularities" (...); and there is an arrangement of statements, a regime of statements formed from a multitude of statement regimes (...)." Lazzarato states that "the collective statement arrangements are not expressed solely through language, but also through the technological expression machines (Internet, telephone, television, etc.). Both arrangements are constructed in terms of the current relationships of power and desire."[10] The digital back office of indymedia is one of the places where such "collective statement arrangements" are being articulated. Permanent communication in the digital backoffice of Indymedia can lead to weird displacements of virtual and physical space. At the recent UK-wide meeting of the imc collectives in Britain, a participant was heard saying: "Me is not happy about this". Typed into the text box of a chatroom, the sentence /me is not happy
about this For the chat savvy reader, this has more or less the function of a stage direction, and can evoke similar feelings as an unhappy face. In face-to-face communications, such stage directions are actually unneccessary, because the body language is visible. That we are using them anyway shows how deeply engrained conventions from virtual space are in our physical being. The reactions of the chatting body to frequently used abbreviations like "brb" ("be right back") oder "lol" ("laughing out loud") can be very similar to their body language equivalent - disappointment (why is she leaving?), for example, or amusement. After the protests against the G8 summit in Evian in 2003, a participant in the indymedia reporting posted some feedback, which shows how this virtual activity caused physical sensations: "It was exciting, but at times, it was too much, even though we were more people than ever before. The fastness, the urge to do 10 things at a time, a lack of pre-structuring and priority setting pushed us to the limits - no teargas for the webheads, but exhaustion after days on end at the computer, completely forgetting about basic physical needs. It was matrix. One person stayed online for 36 hours. Direct media. The dynamics of 'being there' spread from the streets to the virtual world."[11] During the reporting of large mobilisations, the indymedia back office is buzzing with activity. Consequently, the imc websites are at their liveliest when something is happening in the streets. News from the events in the streets are being passed on via SMS, telephone, radio- and videostreams, email and newswire postings; then checked and confirmed within the chatrooms, summarised and publicised. Those who are in the streets, at blockades or in activist convergence villages are participating in this permanent stream of communication just as much as those who are in front of computers. In those moments, the internet is not anymore restricted to being a tool for communication: it demands presence, relentless like a physical space.[12] What has been celebrated in the 90s as the potential of the internet for freefloating play of identities has translated itself into an everyday practice. In their communications in emails, wikis and chatrooms, many indymedia makers choose to use nicknames. Gender, age and background are not necessarily apparent. However, during intensive interactions, it does not take long to find out how certain nicknames are behaving, how these particular people work and communicate, what to expect and not to expect from them. To discover these things, it is not necessary to ask for the identities mentioned above - and sometimes, the first actual meeting from face to face comes as a big surprise.
Videos - a fresh incarnation of leaflets? The permanent, worldwide communication generates a pool of reports in images, texts and sound. From this pool, a number of videos have emerged. Looking at the indymedia production "Showdown in Seattle", Hito Steierl has shown that these videos don't stand out for their experimental aesthetics. Stylistic devices used in traditional documentaries are not being questioned, political positions are represented in "an aesthetic form of concatenation, which takes over the organizational principles of its adversary unquestioningly"[13]. According to Steierl, the result of this addition is a rather unspecified "voice of the people"[14]. There is no denying that the reference to "the truth" within indymedia ideology may appear naive at times, although some Imcs present themselves differently in their mission statements[15]: "While the mainstream media conceal their manifold biases and alignments, we clearly state our position. Indymedia UK does not attempt to take an objective and impartial standpoint: Indymedia UK clearly states its subjectivity". According to Steierl, "Showdown in Seattle" represents the process of media production in a way that is not fundamentally different from conventional information production in corporate media. However, although the production process in conventional and imc media may be comparable, a few clear differences should be mentioned. Physical Independent Media Centers usually get by with a minimal budget. There is no paid staff. Instead, volunteers are self-organising their own work. In such a self-organised environment, the approach to problem solving differs from the approach in a conventional newsroom.[16] In addition, the brutal police attack against the independent media center during the protests in Genoa 2001 has shown most clearly that IMCs are not a safe working environment. Both characteristics lead to Independent Media Centers being more than a space of production. Equally important is their function as a "hub" within the network of an emerging communication space, and as one position in the process of appropriating technology, especially free software. Since "Showdown in Seattle", dozens of Indymedia videos have been produced, sometimes respectlessly described as 'riot porn'. Often, it takes several months to publish them. The making of these videos allows for experiments with collective ways of video production. For example, "Red Zone", a video about the G8 protests in Genoa, was assembled by video activists from Italy, Ireland and the UK. This process was tedious and full of conflict, and often hit the limits of unpaid, voluntary, non-hierarchical collaboration between groups with different political backgrounds and different aesthetic standards. With regard to the fusion of digital and material space, activist videos are interesting for an additional reason. For years, media activists have been experimenting with internet based video streams in real time. They were mostly watched by only a few, using their own computers. These streams were closely connected to the digital side of the emerging network of communication. As video activism is growing within the global movements, a kind of decentralised video distribution emerged, creating an additional communication channel, an aditional cultural practice. While "Red Zone" was still distributed on video tapes, today's videos are often being downloaded straight from the web and burned to DVD or CD-Rom - often using the facilities at work. At the same time, a renaissance of cinema is detectable: Video screenings have become an integral part of the entertainment choices of the movement, at least in the west, both locally and during large mobilisations. Especially where the movement-multitude speaks many different languages, the moving images might have a function similar to the leaflets of earlier decades: Producing a shared platform, maybe even more, a reference for a shared identity. Sometimes, videos are turning into tools for protest, when, as seen in 2003 during the world summit on information society (WSIS) in Geneva, movies are being projected onto public buildings at nighttime. At this occasion, it was the World Information Property Organisation (WIPO) which ended up as a screen for a movie on intellectual property rights.
Limits of an integrated communication space Does
this mean that indymedia volunteers have arrived right
in the middle of science fiction, technically mediated,
immediately present, whereever the internet reaches?
The communication space is also limited by the very openness that made it possible in the first place. Every mailing list is being chronologically archived. Every email, every page on the wiki is on the same systematic level of importance. There is no central space to archive important documents in a stable way. This points to a more general and at the same time central problem when moving around in the weird space of the Internet: The problem of orientation[20]. Within indymedia, orientation is most likely achieved by that type of knowledge that evolves through participation. Some texts are sticking out from the avalanche of material because many links refer to them. However, the pool of indymedia texts remains complex and chaotic to an extend that even a research team conducting an extensive comparative study on five IMC case studies confused two cities with each other[21].
Preliminary Conclusions One special thing about Independent Media Centers is their function for the communication space of the global social movements. Imc websites are at their liveliest when things are happening on the streets, even though the news value of often up-to-the minute reports during large mobilisations tends to decrease rapidly. At these occasions, the fusion of virtual and physical spaces, including the respective cultural practices, is most intensive. Perhaps this is Indymedia's most innovative contribution to a global alternative public sphere: "Weaving channels, so that the words may travel all the streets of resistance". Channels that are made of software and of the competent use of old and cheap hardware, of bandwidth and donated servers, of regularly maintained webpages. A public space emerges from the combination of protest, free software and an ideology of openness. This space can not be restricted to an overly hyped-up internet, nor can it be limited to an absolute preference for the streets. The event is becoming inseparable from its representation: "The signs, images and statements play a strategic role in this twofold becoming: they contribute to allowing the possible to emerge, and they contribute to its realization.".[22] The
hands-on, matter-of-course approach of media activists,
software developers, protesters and others in embracing
new technologies is a significant precondition for this
process. They are adopting technologies as their own,
as part of their material everyday worlds as well as
a means of communication across the globe, and without
bothering much about the often implied separation of
the "virtual" and the "real".[23]
[1] Quoted in: Ruggiero, Greg. Microradio and Democracy: (Low) Power to the People. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999, p. 43. [2] Online: subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/marcostext.html [3] See Katharine Viner: "Hand-to-brand-combat" in: The Guardian, 23.9.2000. |