A decade of independence

Posted in CULTURE to Previews by Kelly Innes on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

It's easy to forget (now that you have been named the "Person of the Year!" for blogging about your exotic life in Marrakesh and filling out your Facebook profile and we can watch videos of any spectacle, political or not, almost immediately after it happens) that things weren't always like this. When the GEO strike happened a few weeks back, videos of the picketing were published online almost instantaneously, all without waiting for the mass media: the News-Gazette or local television. These videos are hypothetically viewable from anywhere by anybody, placed online either by GEO members or someone else interested enough in capturing and relaying records of the strike.

Such open, independent publishing is as old as writing itself, but the speed and scope with which these communications now take place is historically new. Simply put, given access to mundane technologies, everyday people can now "broadcast" in a way once limited to mass media.

This week marks a possible birthday for this historical novelty: the tenth anniversary of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests and the concurrent beginning of the Indymedia movement, of which the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center forms a part. (Time for disclosure: I volunteer at The Bike Project, a cooperative bike shop located in the UC-IMC, and through my work there I have become involved in the UC-IMC fundraising group.)

ORIGINS OF INDYMEDIA

Beginning November 30, 1999, a group of labor, antiglobalization, and other protestors effectively shut down the WTO's third ministerial conference, delaying negotiations until the next meeting in Doha, Qatar and leading to the perpetually failed "Doha round" of the WTO.

Some very good accounts of the protests have subsequently appeared, including the Rand publication "Netwar in the Emerald City", "Black Flag Over Seattle", and the book Five Days that Shook the World by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

The website indymedia.org emerged as a way to document the Seattle WTO protests, without relying on traditional or mass media, taking advantage of the possibilities offered by open-source software and the internet. The site's first post declares indymedia's aims:

welcome to indymedia

author: maffew and manse

Nov 24, 1999 18:45

The resistance is global... a trans-pacific collaboration has brought this web site into existence.

The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can setup a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in Seattle and around the world, telling the real story behind the World Trade Agreement. (See more here.)

The initial point of indymedia, then, was to provide a platform for other voices and stories about the WTO protests to contest the dominant voices and stories of traditional media. Although the site began as a way to document the Seattle protests (and, incidentally, you can read some of the early, immediate stories about those protests here  and here), the simple tools of computer code, cheap equipment, and a web connection left in place an apparatus that could then be used to tell other stories, in other voices.

THE MOVEMENT SPREADS

Indymedia spread both by setting up similar sites in other cities on the occasion of other protests and by following — as a set of principles for independent — activists coming back from Seattle to places like Urbana-Champaign. In the latest issue of The Public i — a paper published by the U-C Independent Media Center — local labor activist Daniel David Johnson recounts the direct connection between Seattle and the UC-IMC. (Available as a PDF here)

One of the legacies of Seattle, then, has been the propagation of indymedia centers across the world. If some IMCs emerged as an attempt to tell stories about a particular protest, afterwards they became lasting institutions operating as a more or less unfiltered local media outlet. The documents section of the indymedia.org site even features what amount to position papers debating the desirability of any editorial control at all, largely concluding that the less, the better.

LOCAL GROWTH

Along with the virtual spaces offered by indymedia websites, indymedia has also propagated into physical spaces. In 2005, the UC-IMC purchased the Post Office in downtown Urbana, creating a community center that now houses not only The Public i, the radio station WRFU-FM, a space for concerts and other shows but also the Books to Prisoners project and The Bike Project, among others. While such different projects stretch the definition of "media," each shares an aim to open possibilities — possibilities as various as making your own radio show, writing your own article, or building your own bike — and to enable a kind of independent, DIY ethic and to create an alternative community space. Over the last two years, the UC-IMC has also become home to Americorps volunteers, some of whom have been profiled in this very publication! All this, from such humble beginnings!

MARKING THE OCCASION LOCALLY

On Saturday, the UC-IMC will host a tenth anniversary celebration featuring a series of community media workshops — on such topics as radio broadcasting, 'zine making, open source software, operating sound and video equipment — and a panel discussion about indymedia by some of the UC-IMC's founding members and supporters.

The media workshops will take place from 2–5 p.m.; the panel discussion will begin at 5 p.m. The UC-IMC is located at 202 South Broadway in Urbana For more information, take a look at the UC-IMC's article on the topic.