From mass to network society and the birth of indymedia

I’ve been recently looking at the foundation and development of indymedia.org as part of the research for my other blog on journalism and new media. When reading about the convergence of new levels of social movement and technology that led to the foundation of the Independent Media Center (IMC), it occurred to me that this represented exactly the processes identified by Manuel Castells as causing the emergence of a new form of social organization: the network society.

Castells (2004) identifies three independent processes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, transforming western civilization from a mass to a network society.

1) The crisis of industrialism, the resulting economic liberal policies that fostered deregulation and liberalization of markets and ultimately led to capitalist globalization.

2) The rise of freedom-oriented social movements, symbolized by the movement opposing the Vietnam War and in later years resulting in the feminist movement, the environmental movement and the anti-globalization movement.

3) The revolution in information and communication-technologies (ICT), most notably the personal computer and the internet.

Now what are the differences between a mass society and a network society in terms of media and how does it relate to the indymedia movement?

To examine the differences I turn to Jan van Dijk, another scholar who has defined the concept of the network society prominantly.  The mass society was defined by ‘social formation with an infrastructure of groups, organizations and communities’ (van Dijk 2006, p. 32). In terms of media that meant access to a limited number of mass media, that were broadcasting in a top-down approach. Power was centralized in a few cultural institutions that occupied the media commons.

Through the advancements in ICT and a growing movement to resist capitalist globalization which had its coming-out party at the anti-WTO protests in Seattle 1999, the indymedia movement was born as a member of this new network society. In the network society, ‘broadcast mass media reaching everyone are accompanied by, and partly replaced by, narrowcast interactive media reaching selected audiences’ (van Dijk 2006, p. 36).

In the words of Sheri Henderson, co-founder of the IMC in Seattle, commenting on the birth of the indymedia movement:

‘The timing was right, there was a space, the platform was created, the Internet was being used, we could bypass the corporate media, we were using open publishing, we were using multimedia platforms. So those hadn’t been available, and then there was the beginning of the anti-globalization movement in the United States. I think it was all of those pieces together’ (quoted in Kidd 2003, p. 59).

I will continue to examine the indymedia movements and its further development in later posts.

References:

Castells M 2004, ‘Informationalism, networks, and the network society: a theoretical blueprint’ in The network society: a cross-cultural perspective, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 3-45.

Dijk J van 2006, The network society: social aspects of new media, SAGE, Calif, pp. 19-41.

Kidd D 2003, ‘Indymedia.org: a new communications commons’, in Cyberactivism: online activism in theory and practice, eds. M McCaughey & MD Ayers, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 47-69