Disclaimer: all images and original texts belong to their rightful owners. Chapter 17 of the book "International Communication. A reader", edited by Daya Kishan Thussu.

1. AUDIENCES AND
READERS OF
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA:
THE ABSENT LURE OF
THE VIRTUALLY
UNKNOWN
John D.H. Downing

2. ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: A
DEFINITION
 There is not a tidy definition of alternative
media due to:
 The risk of requiring them to be evaluated by
standards peculiar to large-scale mainstream
media.
 The multiplicity of formats and technologies
involved.

3. ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
ACTIVISTS
 They represent the most active segment of the so-
called “active audience”.
 We should pay attention to them because:
 Global trends to giant media corporations and the
international growth of anticorporate sentiment and
action create an important setting for understanding
small-scale oppositional media.
 The multiple social roles of myriads of alternative
media constantly expand on Internet and elsewhere
(and they don’t necessarily have a radical agenda).
 The actual and potential roles of extreme rightist
alternative media and their appeal.

4. INITIAL RESEARCH
PRIORITIES
 Incorporate the play between alternative-
media uses with their frequent focus on
challenging power structures, and
mainstream-media uses, with their more
typical focus on hegemonic integration.
 Propose a political ethics of listening.

5. LANGUAGE AND AESTHETICS
OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
 Italy’s L’ Ordine Nuovo
 Weekly newspaper established in 1919 in Turin by a
group of admirers of the Russian Revolution.
 Strongly supported the creation of soviets in Italy.
 Problems with language.
 Soviet samizdat media.
 Very limited raw material.
 Originated from the dissident movement of the
Russian intelligentsia.
 It had around 200,000 readers on average, and many
of these readers had positions of cultural power and
authority.

6. THE WEAK APPETITE
FOR USER RESEARCH
 The reasons for alternative-media activists to
not engage in user research do offer a
valuable role to politically engaged academic
media researchers.
 However, audience images are always
inscribed:
 The institutional according to institutional goals.
 The academic according to methodological and
other cientific discourses.
 And the audience’s image according to cultural
codes for good taste and decent lifestyles.

7. VIEWS OF AUDIENCE
AGENCY
 Don’t hate the media! Become the media!
 The subjects (agents) of struggle can become the
subjects of information (Downing, 2001:278)
 Postmodernist analysis of audience agency by
Amercrombie and Longhurst (1998).
 With the diffusion of commodity-exchange-based
spectacle via mass media, the world has recently
added an extra cultural dimension in which, in our
habitual role of being audiences, we are also
‘performing for an imagined audience’.
 Yet, our ‘narcissistic’ responses as
performers/audiences lead mostly to an interest on
the management of appearance.

8. VIEWS OF AUDIENCE
AGENCY
 This views have an interest on amateur
musicians and on ludic agency in fandom.
 But they tend to lead not to any focus on the
extension of the public’s potential to
communicate independently.
 They pay attention only to highly bounded
consumer culture options, ignoring the rest of
the world.

9.  As media activists researching alternative-
media users, we will be simply ourselves
wearing our other hat, switching from ‘us the
objects’ to ‘we the subjects’ of media
communication.
 This could substancially reduce the
‘knowledge-for manipulation’ factor that
characterizes conventional research on media-
users.

10. CASE STUDIES
 The “wall” newspaper and rabselkory:
 Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and North Korea.
 Editorial control and guidance by Party cells and the
Communist Youth organization.
 British anarchist press reader-writers:
 Honesty and credibility
 No money making involved
 Great variety of the readers’ motivations and uses.
 People’s radio in Milan:
 Sufficient financial resources
 Very often students
 Communication with a diverse audience was not easy

11. PRIORITIES ON THE ANALYSIS
OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA USERS
 Alternative media users juxtapose (To place side by
side, especially for comparison or contrast) a prior
power/resistance audience dimension to the new
“diffused-audience” dimension they put forward,
without engaging with their mutual imbrication
(overlapping of edges) and its implications.
 Incorporating this mesh into our models is the first
priority.
 Not to translate our commitment as alternative-media
activists into a dystopia (a hypothetical or imaginary
society) of incessant and compulsive public
communication, we have to listen and give voice to
others.

12. CONVENTIONAL RESEARCH
ON MEDIA USERS
 To understand mainstream media producers’
and journalists’ relation to users, it is useful to
begin from the distinction of ‘single-loop’ and
‘double-loop’ learning.
 In mainstream media ‘single-loop’ denotes an
image of media users that professional
communicators derive from each other within
their own close circles.
 ‘Double-loop’ signify audience-images they
might draw from external resources.

13. CONVENTIONAL RESEARCH
ON MEDIA USERS
 Single-loop learning is the result of
instrumental means-end reflection on human
action.
 Double-loop learning is the result of reflection
on the norms, values, and social relationships
which underpin human action. Seriously
reflective practice is a function of double-loop
learning.

14. IN OTHER WORDS…
 The history of mainstream media-user
research is firmly anchored within this
marketing dynamic:
 Expensive
 Initially secret
 Quantified
 Very loosely estimated broadcast ratings
 Based on particular programs and products
 Focus groups whose role is to warn of box-office
disaster
 Producers ‘single-loop’ learning

15. ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTES
 Social movements have suffered from
reductive definitions:
 Mob model favored by 19th century
commentators.
 Rational actor model influenced by facets of the
US Civil Rights movement.
 New social movement model (19080’s – 90’s)
based on readings of the feminist, peace and
ecological movements.

16. ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTES
 Debates have opened around the notion of ‘contentious
politics’.
 Contentious politics is the use of disruptive techniques
to make a political point, or to change government
policy. Examples: demonstrations, general strike action,
riot, terrorism, civil disobedience, and even revolution or
insurrection.
 Seek to address facets of social and political
movements still typically left un-examined by
academic research:
 Space
 Time
 Religion
 Secular

17. TIME IN ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
 Genealogy of social movements.
 The role of specific events in their life-cycle.
 The difference between ephemeral and long
running alternative media.
 3 periods:
 Gestation
 Full flood: pivotal role of particular events in the
growth of social movements.
 Abeyance (a state of expectancy or persistence).

18. AVEYANCE IN ALTERNATIVE
MEDIA
 One-shot alternative media:
 Graffiti, song, performance art, political cartoons.
 Much closer to artistic than to journalistic
models.
 Seek to make a lasting imprint by concentrating
a great deal into a very compressed and
pungent (sharp, incisive) format.
 Ongoing alternative media:
 USA’s The Nation.
 Has more in common with mainstream media.

19. THE QUESTION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
 Mansbridge (2001) argues that oppositional
consciousness requires:
 Identifying with an unjustly subordinated group.
 Recognizing a group identity of interest in doing
so.
 Understanding the injustice as systemic.
 Accepting the need for and efficacy of collective
action.
 Consciousness forms an oppositional culture
in both and additive and an interactive
process.
 There must be a strategy to address the

20. THE QUESTION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
 The questions researchers ask alternative-media
users need to be infinitely more complex than
those posed in commercial surveys.
 We have to focus on emotion and its relation to
social involvement. Aminzade and Mc Adam
argue (2001) that emotion is directly relevant both
to collective mobilization and the onset of
individual activism.
 Emotions:
 Can be reactive to particular situations or events.
 They are deeply connected to national cultural
patterns (family or government).

21. THE CONDITIONS OF
ALTERNATIVE-MEDIA
RECEPTION
 Space and location:
 Stable home or office environment associated with
broadcasting, VCR/DVD and computer use.
 Collective gatherings / individually used.
 International solidarity movements audiences:
 The movement itself, operating under liberal democratic
conditions.
 The opposition movement in the nations with whom
solidarity is expressed.
 The foreign regime and its embassies, and/or the
transnational corporations against whom the movement is
protesting.
 The domestic government and corporate elite.

22. TECHNOLOGIES, GENRES AND
FORMATS: VARIETY AND
CONNECTIONS
 Too much media-user research tends to
conflate technologies, genres and formats. We
should not generalize.

23. CONCLUSIONS
 There are many kinds of alternative media:
 Media of migrant workers
 Political refugees
 Settled minority-ethnic and indigenous groups
 Women’s movement media
 Lesbian and gay media
 Labor media
 Reactionary and fascist media
 Local issue media
 Minority-ethnic media
 Religious media
 Hobby media

24.  The internet’s diversity complicates the issue of “What
is alternative?”, inasmuch as the current weakness of
widely accepted and thoughminded criteria for
evaluating its sources risks devaluing the currency of
the alternative and the different.
 We haven’t deal with the emphasis on the ludic in the
sphere of audience agency and the emphasis on
power and oppositional movements.
 This complex terrain is in urgent need of careful,
sensitive exploration by communication researchers in
conjuction with cultural anthropologists, cultural
geographers, historians and political scientists and
sociologists.
CONCLUSIONS