Towards a Considered View of Citizens' Media

The second ECREA 2012 keynote speaker this morning is Clemencia Rodríguez, who will be shifting our focus further towards citizens' media. She notes that it is important to take historical precedents seriously – reacting against the popular representation of recent political unrest as driven and determined by social media, and as leaderless revolutions.

But media have always played a role as mediators, of course – in political communication, social actors negotiate their identities through interaction; media effects theory has this wrong. The visibility of today's ICTs has led to a resurgence of media effects theory, and this needs to be addressed. This is also a call to move beyond a focus merely on 'big data' as the central source of information; such big data need to be contextualised and placed in perspective by connecting it with other forms of research.

When this is done, it highlights, for example, how the activities on Tahrir Square had been in the making for several years – it uncovers social movements of dissent which have a long history in Egypt under Mubarak, and which learn from one another across national boundaries. Communication is necessary to galvanise political action, of course, but this requires multiple forms of communication, online as well as offline, and physical as well as non-physical. This often also involves a coalition of different groups, who bring very different skills and abilities to the common cause.

Interaction with the mainstream media also remains important, and is approached very differently by different activist movements. This may also shape coverage by local and alternative media, in counterdistinction from the mainstream, which aim to more fully represent the lived experience of local populations.

A second challenge is to take communication seriously – to move beyond simplistic notions of how specific individual communication technologies may be used, and to more fully understand the intersections of different communication processes and techniques in specific local contexts. What must be considered here is the mobilisation of communication technologies by local community communicators to make things happen. This also involves performative uses of media, where local media model desirable communicative situations and thereby also change reality.

Thirdly, the political economy of media and communication technologies must be considered: the question of information and communication haves and have-nots is often oversimplified in our understanding, for example, and the real complexities in specific local and national contexts are frequently ignored. This is especially important in the context of Web 2.0, which rides off the productivity of peer-to-peer movements but uses it to generate new forms of commercial exploitation.

Finally, we must take the field seriously – we must be aware of existing research and connect our own work to this body of work. Too many studies, Clemencia says, operate in a vacuum and are clearly unaware of the long history of citizens' media, approaching their subjects as entirely new phenomena.