Both these images found resonance in Dublin over Mayday when protesters sprayed ‘liars’ on mobile studios. Equally during the Bush protests at Shannon this summer segments of the anti-war movement delighted in disrupting the spectacle of the visit by blockading the media . This portrayal and distrust of the press has been repeated globally, and is also echoed by earlier generations of activists, as a striking miner put it “they only ever show pickets throwing stones or hitting policemen, they never show it the other way. Someone must be afraid that the country will get to know what is really happening on the picket lines. Why else is coverage so biased? ”
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman sketched a ‘propaganda model’ of filters exposing how the mass media plays the role of propagandists, transmitting biased information which mobilises support for established interests. It is worth discussing the model in light of the recent events of the EU Summit in Dublin and the FTAA Summit in Miami. The state management of these events and the relationship of the media to them have provided a paradigm in their own right, one described by the Miami Dade State Attorney as a ‘model…for the rest of the world to emulate when these sort of events take place.’ In discussing democratisation of the media, the idea of democracy itself is worth exploring. Most importantly I will also look at practical responses to over coming the propaganda models that are already in existence.
The Propaganda Model.
The model Chomksy and Hermann outline relies on five sequenced factors. In applying Curran’s history of the radical English press they describe how free-market discipline causes the concentration of the media. The reliance on advertisers also sees the media become a vehicle delivering audiences to advertisers rather than delivering news. The idea of ‘flak’ is the ability of organised institutions to mobilise their resources against the media in an effort to shape it. Concentration creates a symbiotic relationship between news sourcing and the centres of power from which news is derived. The focus of the elites and establishment is what then becomes the content of the media, creating an often one sided interpretation of events. Embedded reporting during the invasion of Iraq saw journalists hounding after American military figures for news instead of seeking it themselves, reporters saw and reported what they were directed to see as the conflict was stage managed and directed to suit the interests of coalition forces. In particular moments of social fissure this becomes glaringly obvious, just as during the poll tax when the media vilified the Trafalgar Square rioters, substantial parts of the population supported it. This adherence to the elites manifests itself most obviously in the ‘anti-communism’ filter which ‘helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests. ’ This mobilisation of the press against perceived enemies will be my focus during discussion of the Miami Model, especially the manner in which it provides a cover for state actions against dissidents.
The Press As A Popular Mobilizer.
The existence of a radical press in Nineteenth Century Britain is an interesting example of the role media can play in society. Even more interesting is the reactions it provoked as a result of it’s mobilising effect on previously passive sections of the population. As Curran points out because publishing costs were low a large strata had access to the press. This lead to a proliferation of papers seeking to ‘support the rights and interest of the order and class to which it is my pride to belong. ’ This phenomenon greatly assisted in the mobilisation of previously passive sectors of society. In the words of one Charterist leader, this media was ‘the link that binds the industrious classes together.’ It was the media that created the Tollpoddle Martyrs. Curran describes how ‘the early militant press thus fostered an alternative value system that symbolically turned the world upside down. ’ Newspapers like the Poor Man’s Gaurdian facilitated the development of a counter-hegemony, that became very obvious in the 1842 general strike for suffrage, over 1,500 were jailed in this mobilisation. In a decade where revolutions swept Europe in 1848, this use of the press as mobiliser for and in articulation of working class interests sparked the same concern that the development of sedititious pamphlets had during the Jacobin agitations.
The existence of a mass press during the stamp act was reliant on the organisation of underground networks of distribution. The illegality of the press meant that it was at a price that was affordable to most people. The stamp acts had effectively priced people out of reading the legal papers or into pirating them. With the stamp acts sabotaged the question faced by the state was how the masses, as the Lord Chancellor put it ‘shall be instructed politically…the most safe for the constitution of society. ’ The answer was to be found in subjection to market discipline. As one prominent press tax repealer put it free trade would ‘give men of capital and respectability the power of gaining access to by newspapers… to the minds of the working class ’ by reducing the cover cost of the ‘official’ press and undercutting the radicals. The removal of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ facilitated this. Economies of scale came into play, new technologies, alongside advertisement subsidised cover costs meant access to media production was very isolated.
State Concern Over The Excess Of Democracy.
In a fashion echoing the elite concerns outlined above, a primary concern of Western elites after the mobilisations of the sixties was how to return them to their previous passivity. A very odd perception of democracy unfurls itself. Under Carter the Trilateral Commission stated how "the vulnerability of democratic government in the United States comes...from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society. ” A paradox if ever there was one. But this is not an overly odd application of the term democracy. One is reminded of South African Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts statement, in 1943 that "with politics let loose among those peoples…we might have a wave of disorder and wholesale Communism. "
When discussing ideas for a democratic media, one should clarify one’s interpretation of democracy. Is it that of a largely passive crowd with formal representation as outlined above? Mine is instead quite the opposite. That is the participation of the crowd directly in society. As Dahlgren described ‘virtually everybody will agree on the importance of the media of communication in shaping the democratic character of society, but fewer, unfortunately, emphasize the importance of democratising the media. ’ The corporate and business model seems ill suited to generating democratic content as their organisation is anti-democratic. As “power goes strictly top down, from the board of directors to managers to lower managers to ultimately the people on the shop floor, typing messages, and so on. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up. People can disrupt and make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. The structure of power is linear, from the top down. " Manufacturing Consent concludes that "the organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent "
Organisations close to the state were quick to recognise the potential of new media technologies and their role in mobilising such participation in politics. The RAND Corporation discusses the role of networked information outlets on the internet in galvanising the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 by disrupting the propaganda of the Mexican state. Describing how ‘there is no single, central leadership, command, or headquarters—no precise heart or head that can be targeted.” They speak of an ‘all channel’ network design that facilitates equal access to knowledge and in producing it. These new networks facilitated by the net ‘will pitch battles for public opinion and for media access and coverage, at local through global levels.” Already the role of this new media has been dramatic. Chiapas might just as easily received the same treatment as the University occupations of 1968 without it. South Korea’s most popular media outlet is an online portal called OhMyNews , it’s motto ‘every citizen is a reporter’ and already it has been attributed responsibility for shifting the balance of power in a presidential election. Next I will examine some aspects of the states response to such mobilisations in the West and the role of the old and the new participatory electronic media within them, such as Indymedia. Echoing an earlier and still prevalent online tradition of open-software, the Indymedia network facilitates open-publishing by those using its sites, its attitude is very much ‘don’t hate the media, be the media’.
The Miami Model
A primary tactic of the state in dealing with these events is to allow the traditional media to de-legitimise the protests, while simultaneously using this cover to attack the new media and the milieu around them. Miami the site of the FTAA protests gave the name to the model after an Indymedia documentary painted a bleak picture of how the media dealt with what is after all democratic dissent. Protesters were marginalised with the police chief describing, "outsiders coming to terrorize and vandalize our city. " One is reminded of the description of anti-war protesters as a ‘minority of a minority’ at the Democratic conference in 1968. Similarly before the Prague IMF demonstrations, the Ministry of the Interior in Prague closed schools, and advised people to stock pile food. The Mayor Of Prague declared that protestors 'will kill if possible, if allowed.' Czech president Havel said that the situation was 'as if we are preparing for civil war and looked forward to it being over. ' Before the Dublin mayday protests the mayor called for the state to ‘ban anarchists’ from Dublin. Bourdieu describes the mainstream media ‘search for the sensational and the spectacular. Television calls for dramatization. ’ With the spectacle of power dramatically on display in the security operations of the state the media rushes into a feeding frenzy. Dramatic headlines about the threat of violent protest demobilise larger sections of the population from involvement. The security operations themselves seem to confirm the sensationalism. When all this is put together, one can see an international pattern where the spectacle generated by the corporate media dissuades one section of the population from political participation outside ‘legitimate’ bounds. The other section is isolated for attack , including the medias around it.
In Miami, as in Iraq, reporters were embedded with state forces. As in Iraq those refusing to be embedded are often on the receiving end of repression. As Ana Nogueira, a reporter for the grassroots TV Network, Democracy Now! found in Miami. "She's not with us, she's not with us" shouted arresting officers, as she was hauled off reporting as police attacked 30 hemmed in protesters . The dynamic between the establishment media and the insurgent electronic media is interesting. After a police raid on the Indymedia Centre in Genoa , The Daily Mail wrote an article accusing a hospitalised media activist of being "in charge of computer systems used to co-ordinate attacks on the G8 summit by anarchist groups." Even more recently, in an act Mark Thomas compared to smashing up communist printing presses the FBI seized two Indymedia servers crippling part of the network for a brief period. One theory is that the seizures were an attempt to disrupt legal action against the Italian authorities after the Genoa raid.
Conclusions.
The criminalisation of dissent by the corporate media and how this has facilitated state repression against new media should be a central concern for those seeking a democratic media, one that promotes participation in the political processes of society. The propaganda model outlines those factors of the corporate media ensuring it is anything but democratic. The question of how we get beyond this is a more difficult one, the most obvious starting point in this transition is promoting the working examples of a democratic alternative media that we have. It has been described how ‘the production of alternative media frequently involves collective action and entails the expression of group interests, it may also lead to collaborative and organised democratic practice. ’ In a Gramscian schema this a recognition of media in a counter-hegemonic ‘war of position.’ As things currently stand, the internet seems to hold most possibility for these creative impulses. The success of this project is largely western, I doubt there will be significant moves towards universal net access in the global south anytime soon. Yet the creation and growth of democratic forums for debate, even as small as they are nonetheless holds the possibility of creating a participant layer which can mobilise beyond itself. One that can act in it’s own interests, as well as mobilising in defence of struggles elsewhere. As illustrated by the stamp acts and subsequent disciplining of the media through free market regimentation: the state has a historical track record in disrupting such mobilising medias.
The Origins of Irish Indymedia.
Concern over the role of the mass media in society has been the subject of much rigorous intellectual exercise on an academic level, giving fuel to core modules in media and sociology courses in third level institutions. You can also be guaranteed that most movements for egalitarian change repeatedly throw up the rather strange figure of the newly politicised individual who uses their turn to speak at a meeting to vent exasperation with the totality of the modern media behemoth and an inability to achieve coverage for their chosen cause within it, lost as they often are in the myth of the media as a fourth pillar within the sphere of liberal democracy. Much of this discussion is justified given the weight attached to the media in contributing to the ideological climate of a society and framing the paradigms through which debate is explored. Equally the media plays a huge role in demobilising populations from political action, or as in the case of going to war in Iraq in mobilising them for support.
Habermas has pointed out that the media plays an equally important role in mobilising and forming new identities during moments of social change, providing a space in the public sphere where common experiences can coalesce into the defining features of a shared sense of community. However if social movement activists laboured over the role of the mass media in the same way critical theorists did, we would still be producing critical articles with no where to publish them. For this reason this essay will move to look at attempts to build an alternative media network by the Irish Indymedia collective, focussing on how the site contributes to the process of ideological change by providing a space where alternative political narratives and minority currents can compete with more dominant institutions. Equally Indymedia contributes to a process whereby the concept of democracy is radicalised, creating movements that operate on a horizontal rather than hierarchical nature.
The global Indymedia network was kick started by the launch of an online open publishing system to disperse news and information going against the grain of mainstream media coverage of the Seattle World Bank protests in November 1999. The formula employed was a relatively simple one, create a website where anyone can publish news and analysis has long as it remains within the parameters of the consensually agreed editorial guidelines. With this at the centre of the networks modus operandi, a huge conceptual leap is made with traditional media outlets with their claims of non-partisan coverage and professional standards. The best of this material, would then be given added prominence by being featured in a central column by an editorial collective that is open to participation by any one who is interested. The aesthetic and philosophy of Indymedia was a whole package that could play be recycled within more geographically specific movements. The process to create an Irish Indymedia site sprang from the experiences of Irish activists who went to the anti-globalisation protests that severely disrupted the Genoa G8 meetings in the summer of 2001.
Indymedia and the Facilitation of Ideological Change
Egalitarian Theory Seminar Essay (Semester 2)
Student number: 01557921
Concern over the role of the mass media in society has been the subject of much rigorous intellectual exercise on an academic level. This gets reflected in the presence of core modules in media and sociology courses in third level institutions. You can also be guaranteed that most movements for egalitarian change repeatedly throw up the rather strange figure of the newly politicised individual who uses their turn to speak at a meeting to vent exasperation with the modern media behemoth and their inability to achieve coverage a chosen cause within this traditionally viewed fourth pillar of liberal democracy. Much of this discussion and exasperation is justified when one considers the weight attached to the media as a core contributor to the ideological climate of a society and how it frames the paradigms that limit debate. Equally the media can play a huge role in demobilising populations from political action, or as in the case of going to war in Iraq in mobilising them for support.
However if social movement activists laboured over the role of the mass media in the same way critical theorists did, we would still be producing scathing articles with no where to publish them. For this reason this essay will move to look at attempts to build an alternative media network by the Irish Indymedia collective, focussing on how the site contributes to the process of ideological change by providing a space where alternative political narratives and minority currents can compete successfully with more dominant ones. Equally Indymedia contributes to a process whereby the concept of democracy and participation is radicalised, contributing to movements that operate on a horizontal rather than hierarchical basis. This then profoundly leads to a shift in the organisational shape of social movements away from authoritarian, top down models to libertarian, participatory ones.
Chomksy and Hermann provide the most brilliant and popular critique of a market driven media. In referencing Currans history of the radical English press they describe how free-market discipline causes the concentration of the media into a few hands. A reliance on advertisers also sees the media become a vehicle to deliver audiences to advertisers rather than delivering news. The idea of flak then captures the ability of organised resource strong institutions to mobilise against the media in an effort to shape it. Concentration of ownership creates a symbiotic relationship between news sourcing and the centres of power from which news is derived. The focus of the elites and establishment is what then becomes the content of the media, creating an often one sided interpretation of events. In particular moments of social fissure this becomes glaringly obvious, just as during the poll tax when the media vilified the Trafalgar Square rioters, substantial parts of the population supported it. This adherence to the elites manifests itself most obviously in the anti-communism filter which helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests. With such clear failings in the traditional role the media likes to claim for itself, it becomes neccesary for radical egalitarians and especially those on the fringes of politics to create their own media in order to contribute to the ideological processes shaping a society.
The global Indymedia network was kick started with the launch of an online open publishing system to disperse news and information striking against the grain of mainstream media coverage of protests at the Seattle World Trade Organisation talks in November 1999. The formula employed was a relatively simple one, create a website where anyone can publish news and analysis has long as it remains within the parameters of the consensually agreed editorial guidelines (eg discriminatory or hateful posts are removed). With this at the centre of the networks modus operandi, a huge conceptual leap is made away from traditional media outlets with their claims of non-partisan coverage and professional standards in favour of recognising the subjectivity of all media. The best of this published material is then given added prominence by being featured in a central column by an editorial collective that is open to participation by any one who is interested. The aesthetic and philosophy of Indymedia as a whole package is one that was recycled easily within more geographically specific social movements.
The process to create an Irish Indymedia site sprang from the experiences of Irish activists who travelled to the anti-globalisation protests that severely disrupted the Genoa G8 meetings in the summer of 2001. While there the futility of trying to get coverage in the mainstream media was overshadowed by the experience of wholly cutting across it through using the means provided by an Indymedia centre provided by activists within the Italian network. Even more provocative to the drive required to set up a project here was the realisation of a growing native movement within the broad template of the anti-globalisation movement. Traditionally on the Irish left there have been a number of publications ranging from tabloids like those provided by the Leninists and free sheets by the Workers Solidarity Movement. A newly emergent social movement however needed a media that displayed different traits to those of more traditional politically narrow publications, as well as one that had the potential to grow with participation and interest in a movement consisting of resource poor organisations. Coming online in early 2002, the Irish Indymedia site grew remarkably quickly on the back of its popularity as a tool for those on the non-traditional left. Quickly participants in these movements began to document their work, almost one of the first features on the site was coverage of an non-provoked baton charge on an anti-privatisation demo at the Burlington hotel.
A few months later, footage taken by Indymedia activists showed Gardai with their numbers removed viciously attacking a peaceful Reclaim the Streets party, the footage fundamentally swayed public opinion away from Garda spin and contributed greatly to a massive upsurge in the popularity of the site outside its activist base. This led to a pheonemeon where the Irish Indymedia site has punched above its weight in comparison to many international sites, while the application of editorial rules against cuting and pasting from other websites encourages fresh and original coverage of localised issues avoiding the flooding by international spammers that cripples sites such as the UK one. While rarely receiving due credit and often smeared by media outlets like the Sunday Independent, the site has been responsible for breaking several national stories in recent years, such as evidence of US use of Shannon airport for refueling and rendition (which the state denied in the early stages of the anti-war movement). The site now has a readership of over 150,000 individuals every month, when this is combined with the participatory focus of the news generation on the site there has been a large shift away from the action reports that characterised the traditional Indymedia reportage style to more sustained and serious analysis of popular struggles and campaigns such as the Rossport saga, the Bin Tax, the ongoing activities of various left wing campaigns as well as individual accounts that highlight injustice and corruption in Irish society.
Theorists with variant political intentions, from Castells to Negri, can agree that the modern economy has been shaped and influenced by communication technology to take on a more networked form. Characterised by the informatisation of production and the development of power relations that are infinitely more post-modern in nature, with supranational entities such as the IMF etc superseding the nation state as the governing force of empire. The movements which struggle against this empire have equally been profoundly shaped by opportunities opened up by new technologies.
Organizations close to the state were quick to recognize the potential of new media technologies and their role in mobilizing such participation in politics. The RAND Corporation discusses the role of networked information outlets on the internet in galvanising the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 by disrupting the propaganda of the Mexican state. It described how “there is no single, central leadership, command, or headquarters, no precise heart or head that can be targeted. They speak of an all channel network design that facilitates equal access to knowledge and in producing it. These new networks facilitated by the net will pitch battles for public opinion and for media access and coverage, at local through global levels.” As Harry Cleaver argues in The Zapatistas and The Electronic Fabric Of Struggle, resource poor organizations were able to mount a serious campaign of international solidarity that effectively limited the action the Mexican state could take against insurrection within its borders, a marked difference to the experiences of University occupations which were massacred a generation earlier.
Cleaver produced his analysis of the on-line use of the net by social movements prior to the existence of the Indymedia network, but parts of the conclusions Cleaver reaches can be carefully weighed against the experience of the Irish node. Habermas has pointed out that the media plays an equally important role in mobilising and forming new identities during moments of social change, providing a space in the public sphere where common experiences can coalesce into the defining features of a shared sense of community. This process is undoubtedly unfolding within the Indymedia audience and is largely comparable to the creation of a radical press in 19th Century Britain. The parallels between resource poor organisations over a century apart using technological innovations (the charterist use of the printing press and Indymedia's use of the net) to create a mass media are strikingly apparent.
This phenomenon greatly assisted in the mobilisation of previously passive sectors of society. In the words of one Charterist leader, this media was the link that binds the industrious classes together. It was the media that created the Tollpoddle Martyrs. Curran describes how the early militant press thus fostered an alternative value system that symbolically turned the world upside down. Newspapers like the Poor Mans Gaurdian facilitated the development of a counter-hegemony, that became very obvious in the 1842 general strike for suffrage, over 1,500 were jailed in this mobilisation. In a decade where revolutions swept Europe in 1848, this use of the press as mobiliser for and in articulation of working class interests sparked the same concern that the development of seditious pamphlets had during the Jacobin agitations. The subjection of this radical press to the stamp acts as an attempt to price it out of the reach of its commoner readership, is certainly a tactic that can not be applied to the modern readership of an Internet portal like Indymedia which is registered on a server in another country, allowing the circumvention of indigenous libel or tax laws designed to sabotage it. There have however been cases where servers have been seized by state authorities at the request of a foreign power such as the recent Brsitol Indymedia seizures and raids in 2004 across a series of Italian Indymedia centres.
Nowhere here am I suggesting that Indymedia Ireland can claim to the voice of a movement comparable to the scale of the British Charterists, but more that in a situation of heightened social conflict the widespread use of a site like Indymedia will undoubtedly play a huge role in countering disinformation spread by government and elite interests. Already there has been momentary portents of this role, and states have responded in kind. For instance why did the Italian police raid the Indymedia centre in Genoa as opposed to any of the parks where anarchist contingents were openly preparing for combat with the police? Obviously the state realises the role information dispersion plays in social struggle and targets mechanisms facilitating this. Within the Irish Indymedia context there have been a number of occasions that allow a sketching of the likely influence of the site in a situation of vastly heightened class struggle or popular protest.
Indymedia and anarchist groups bore much of the burnt of a media orchestrated campaign of fear prior to Mayday 2004. This matched closely what some movement intellectuals have termed the Miami Model after the FTAA protests there a number of years ago, whereby the idea of outsiders coming to terrorize and vandalize our city is widely promoted by both the police and the media. Indymedia largely was able to provide a vehicle where organisers could cut across this limiting of political debate in order to mobilise for the No Borders Weekend events. Interestingly the main libertarian march which was to take place on Mayday itself, was scheduled to begin from Park Gate St. The evening before this event, a senior police officer announced that anyone assembling there would be met with riot police, as the gate was deemed to be within the security perimeter of the EU summit. All the traditional material used to promote this event carried the details of this meeting point. The event was effectively sabotaged. When a sudden decision was made to assemble on O'Connell St, just 12 hours prior to the rallying time the only mechanism for dispersing this information was through Indymedia. Given the increased use of the site in this period, it is not surprising that as many as 5,000 paid heed to this change and gathered to begin the march from the new starting point. This represents a swift change in direction that a movement could not have pulled off even five years prior in the face of changing political circumstances.
More recently Dublin City Corporation has deployed an advanced buffing system to clean posters and stickers off the walls off the city to enforce its postering ban. Yet there has been no real discernible decline in left wing activity has a result of this ban. A traditional media has simply become supplanted by the use of sites like Indymedia. This illustrates to some extent the mobilising potential of a site like Indymedia. In the recent past pirate radio stations have been shown to be capable of facilitating the moving around of large numbers of people as in the organisation of illegal raves in the mid 1990's in the UK or further back to Bologna 1977, when autonomist influenced youth used Radio Alice to check in on police movements during a week long series of mass rioting. Pirate radio however has a head or a centre that can be targetted, dependent on a transmitter which can be destroyed or captured. The immaterial or headless aspect of online publishing, how pages of html are automatically reproduced across thousands of different computers renders the task of disrupting such a media much more difficult in a situation of conflict.
After the dire coverage of the recent “Love Ulster” march in Dublin which culminated in a riot, the number of unique IP addresses logging on to the site leaped from the standard 150,000 average for the month to 250,000 in the three days immediately after the riot. What this suggests is that in a situation of heightened social tension, increasing numbers look to the Indymedia site for discussion and coverage that extends beyond debates within the mainstream media. Indeed, one could go on to say that the dominant Indymedia analysis which contextualised the outbreak of attacks on the police in the growing marginalisation of youth from traditional working class backgrounds and the recent death of Terence Wheelock, seriously shifted how the riot was viewed by many mainstream commentators. In fact Indymedia coverage pointing to the inaccuracies of reportage by Jim Cussack in the Sunday Independent led to subsequent direct attacks on Indymedia editors within the same paper. In the run up to Mayday 2004 again, the Ireland On Sunday paper carried a hatchet job by Deirdre Tynan who “infiltrated” an anarchist meeting. Getting drunk at the social after she admitted to one attendee that “"I feel awful, I feel terrible, I'm a journalist, I've been sent here to write a hatchet job, but I feel sympathetic to what you are doing.” This hints at a major role that has been taken on by users of the Indymedia site, to comment on and highlight inaccuracies and the lack of balance in the mainstream press in a manner which was previously inconceivable by those on the radical left.
Indymedia emerged then from within a movement already characterised by a horizontal organising style that echoed the mechanics of the online networks among the groups planning large scale anti-capitalist demonstrations. Traditionally organisations on the left, rooted either within the social democratic tradition or the Leninist one, have made the argument that centralisation of decision making is necessary in order to navigate situations where political events change at such a frantic pace that a consultation of all the membership may not be possible or where all the membership may not be informed of the situation at hand. Critics of this centralisation of decision making point to how it can lead to a situation where those at the centre of the process can drift in intention from those at the base. There has been some description of this process unfolding within the British Greenpeace organisation and traditionally left libertarians have pointed to the discrepancy of power between parliamentary parties and their extra-parliamentary organisations as a source of tension in situations of mass radicalisation.
Where there is a democractic flow of information on a horizontal level such as within an Indymedia site, there is the opportunity to shortcut the organisational principles of the centralised structures which were traditionally used to carry information and intent around several parts of a movement. To briefly illustrate this with a concrete example, several Polish workers carried out a wild cat strike over working conditions in a Greenhill's distribution centre. Coverage and calls for support on Indymedia allowed them to bypass the slow and legally observant structures of SIPTU to mobilise support across the UK and Ireland, resulting in several solidarity actions coinciding simultaneously. Such swift organisational responses were unthinkable even a decade ago. Again, those social movements which continue to structure themselves on a hierarchical basis are left exposed for their inadequacies due to sites like Indymedia. This became most obvious with the case of the anti-war movement, where organisational weaknesses and democratic deficits could be exposed and proven through horizontal conversation on the site. Equally, a minority political current such as the Grassroots Network Against the War could repeatedly make its case for direct action at Shannon within the broader anti-war movement despite their complete exclusion and smearing by the organisational leadership of the IAWM.
At present those egalitarian forces dependent on a corporate and business media model seems ill suited to generating a democratic content within their social movement organisations. Their media replicates many of the ills that stifle the growth of radical and democratic movements, with as Manufacturing Consent puts it power going “strictly top down, from the board of directors to managers to lower managers to ultimately the people on the shop floor, typing messages, and so on. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up. People can disrupt and make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. The structure of power is linear, from the top down." The structure of a media can very much inform the character of a social movement as illustrated in some of the points above. Externally the Irish Indymedia site helps bolster non traditional experiments in political democracy at a social movement level. Through its readership it builds a counter hegemonic community, generating its own political codes and practices which exist as a counter culture to mainstream politics. From the experience of a few pretty marginal contemporary social movements, and from a historic overview of the role of information and communications we can imagine that alternative on-line medias such as Indymedia may have certain effects in facilitating resource poor organisations to contribute to substantial ideological change in the context of more widespread social conflict in Western Europe. The site also works out a prefigurative idea of how large institutions can be ran in a more egalitarian and democratic society by nternally operating on a democratic, participatory basis as a collective,
