by Leah A. Lievrouw, Malden MA, Polity Press, 2011, 294 pp., $US19.95 (paper), ISBN 9780745641843
There is more to this book than meets the eye. More precisely, there is more to this book than its title suggests. During the past 15 years, we have seen a remarkable procession of monographs, articles, book chapters and textbooks that have dealt with that often-elusive notion of ‘alternative media’. On the face of it, Leah Lievrouw seems to have simply added another volume to a growing pile. Her title, Alternative and Activist New Media, appears general and perhaps even a little redundant (what contemporary study would not be concerned with new media?). Her case studies, arranged under five broad headings - culture jamming, alternative computing, participatory journalism, mediated mobilization and commons knowledge - rehearse the arguments for alternative media and the media of new social movements that are to be found elsewhere. Olga Bailey et al.’s Understanding Alternative Media (2008), for instance, shares many of Lievrouw’s interests in media that serve specific communities and that enable participation in media production. Likewise, Lievrouw is also interested in exploring the connections between alternative media and dominant, centralised media (whether complementary, agonistic or antagonistic). Christine Harold’s study of oppositional rhetoric (OurSpace, 2007) is a clear antecedent for many of Lievrouw’s arguments about how culture jamming might be enacted and its incorporation resisted.
I do not wish to suggest that the present book is lazily derivative of these and other works in the field, rather to emphasise continuities and (it has to be said) the apparent limits of alternative media scholarship. In other words, there is a familiarity to many of the cases examined here: Adbusters, the Critical Art Ensemble, Indymedia – all have been the subjects of many previous studies. Similarly, the historical and theoretical wellsprings of the book are familiar: the roots of culture jamming are seen to lie in Dada and Situationism; Melucci’s theory of new social movements underlies contemporary online activism. Lievrouw’s contribution lies not in her choice of cases and their contexts, but in her argument for the book as a whole, an argument that her book’s title belies.
The chief argument of the book is to consider alternative and activist media projects beyond their function as foci for mobilising information and as spaces for the recreation of knowledge. Instead, Lievrouw wants to argue for their significance as processes of “participation and intervention in the creation of and sharing of meaning” (p. 4). The generation of knowledge at the individual level thus becomes a locus for communicative action that can operate socially across media platforms and into the lived world. While at the outset of the book Lievrouw puts aside ontological disputes over the real and the virtual, she returns to explore mediation as a social, participatory process in her final chapter, where she essays a generous positioning of mediation as lived experience that brings together activist forms of communicative action with interventions with communication technology.
In this respect, her position resembles that of Clemencia Rodriguez, who makes similar claims for what she terms ‘citizens’ media’. For Rodriguez, media practice may be understood in a performative sense, where individuals and groups use media to experience the world at the same time as they construct it for themselves. The political power of mediation as performance lies in its capacity to re-appropriate public spaces and to re-integrate communities, or indeed (as I think Lievrouw might argue) to produce communities. Rodriguez finds the significance of what we might term ‘mediatised performativity’ amongst indigenous peoples, particularly those under threat of violence (as she shows in Citizens’ Media Against Armed Conflict, 2011). Lievrouw’s achievement is to find similar significance beyond physical threat and territorial marginalization. Where Rodriguez’s citizens’ media projects work within specific communities that are more or less isolated from the ideologies and rituals of the mass media, Lievrouw’s cases present media performance as resistance both within and against dominant media technologies and institutions. It is here, though, at the end of the book, that I would liked to have learned more about how Lievrouw might apply Jesus Martin-Barbero’s notion of rituality to alternative media. There is a tantalizingly brief reference to mapping rituality onto “new media infrastructure”, understood as an interaction between artefacts, practices and social arrangements (p. 229), but Lievrouw finds that undertaking to be beyond the scope of the present book. This is a shame; to refract alternative media theory through the lens of media rituals would be to place the mediatised performance of alternative media alongside the important work already being done in the study of mass media rituals. Nick Couldry’s Media Rituals (2003) has already problematized the distinction between the ‘media person’ and the ‘ordinary person’. If alternative media as a social practice aims to erode this distinction, then Lievrouw’s book becomes an important step towards a study of alternative media rituals as social practice.
© 2012, Chris Atton