Open publishing,decentralisation,and the rise of new media platforms: reflecting on the IMC experience of Australia

The Australian IMC

The year 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of Indymedia. The last two decades have seen revolutionary moments in the field of alternative media, both from a historical and technological dimension. Indymedia has been one of the key players in this landscape, and reflecting on its experience 20 years later, is useful to try and unpack the factors that have shaped its journey.

The start of the Australia Indymedia collective came with a push towards opening up spaces that would facilitate people in presenting the news stories they wanted to tell, in line with the motto of ‘Everyone is a witness. Everyone is a journalist’. As the work of the Indymedia centres (IMCs) was based on the ability of people to access the Internet, media labs were set up initially in Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne. These spaces offered people access to online computers and the possibility to share technical skills (Pickerill, 2007). Additional centres opened around the country within the space of a few years, with temporary on-site access points occasionally provided by activists during protests; one of the most well-known cases was the Indymedia truck used at the Woomera protest in South Australia in 2002. While small sections of Indymedia continue to operate in the Oceania region today, the Australia chapter shut down officially in 2015.

The weaknesses of the Indymedia network have already been recognised by different scholars. With her work on the Australia IMC in the early 2000s, Pickerill (2003, 2007) in particular, found that the weaknesses of this network were the same elements that ensured its ‘openness’, including its fluidity and the volunteer turnover. Rather than an established type of medium, Indymedia existed in a form that was constantly evolving. The process followed by the activists was mainly based on lessons learned and offered limited space for planning, and Indymedia was deliberately never turned into a professional platform. At the same time, while the volunteer turnover brought in new ideas, it also made it hard to rely on the presence of a sufficient amount of people, especially those with technical skills who were essential to keep the system running. As we know by now, frequent attacks from users who offered racist, homophobic or far-right content – instead of positively engaging in debate – were already a discernible sign of the vulnerability of the network. Yet, as Pickerill (2003) pointed out, ‘openness was retained despite the fragility and threats that resulted from it’ (p. 18).

Challenges and fall of Indymedia Australia

The interviews I conducted last year with six former collective members (writers, editors, and ‘techies’) involved in the establishment and early operations of the Australia IMCs of Sydney and Melbourne, have captured the reflections of the activists while they attempted to appraise their experience with the IMC 20 years later. From our discussions, four critical factors have emerged around the main challenges that have progressively led to Australia Indymedia’s decline.

First, attention was drawn to the important element of decentralisation of the network that characterised the overall structure of the network. Either for similar or different reasons, all the Australian activists expressed their criticism towards this core approach adopted by the global collective. In observing the contradictions within this structural element, one of the former members argued that ‘[…] the lesson learned from it was that decentralising power also enables a whole lot of people who might want to undermine the broader objectives to come in, and have the power to destabilise the whole concept of decentralising power’.

In the context of online activism, the idea of a non-hierarchical organisation that spreads its arms to include views and voices that are often excluded, can be a motivating goal. Yet, bottom up power rising at a large scale, carrying at times differing opinions and priorities, can work at a disadvantage, even to the very organising aims. Lengthy decision-making processes that try to make every voice count are ultimately sensed as frustrating, and the lack of hierarchy ends up being perceived as the absence of effective coordination, rather than a positive feature of the process. The lessons to be learnt here by activist movements are important, and the approaches developed to address these are even more so, as we need to think critically about where a correct balance lies.

The former activists also presented their disillusionment with the practice of open publishing as time progressed and as their experience in media activism matured; they expressed their doubts particularly towards the hard line adopted by Indymedia. As one of them put it, ‘maybe open publishing wasn’t the problem: it was the lack of guidelines and enforcement. It was a free speech fundamentalism that was impossible to change inside Indymedia’.

Practices of open publishing are now widespread across online platforms. The debate on what should be, can be and must be freely expressed has been growing, with little agreement been found so far. The dilemma that Indymedia activists faced in the first decade of the millennium was the first iteration of this freedom of expression crisis that the Internet has brought upon us, in a different form from the one faced with traditional media. Various measures have been adopted by different actors (both state and non-state) to impose limitations on the reach of our voices. With the increase in hate speech prompted by the current availability of channels, such limitations are often regarded as justified, and even needed. Activist movements must develop new approaches that guide their online practices in a way that is inclusive, while causing no harm to individuals and groups.

A number of contextual factors have also been linked to the decline of Indymedia in Australia. First, the impact of 9/11 on the Globalisation movement represented a strong demotivating element for activists, both in Australia and around the world. Second, a changed economic and social context for Australia from the mid-2000s negatively impacted activism opportunities. More specifically, a substantial increase in the cost of life made it harder for activist groups to afford the rent needed to hire places to gather in; it also led to a drastic drop in the amount of time that people chose to devote to voluntary work. Finally, a generational turnover contributed to the decline of the movement, as this was accompanied at times by a loss of that enthusiasm that had drawn people to the movement in the first place.

The last critical factor that has been connected to Australia Indymedia’s decline is the rise of social media platforms. Despite its innovative approach to the Internet and to online technology more generally, the structure and functioning of Indymedia were such that the network was unable to gain a proper seat at the table in the debate generated through this new media landscape. ‘New platforms were emerging, bigger platforms and corporate platforms folk and publishing. All of a sudden Indymedia wasn’t the pioneer in that space anymore and wasn’t as slick or as organised as those other platforms. I think at a certain point people started uploading their videos to other places where it was easier to upload them and easier for people to watch them,’ as one of the activists explained. Another one pointed out how, ‘at the time, there was nowhere else that people could post, because there was hardly any sites that had this open publishing model. […] The impact of social media was that people didn’t need Indymedia anymore’. While these quotes express fairly clearly the sense of obsolescence that Indymedia appeared to generate in the public as social media began to enter the activist space, this last critical factor deserves further unpacking.

Additional reflections on social media and activism

When observing the context of online activism, the aspect of the rise of social media and its impact on alternative media platforms deserves additional reflections. As others have already noted (see for example, Wolfson, 2013), the new global social movements are thriving, thanks to the horizontal, democratic and networked structures that have formed from the new communication technologies that have become available. The claim that has been advanced on these new forms of organising and their accompanying practices, is that they are opening possibilities for a more egalitarian world, while transforming the nature of social change. This is based on their adoption of two key principles, decentralisation and participatory democracy, which are at the foundation of non-hierarchical networks. Yet, several authors (including Carpentier, 2007) have also pointed out that there is a danger in the techno-optimist views that look at these new technologies as key instruments for the empowerment of social movements. These perspectives seem to be based on their own driving ideas on how contemporary political participation functions in a digital world.

Rodríguez et al. (2014) have warned us that ‘[w]ith the recent emergence of so-called new information and communication technologies and online platforms, alternative uses of media technologies are not clearly divorced from their corporate originators. Today, social justice and social movements’ uses of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube remain within the corporate frameworks that underpin these platforms (p. 152). Jeppesen (2016) has also asked questions around the use of Facebook, for example, in anti-capitalist organising, and on the danger of state surveillance its users are exposed to. In the process of ‘producing’ media, people begin to identify themselves as active participants in democratic decision-making; they recognise their role in influencing policy and in shaping the course of progress for their local communities; they also feel inspired to tackle inequalities and human rights abuses. This sense of autonomy that brings together a media collective is also a call to pay attention to the power dynamics that arise within the collective itself. The claim behind autonomous media productions is that their foundations are laid on horizontal forms of empowerment; besides the idea of ‘equal decision-making power’ adopted in its internal structure, the collective also challenges traditional media power and re-organises it by disconnecting its media from corporate conglomerates (Jeppesen, 2016).

Hence, with the rise of commercial social media, the autonomy of online media collectives and social movements has been compromised. This raises significant questions not only in relation to alternative communication, but most importantly on the debated issue of control. A number of poignant cases that are evidence of such control can already be recognised with relative clarity:

In the last 5 years, mainstream power has found ways to use and optimise open publishing to consolidate their power. Examples include the shift in the top 10 most viewed YouTube videos from clips by everyday people to music videos produced by large corporations, or the social media propaganda of the Brexit and Trump political campaigns. The key question here is whether we will revert to mainstream media dominance like the broadcast TV of the 1990s, or whether there will remain an ebb and flow of power across a more balanced representation of people on Earth [Australia Indymedia study participant].

From the experience of Indymedia in Australia, many aspects of which undoubtedly resonate with the IMCs in other parts of the world, a number of points can be laid out for further investigation and reflection. In the first instance, we should be interested in understanding how (and even if) it is possible for online activist movements today to find ways to operate completely independently from corporate ties. Second, we should be curious to explore further the idea of inclusion, which continues to be a driving concept in many politically left-oriented movements, and ask ourselves whether a non-hierarchical decision-making process can realistically (and successfully) take place in the online activist space. Finally, we should inquire about the future course of online activism, and what this practice will look like as it becomes increasingly entangled in the same dynamics of mainstream media it has attempted to evade. The words of one of the founders of Australia Indymedia leave us with the vision of a brighter prospect:

Looking back now, communication technology and practices like open publishing and social media have bridged the gap between personal / small group communication and massive broadcast operations. There is no more of a continuous spectrum from large scale to small scale. I can still imagine a strong and balanced decentralised network of communication and social justice emerging in the grey space in the middle.