Media Empowerment

“We believe that culture is a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not sit at the end of a one-way media tube and buy things until we look like the people on Friends. With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.”

- from the Free Culture Manifesto

The polarization between the commercial and common property is becoming a part of the art world with much success. Musicians are now easily able to find others who are happy to have their work sampled and altered, books are being written by collaboration between people in different continents, entire encyclopedias, media movements and activist strategies are being organized around the simple philosophy that cooperative creation works. Independent media sites are tracking politicians, recording manifestations to assure more accurate estimates of participants while documenting police hostility, organizing actions and sharing techniques on a global scale, mostly from a grassroots level, and with FOSS software that fits neatly their often anti-corporate political leanings.

IndyMedia, a self subscribed “democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth,” runs a network of dozens of websites in every continent which encourage people to post their own accounts of events in their communities as sources of alternative viewpoints and information. As technology costs have dropped to the point where an affordable digital camera can document events and eyewitness reports can be posted and read around the world in minutes, projects like IndyMedia have grown immensely popular. As both a venue for alternative news coverage and a space for non-commercial unembedded journalism, the Internet has become a massive and important source of daily news and dialogue. Weblogs (or blogs), have exploded in popularity in the last two years, with millions of people learning to voice their ideas and opinions online. Internet media is essentially becoming a two-way system, where participation involves both creation and consumption simultaneously, and as software and technology continue to evolve the media creation is becoming nearly as easy as the media consumption once was. Free blogging systems, nearly all based on FOSS, have progressed to the point that the technical skills needed to setup a simple journal-based website are comparably to those necessary to check a web-based email account. As these skills become increasingly necessary in workplaces and schools, media dynamics of the past, based on elite media creation by a few and consumption by the rest, are evolving into new dynamic of media participation.