Old face new media
The Old face of New media v. the New face of Old Media
Too much information? Web 2.0 getting a bit much? Thinking about retiring from the electronic age and pining for a time when it was enough to read a daily paper and send your friends birthday and christmas cards.
You may be suffering from New Media burn out! But don't worry! You're not alone.
We're all interactive now!
From wikipedia -
Web 2.0 the phrase "Web 2.0" hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web. Technologies such as weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services such as eBay and Gmail provide enhancements over read-only websites.
Indymedia was a pioneer of this kind of website. A site where you could provide the news, and collaborate to create reports of local and global events ignored by corporate press.
There was such a need for radical politics, marginalised communities and direct action protest to be covered in a non-mainstream way that it was almost inevitable that something like Indymedia open posting technologies should come along to server that community. It's something that activists and media activists can be legitimately proud of.
As Indymedia grew and groups started cropping up everywhere including over 15 cities in the UK everything is good. Everyone gets excited and starts new projects within the network. Global days of actions happen and new services are created. A phone message box where messages left are uploaded to the internet as mp3 files. Using cheap satellite technologies to create Indymedia centres in rural camp locations.
But 8 years on since the start of Indymedia and in the UK some people have been holding the fort for some time now. Face to face communication of the imc-uk collective are increasingly sporadic. The last well attended ones were in preparation for the 2005 G8. New initiatives are hard to get off the ground, and changes to established technology takes a long time too. Part of the problem is that it's just boring to do the same thing over and over again no matter how vital and inspirational the result is.
Indymedia UK the website and extended family of volunteer news reporters who would identify themselves as part of the network are provide a vital work in the communication and recording of action and protest for radical social change.
The idea of open publishing is hardly new now is it? Everyone's got either a myspace, facebook, custom blog etc . Why would people waste time reposting their news to a centralised place when they can get it out to a wider audience.
One of the reasons that Indymedia is facing trouble moving forward is because there are such lighting quick movements and huge investments being made in the area being made by Corporations and smaller start-up companies. Indymedia is too big to react quickly enough to keep up.
And while large parts of the network are falling apart about without people seeming to notice, there are a lot of spin-off projects happening which hopefully will be reincorporated into the core of Indymedia. Either that or they'll may end up replace Indymedia altogether.
There are several areas where Indymedia is falling behind what other sites are offering technically. perhaps the most obvious one is in the area of video distribution. Let's have a look at that specific area.
Case Study – Video Distribution and the Indymedia network
Let's take the example of Video and see what's happening with global indymedia networks.
Here users face a legitimate question, Why put video on UK Indymedia or other indymedia videos sites when it's easier to watch and you're gong to get loads more hits on YouTube? You'd have to be a real purist to do that. You can't even click and play video hardly anywhere on Indymedia sites! While there are valiant attempts to restart and upgrade the global Indymedia Video site, it's slow work.
YouTube is an incredible visual encyclopaedia of just about everything happening now and a lot of stuff in the past. Let's enjoy it while we can. But make sure to download you best clips cos it's going to be a bit disappointing when all pirate content is finally taken off line due to law suits and maybe the whole site if google who own it can't work out a way of making enough money from it.
Apart from the fact that it's pretty sad to be forced to put your content up on a website that is corporate driven, sponsored by corporate adverts, and actually has no interest in social change at all, YouTube is cool ( choke!).
But, actually we can do a lot better. If we use existing ethical and pirate technologies we can do so much better. And if you're going to put a bit of time into trying to distribute ethical, social justice content you really have a duty to do better.
Many people are now consuming their TV series by downloading or swapping wholes series of programmes via file sharing networks. In the same way radical and non-corporate video projects are taking advantage of the same technology and networks to get their message out.
Most clued up media activists are developing strategies which incorporate YouTube as only one of the video outlets they use. The goal to wean people away from the corporate media tit.
Why can't the underground media networks create a decentralised network of video content that can be searched as easily as the centralised corporate video servers?
Actually they can and it's happening right now.
Projects like VisiononTv from Undercurrents, Ifiwatch.tv, Engagemedia.org (Australia) and numerous global Indymedia video spin-offs are linking up their databases to create decentralised search tools that will greatly increase the profile and possibilities of social justice video online. This is being co-ordinated by a rebel alliance of Indymedia related groups called Transmission.
Transmission is using RSS feeds to share content between their sites and create decentralised searches. They are also defining a new Metadata standard to make this searching and republishing of content even better. You may not have a clue what this means but it's dead exciting believe me. It means that we don't necessarily have to have a big Indymedia server hosting Video content centrally. We can organise our video files like our politics, decentralised with good horizontal communications.
Using open source tools like Miro the Video podcast player, these video projects hope that once you start watching video in this way you won't want to go back to YouTube or it's evil cousins. Miro allows you to subscribe to different channels of video content, some are themed by subject and some are just the pick of the channel editors. You can even subscribe to YouTube channels in Miro as well and it sneakily downloads those videos for you to keep if you want to as well.
VisionOnTv a new online video project from the award winning video activist collective Undercurrents is just about to be launched in the UK. Is going to source video from all over the globe and retransmit it via a customised version of the Miro player. When users download the player, it will automatically download a selection of programmes and reports sourced and edited by the Undercurrent team. Their goal is to create 30 minutes of high quality downloadable content a day for their channels. Now that's something to look out for.
Resources
Miro player http://getmiro.com
Indymedia uk Join the imc-uk-network list to find out what is going on and get involved http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-uk-network or find your local collective here http://lists.indymedia.org
Transmission network : A global network of video collectives working to use and create tools for Video distribution for social change. http://transmission.cc
VisonOnTV: A Online TV project, a series of edited channels from undercurrents.org the award winning activist video collective. http://www.visionontv.net
Clearerchannel.org: A source of activist videos especially environmental and culture jamming. Also experimenting with using Media RSS feeds. http://www.visionontv.net
The Pirate Bay : Download whole series for free with no adverts. Do it and then teach your Gran!
SuitcaseManuals.net: Many tutorials and how to-guides for downloading distributing Video online and pirating DVDs.
