Oppositional and Activist New Media: Remediation, Reconfiguration, Participation

Leah A. Lievrouw

Proceedings Participatory Design Conference 2006

This paper provides an overview of what the author terms “oppositional and activist new media,” which, in her definition, includes tactical media as well as independently produced news (indymedia, gnn, etc).

There is a tension between a “traditional view of the media environment:” hierarchical, media is produced and distributed by a content cartel and consumed, and an alternative view of a “media environment:” “a venue for participation, speech, interaction, and creativity.”

It’s important to note that a “traditional view” might not be a historical view. That’s assuming I’m making the distinction between those terms correctly. Let me clarify: I don’t disagree with the author’s characterization. I just think it’s important to note that what we currently think of as a “traditional view” may not have always been the traditional view. While I certainly don’t maintain that newspapers or radio stations were ever more conducive to “participation, speech, interaction, creativity,” than so-called “New media.” The example of newspapers before they were monopolized (i.e. Reuters, the Associated Press) comes to mind. Much of the homogenization and monopolization of media content may have only happened in the last one hundred years.

Part One: “1990s Era Media Ecology: Two Visions,” discusses the vision of the web as “decentralized and thus inherently democratic,” (the WELL, Californian Ideology) with the passage of the DMCA, Bono Copyright term extension act, etc. which were heavily lobbied for by major media firms.

Lievrouw then explains that many have bemoaned the alleged demise of “the early ‘frontier’ vision” of people seeking empowerment through participation in the new media environment. But that many groups “have adapted almost as quickly as … barriers have been erected, using new media and information technologies to ‘talk back’ to mainstream media culture.” She breaks down “oppositional and activist” new media into genres: culture jamming (RTMark, Negativeland, Detournement), alternative computing (hacking), mediated mobilization (social networking, smartmobs, filesharing), and indymedia (indymedia).

This is followed by a list of “features of oppositional and activist new media:” small scale (diy), interventionist (ex: scp), subcultural literacy (Get Your War On), Ironic (scp, RTMark), perishable (ephemeral), collaborative, heterotopic (T.A.Z.s).

Implications for participatory design:

Under conditions of hierarchically organized production “‘access’ to media and information technologies has been more or less synonymous with the availability of various products, systems, or services. It permits participation only in the sense of reception or consumption.” “In contrast, the governing principles underpinning the new media and information technology environment have more to do with voice and affiliation than with property.” It’s not clear here if the author is referring to the “features of oppositional and activist new media,” above, which seems unlikely. If she’s referring to a different set of principles (Murray? Manovich? Lessig (more likely)?) it doesn’t say. It’s not entirely clear how this is significant to participatory design, though it obviously has quite a things in common (bottom-up, participatory, community-based).

Reconfiguration, Remediation:

“Participatory design of new media and information systems increasingly is based on reconfiguration, that is, the modification and adaptation of technologies as needed to suit particular purposes.” Then Remediation (Grusin and Bolter).

Oppositional and activist new media projects are “‘laboratories’ where users resist the fixity of traditional systems, and negotiate and shift the boundaries of old and new media.”

“Participatory design in this environment is necessarily recursive, in the sense that, participation is both the means of designing usable and meaningful systems and content, and because participation is also he goal or outcome of well-designed technologies. Designing for participation means designing for access, designing for reconfiguration, and designing for remediation.”