Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Needed: A growth spurt for online media

By Peter Chen - posted Monday, 18 April 2005


As On Line Opinion reaches its fifth birthday, it seems an appropriate time to ask “when will alternative media come of age in Australia?” The question is not simply one of introspection, but is deeply political too. Media, in a mass society, forms the basis of the social and political nervous system. If it’s too primitive we flop around like social molluscs. Too specialised, and we're easy prey to simple viruses and rapacious memes of pure ideology.

The explosive growth of the Internet, driven by its unique combination of simple interface, thanks Tim Berners-Lee, and robust interoperability, thanks Bob Kahn and Vinton Cerf, continues to yield new applications for communication and participation. It was not long after the coining of the short lived slogan “information superhighway” that the democratising power of an uncensored, uninterrupted, global communications technology caught the imagination of new social democrats and fringe media proponents to spawn a range of new and alternative media channels across the globe.

The growth of these services reflects our experience in other forms of online commerce. We find an eclectic mix of clicks and mortar. There are pre-existing operators such as Green Left Weekly and Choice Magazine that have successfully leveraged their existing channels into the new environment and wholly new startups like Crikey! and On Line Opinion.

Advertisement

Following the anarchist maxim, the destructive urge is the creative urge, the tendency for the various clicks and bricks and their vernal dot.coms to succeed has not been clearly predictable. What has been predictable is that the media landscape has been changing dramatically, and in any highly dynamic environment entrenched players were never going to remain passive for long. They change, either for reasons of caution, or because they too see something special about going online.

But it is time to question whether the growth of alternative media in Australia has lived up to its proponents' expectations and make some assessment of the potential for these forms of communications vehicles in the future. This is because, at one level, alternative media's role in our society has never been more critical, but at another it's never been more marginal. For all our hopes of an information revolution, an opening of knowledge and shared understanding, the bombs still rained down on Iraq for what we know was at worst an outright lie, and at best the thinnest of pretexts to wage an unholy war. The optimism expressed during the 1990s for a new media dawn driven by the Internet now appears naive and idealistic, foolish even.

We might pose two questions here. First, why does Australia's alternative media landscape remain relatively sparse, with few interesting, dynamic alternative news and current affairs journals and channels online? Second, at the global level, has the rise of an alternative media realised much of its democratising promise?

In Australia we can look to a number of key publications such as On Line Opinion or The Drawing Board, that have expanded the reach of commentators, practitioners, and academics to a far wider audience than ever before. The number of academics who have come down from their ivory towers to write 1,500 words for On Line Opinion show that there's both a demand for expert opinion, and a willingness of experts to place their work before a wider audience. The new popularity of blogging shows the next phase of this cultural shift and RSS syndication promises to open the way for greater control of media content at the desktop level. Take that, you media moguls.

Argumentum a contra we can see this as exception rather than rule. Numbers of new media vehicles remain small and the nature of their coverage erratic. Aspects of popular public policy, information technology and postmodern analysis are well catered for online, but Australia certainly hasn't seen the growth of creative applications for democratic media that have arisen internationally. None of the mainstream media channels online are more than advertising blanks for their offline offerings, and few innovations, such as Margo Kingston's webcast show, have been initiated or lasted long.

Economics, as always, is the reason - or maybe consumer demand. Research conducted by the Australian National University during the last federal election reveals that the major media channels for the political news of the nation are the same as they were before the Internet appeared. There are radio, television and newspapers. What percentage of Victorians in their survey read a blog? Zero. Round that up from the raw figures? Still zero.

Advertisement

But the unrealised potential remains. It is true that the University of Wollongong's Brian Martin noted in his 1998 book Information Liberation that “The futility of seeking media democracy becomes even more apparent when the scale is increased to audiences of hundreds of thousands or millions”, but this is a misconception that the power of the Internet has put down for good.

Systems like Kuro5hin.org's voting system or e-the-people.com's page ranking algorithm have introduced new, democratic publishing systems that have reconfigured the notion of editorial oversight. But we haven't seen these introduced in the Australian environment and Australians interested in these forms of collaborative publishing tend to go to these, largely US, services, a tendency that drains these authors away from Australia into environments that often lack much Australian content. It turns out you don't need to flee to a HECS haven to contribute to the brain drain.

Similarly, informed participants in online publications are limited. Many academics remain loath to move outside of the peer reviewed publication system: a system rich in academic credibility, but poor in the number of readers. The University of California's Bruce Bimber recently chided social scientists at the ANU on this front, arguing that discipline is suffering a crisis of legitimacy. This is not because it is necessarily poorly regarded, but because it doesn't believe that its work is important enough to publish and publish in a timely manner. Vehicles like On Line Opinion and its brethren put this claim to the lie, but we need to question on what basis those of the tenured intelligentsia who fail to publish in these pages believe they offer public value.

Globally, the situation is more complex and there has been a range of impressive publications spawned online from the New York Time's online service with its excellent customisable functions, to the Women's eNews a virtual newswire service for issues of interest to women. Slashdot's subversive technology coverage has resulted in the “slashdot” effect, boosting referrals to a range of smaller publications online, while at the P2P level we see some very interesting creative uses of bulletin boards to cut around government censorship in China, often at great risk to authors and readers alike.

But while we can talk about case examples there remains limited evidence of a wholesale impact on the quality of public discourse. The Iraq invasion shows how the subtlety and nuances of the online press can be undercut by a shock and awe campaign not run by the Pentagon, but by their primary allies in the newsrooms of News Corporation.

And the empire continues to strike back. Apple Corporation - long a darling of the “technati” - has recently launched legal action against some of its own alternative media press over leaks to their websites about new product offerings. This is a lawsuit that challenges the rights of online publications to conceal their sources of information - even though the White House has found that the proliferation of obscure online journals useful in masking republicans posing as journalists to ask “Dorothy Dixers” during media briefings.

In response to the integration of media management on the US Right, American liberal bloggers have begun actively caucusing strategies to manage their information outputs. The last federal election in Australia saw a proliferation of anti-candidate websites (such as www.johnhowardlies.com) run by anonymous authors.

The optimists need to recognise that where we have information, we also have disinformation. Democracy, as a practice, is messy. It's hard, and - for all that the power elites like to claim their adherence to its values - is often in contradiction to the desires and objectives of the governments of the day which see the mobilising of public consent as instrumental.

The control of media messages and the resulting creation of meaning, even through outright fabrication, mark the central tenet of political power in our post-industrial age. To butcher Baudrillard, “Simulation has replaced the real. White is black, black is white.” For every advance in open and democratic publishing, we must expect a response, a counter-manoeuvre and attempts at subversion and negation. It’s time for alternative media online to grow up, real fast.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All

Article edited by Alan Skilbeck.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Dr Peter John Chen is a lecturer in politics and public policy at the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Peter Chen

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Peter Chen
Article Tools
Comment Comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy