Indymedia: Keeps Getting Bigger and Better

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday February 03, 2003 03:27 by Graham Caswell - Various caswell at indigo dot ie

In Ireland too!

The Independent Media network has gone from strength to strength in the three years it has existed and now provides an important alternative perspective to commercial media. In Ireland Indymedia.ie is part of this story and has just finished a very successful first year.

Indymedia Ireland is part of a large and growing network of 'Independent Media Centres' around the world. Started just three years ago during the demonstrations surrounding the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, the Indymedia network now consists of 108 regional, national and local groups, known as Independent Media Centres (IMCs). Each national or local Indymedia centre runs a website and some also publish printed material, videos, CDs and film.

Independent Media Centres are fed by tens of thousands of activists, observers and volunteer reporters who provide first-hand accounts of events and activities around the globe. The Indymedia network is entirely non-profit and non-commercial and positions itself as an alternative to traditional corporate-owned and advertising-sponsored media. In terms of numbers of contributors Indymedia is already the largest news-gathering organisation in the world. A new Independent Media Centre opens every few weeks and Indymedia readership is consistently and rapidly growing.

Irish Indymedia is just over a year old but already over 26,000 stories, articles, notices, sound recordings, press releases, photographs, video clips, opinion pieces, exposés, rants, propaganda, fantasies and other bits of content have been posted. Not only has Indymedia.ie broken many national stories, but it has provided in-depth information and coverage on important issues (such as US military use of Shannon and the destruction of Carrickmines Castle) months before commercial media sources picked up the stories. Indymedia is a valuable source of news and information.

Indymedia Ireland is completely free for everybody and anybody to publish news, information, opinion, photographs, audio or even video, unconstrained by influence from advertisers, career colleagues, official contacts, lawyers, editors, owners or anybody else. Anybody who feels they have something to say can express themselves without requiring permission from anybody. You don't even need to be able to spell.

However it is wrong to say that "any nutter can pass off anything he or she wants as fact", as a recent critic said. Any nutter can TRY to pass lies, fiction or illusion as fact, but few get away with it. This is partly due to the work of the volunteer editorial group who will delete material that is obscene, blatantly untrue, personally abusive or otherwise infringes the very liberal editorial guidelines. But even more important is peer review, the process that allows any and all readers, listeners and viewers to respond to what they have read, listened to or seen and to comment on it. If you don't believe or don't like something that is written on Indymedia.ie then you can say so - right then and there. You don't have to depend on the discretion of a letters editor.

What drives Indymedia is the increasing development and accessibility of information technology. It is more difficult for police to get away with beating protestors when many of them are carrying video cameras or photographic telephones. When such democratic news-gathering technology is married to the global distribution power of the Internet then many traditional bottlenecks in social conversation are removed. Editorial attitudes, advertiser's perspectives, enslavement to market demand and other distortions become less and less important.

Open, democratic and genuinely independent media, like the world it reflects, is certainly rough around the edges, contradictory and sometimes facile and if it were one's only source of information one would have a distinctly warped view of the world. But no less warped than if one's worldview were filtered by commercial sponsorship and market demand. By offering an alternative to mainstream commercial media Indymedia highlights the distortions and the omissions of market-motivated information gathering and sharing. Which is probably why its so popular.