Social Movement Media and Media Activism: Four Broad Zones of Study

Social Movement Media and Media Activism
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

John D. H. Downing
Subject: Communication and Technology, Critical/Cultural Studies , Communication and
Culture, Media and Communication Policy
Online Publication Date: May 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.574
Summary and Keywords
Social movements are the matrix of many forms and formats (technologies, genres) of media
that contest dominant power. Such media are in many ways the lifeblood of such movements.
Media activism denotes collective communication practices that challenge the status quo,
including established media. Frequently, such media are underfunded or unfunded and have a
much shorter life cycle than capitalist, state, or religiously funded media. They are a “tribe”
within a much larger continent of nanomedia (also called alternative media and citizens’ media).
Their functions may spill over at times within the operation of established media, especially in
times of social turbulence and crisis.
The “dominant power” in question may be quite variously perceived. Extreme-right populist
movements, as in several European countries, may define the political establishment as having
betrayed the supposed racial purity of the nation, or in the case of India’s Islamophobic
Hindutva movement, as having traduced the nation’s religious purity. Labor movements may
attack capital, feminist movements, or patriarchal and sexist structures. Sometimes these
movements may be local, or regional; other times, they are transnational.
The impact of these media is still a matter of considerable debate. Often, the debate begins from
a false premise—namely, the frequently small size and/or duration of many social movement
media projects. Yet women’s right to vote and the abolition of slavery in the Americas were not
won overnight, and neither was the dismantling of South Africa’s racist apartheid system. The
Hindutva movement goes back over a century. We should not hold social movement media to a
higher standard of impact, any more than we should ascribe instantaneous power to established
media.
Social movements wax and wane, and so do their media projects. But the persistence of some
such media activism between the peaks of movement activism is generally essential to the
regeneration of social movements.
Keywords: activist media, alternative media, citizens’, media, community media, independent media, repressive
movement media, social movements, social movement media, communication and critical studies
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Introduction
There are four broad zones in this field of study: (A) subversive, small-scale analog media; (B)
alternative and radical digital media; (C) reform projects directed at corporate media ownership
and policies; and (D) the interplay between large-scale mainstream media and the media
projects in Zones A and B. (Reflecting research literature focuses to date, Zone A takes more
space than the others.)
Before directly exploring these zones, some ground-clearing is needed by responding to the
following questions:
1. What do we mean by “media”?

2. How do we navigate the numerous terms used to designate these small-scale media?
3. What does the term social movement mean?
Far too often, the term media is used as a handy way to lump together television, radio, the
press, cinema, and the Internet. That is a technology-based bracketing. Here, the definition of
media will be anthropological, thus including any and all forms of cultural communication:
Tattoos, dance, street theater, popular music, street art, graffiti, dress, placards, satire, poetry,
posters, flyers, murals, and all sorts of artwork all play their part, along with cell phones and
legacy media (i.e., older media formats still in play).
Although this greatly expanded definition is a game-changer, it is easily grasped. More of a

challenge is presented by the bewildering array of terms used to designate small-scale media.
The following list gives an idea of the range, although it’s not completely exhaustive: alternative
media, community media, citizens media, independent media, underground media,
counterinformation media, small media, nano-media, participatory media, activist media, and
social movement media.
An understandable reaction to this flurry of terms could be that professors love nothing better
than to bicker endlessly over trivia. Let us nonetheless look at each term briefly, and as we do
so, ask ourselves whether the root cause of this Pandora’s box of definitions may be that small-
scale media represent, not just a perverse little island of activity inhabited by the crazed and
semicrazed, but an entire continent of cultural energy. This cultural energy is multifaceted,
hence the variety of terms, none of which can include all facets. Mainstream media are often
national, even global—a routine focus of business journalism. The nano-media continent often
works by different rules and marches to an infinitely wider spectrum of drummers.
Some initial clarity may be gained by grouping these terms. Alternative, small, and nano focus
particularly on size, either explicitly or implicitly, and are the nearest to generic terms.
Alternative, at its best, denotes a frequently overlooked cultural reality—namely, the huge
continent of small-scale media activities (Atton, 2015), from hobby weblogs (or blogs) to jihadist
communiqués to zines to alternative rock to satirical phone games. Small or little initially
focused on low-cost, simple technologies such as the slide projector (Schramm, 1977). Nano, by
gesturing toward very powerful nanotechnologies, rhetorically challenges the seemingly sensible
conviction that social impact increases with media size. (At its weakest, though, alternative tells
you only that something is different, not how it is such.)
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Community, citizens, and participatory focus more on process and local dimensions. In our
networked and video-conferenced era, a community need not be tied to a specific locality, but
ongoing face-to-face communication is generally acknowledged to provide stronger ties, with
mediated communication more productive once those face-to-face ties are in place. The term
community in English (though not always in other languages) does sometimes convey an
optimistic sheen, signifying a united and supportive neighborhood whose media would thus be
part and parcel of these warm fuzzies. It does not immediately evoke serious antagonisms over
tough issues dividing communities. At the same time, its strength lies in implicitly asserting the
irreplaceable value of independent local expression in a world where national and supranational
forces frequently seem to rule the roost (Rennie, 2001; Howley, 2009).
Citizens media (Rodríguez, 2001, 2011) emphasizes the generative power of ordinary citizens as
cultural producers in constructing their own media projects, step by step, in interaction with
their particular local contexts. Rodríguez underscores the variety of such projects, the slow
process of deliberation needed to mold them, and in particular, that they must be evaluated on
their own terms and in their own context rather than concocting evaluations of their impact
based on mainstream media criteria.
Participatory media (Wilkins, Tufte, & Obregón, 2014) also directs attention to collaborative
dimensions of small-scale media production, especially in economically struggling zones of the
planet. Virtually all media, short of the individual blog or graffiti-sprayer, are collective
enterprises, but levels of participation in decision-making are typically hierarchical in
mainstream media. Collective grassroots projects are a different matter entirely, yet often the
practical experience of organizing them in a seriously participatory fashion dies with the
project’s eventual demise. The wheel thus keeps on being reinvented . . .
Underground, counterinformation, and independent media may be grouped together. The

underground image (McMillian, 2011) dates from the clandestine antifascist activists in Italy and
other countries during the 1940s, and was later self-applied by militants in the United States,
Britain, and elsewhere to the media that they created during the rebellious 1960s and 1970s
(although their activism then faced much less terrifying odds). Counterinformation media define
themselves as supplying correct, politically challenging news and analysis in order to expose and
defeat the propaganda lies of the established news machines (Vitelli & Rodríguez Esperón,
2004). For both of these terms, there is a clear dualism, with visible boundaries. While some
writers sneer at this simplicity, the complex nuances that can be the stuff of interesting debate
in liberal democracies melt away in authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the term enthrones
so-called factual news and information as the crucial issue, implicitly sidelining the imagination
and emotion. Independent media is a term favored by Noam Chomsky (2012), and many
contemporary movement activists. In essence, it is a rhetorical challenge to the claim by
commercial news operators that they are independent, while Chomsky underscores their
capitalist and governmental bonds.
We are left, then, with activist (Lievrouw, 2011) and social movement (Downing, 2011; Milan,
2013) media. Activist media focus on their makers’ purposes in Zones A and B in this article.
Media activism is broader, covering at least Zones A–C. Social movement media is designed to
zero in sociologically on social movements as the matrix (i.e., womb) of these generally small-
scale media, though of course since the emergence of digital tools such as the Internet and
smartphones, a small-scale technology can reach a vast number of people (Gerbaudo, 2012;
Zayani, 2015), even across frontiers. It is their embedding within social movements, large or
local, that has given these media the degree of influence that they exert. In that sense, social
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movements are the contrasting “capital” source for these media, to business capital for
mainstream media. They are the heartland, the wellspring, the resource base, and the amplifier
of these media. This, in turn, is the movements’ cultural lifeblood.
This leads us straight to question 3: What does the term social movement mean? Rather than
plunging into a second terminological forest (Goodwin & Jasper, 2014), the approach now is
simply to clarify how the term is used here.
There has been much debate among specialists in the field as to whether social movements are,
effectively, either short-run emotive explosions or rationally chosen tactics among the have-nots;
or have been shifting, in recent decades, from traditional models of strategic political activism to
being based principally on the assertion of fresh cultural identities, such as feminism, lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) activism, minority-language activism, and the
so-called New Social Movement school. Their extension across borders into global activism is a
further focus. Here, all of these elements are defined as facets, sometimes overlapping but not
exclusive.
But we do need to address the questions of scale and longevity. Social movements are sometimes
assumed to be megamovements shaking thrones, and yet they also are assumed to be short-lived
(because that level of energy is unsustainable). In reality, masses of eddies in the societal flow
are highly local and never systematically come to national media attention. In the United States,
local actions such as the Critical Mass cycling movement, antigentrification movements, the
Reclaim the Night movement, police violence protest movements such as Black Lives Matter,
labor union protests and strikes, and health and safety actions get only fleeting national
coverage, if any.
As to the longevity of social movements, the U.S. women’s suffrage movement persisted from
1848 through 1920, when law was changed to allow women to vote; and the U.S. abolitionist
movement continued from a small start in Rhode Island in 1652 to Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Obviously, energy levels fluctuated in those two movements
and their media projects over time. Expecting the routinized daily output of a capitalist media
project from many social movement media projects would be absurd. But neither are social
movements all flare-up and drama. A steady unpaid slog is on the menu.
Zone A: Subversive, Small-Scale Analog Media
Through World War I
How can one summarize a continent? Nothing daunted, we continue, but we should give a
strong warning here that what follows is meant as a series of pointers toward further
exploration, in addition to an alert: Although the media examples that follow are mostly from
social justice movements of one kind or another, ultrarightist social movements have to be part
of our picture, and this point will be addressed a little later in this article.
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Before literacy was reasonably widespread, subversive communication mostly would take place
via music, jokes, poems, proverbs, and short plays, including mime. In Europe, with the Catholic
hierarchy trying to keep the lid on cultural expression and retaining ideological dominance
through hanging on to Latin, vernacular versions of the Jewish and Christian bibles were
potential dynamite. Interpretation of the Supreme Being’s commands and priorities was now
open to people who could not understand Latin, who even if they were illiterate could be read to.
It is not customary to think of the Bible as a subversive media project, but during that period, its
vernacular versions were capable of serving in exactly that role.
The Catholic hierarchy did not always have an easy time. There were a number of heretical
circles and movements, such as the Cathars of northern Italy and southern France (12th–14th
centuries), the Adamites in the Low Countries and Bohemia (14th–16th centuries), the Diggers
and the Ranters in England (17th century), and many more. Pamphlets, songs, and ideas
circulated underground. Colporteurs were traveling booksellers who bought subversive texts in
the few cities with some publishing freedom (e.g., Venice, Basel, or Antwerp) and carried them
on their journeys, usually in small octavo format with misleading covers, at the very bottom of
their baskets or sacks, and sold them surreptitiously.
One of the first subversive novels was the Jesuit François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,
a five-volume work published during the mid-16th century. The novel cheerfully reproduced—
and enhanced!—the irreverent, bawdy, and lively daily language of the market square, usually
located right outside the local church, where such language was banned. (Being a Jesuit did not
save Rabelais from condemnation and energetic attempts to sideline his novel.) Russian
researcher Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, pp. 90–91) acutely observed that
laughter . . . was not only a victory over mystic terror of God, but also a victory over the
awe inspired by the forces of nature, and most of all over the oppression and guilt
related to all that was consecrated and forbidden . . . It was the defeat of divine and
human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and
punishment after death, hell . . . Through this victory laughter clarified man’s
consciousness and gave him a new outlook on life. This truth was ephemeral; it was
followed by the fears and oppressions of everyday life, but from these brief moments
another unofficial truth emerged, truth about the world . . .
Now famous worldwide, this book was joined two centuries later by yet another ferocious blast
at convention, including official religious conventions: Voltaire’s Candide (1759). Widely banned,
it nonetheless survived and flourishes to this day. Both Candide and the Rabelais novels are cited
here as widely known instances in today’s world of social movement media, but they were far
from the sole subversive texts circulating in those bygone centuries before the Industrial
Revolution and the political revolutions of the American colonies and France. They were not, in
other words, solely generated by their individual authors’ fertile imaginations, but out of their
authors’ connections to dissident circles which challenged the status quo. Today, they are mostly
taught in literature courses, which risks rendering them holy rather than subversive!
To return to the American and French revolutions, these too were encouraged, and in turn fed,
by a slew of pamphlets, flyers, posters, songs, poems (e.g., Jensen, 2003; Darnton, 1996). The
most famous at the time, and since, was Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1775), which in relation to
the two and a half million settlers in the thirteen colonies, had proportionally the largest
circulation of any book ever published in North America, before or since. It identified Britain’s
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King George III as “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.” Like Rabelais’s and Voltaire’s novels,
Paine’s pamphlet is still in print.
The worm in the bud of the still-unfinished American revolutionary process was slavery.
Although slavery is often misunderstood as an issue strictly affecting the southern colonies (and
then U.S. states), its profits also flowed to New England merchants, to New York, Philadelphia,
and other cities (not to mention Britain and other European powers), as well as those West
African princes who supplied captives. The abolitionist press, beginning in the United States in
the 1820s, was an ongoing pillar of the movement to end the practice of slavery. While
acknowledging the communicative impact of White activists such as William Lloyd Garrison, the
contributions of African-American writers need recognition as well.
No fewer than six books, detailing their experiences of being enslaved, were published by freed
African Americans before 1800, as the major opening media salvo in the final decades of the
campaign against enslavement in North America (Bolster, 1998). More books would follow by the
African American writers Phyllis Wheatley, Solomon Northrup, Frederick Douglass, and
Sojourner Truth, among many; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental and patronizing Uncle
Tom’s Cabin enjoyed a huge circulation (although it was three times greater in Britain than the
United States).
Along with the abolitionist movement, labor movements and women’s suffrage continually roiled
the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Both were characterized by multiple forms of
media activism. Various print media formats predominated—newspapers, magazines, pamphlets,
flyers, posters, placards, and cartoons—but music, song, and street theater also played
significant parts. Studies of these communication projects and actions are few and far between,
and mostly focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Green, Roediger, Rosemont, &
Salerno, 2016; Lumsden, 2014; Wolff, 1998). The topic cries out for further historical research.
Beginning with the Civil War, antiwar movement media activism also began to make itself felt,
peaking in the 1910s as the U.S. government moved closer toward involvement in Europe’s
nightmare (Bennett & Howlett, 2014).
We can already see how far the roots of social movement media stretch. Individual media
projects may come and go, and eventually be buried in archives somewhere or vanish entirely
from memory with the passing of generations. But, recognizing their anchorage in social
movements and acknowledging the magnitude of the tasks that they undertake—abolishing
slavery, changing the status of women, carving out an eight-hour day and a five-day workweek,
fighting off perpetually renewed invasions of labor rights, pushing for an end to war, etc.—the
roles of social movement media are anything but fly-by-night.
Moreover, the focus to date has overwhelmingly been on U.S. examples. Given the time and
space to address them, Latin American, European, African, and Asian examples are numerous.
Indeed, to get ahead of ourselves for a moment, Latin America in the 1960s and ensuing decades
has been a powerhouse of both media activism and sustained reflection on its vicissitudes
(Gumucio Dagron & Tufte, 2006). Brazilians Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal are names of leaders
to conjure with, but they were active within an energetic cross-national movement.
Art, Radio, Film, Photography—and Tunnels
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At the outset of this article, art was identified as a sphere for activist communication. Colleges,
for convenience, often put communication in one department (and often a separate building as
well), art in another, literature in yet another, and education in a fourth. This splits up many
people’s instinctive thinking, elevating conceptual and practical barriers on bureaucratic pillars,
and in the process, it draws attention away from real-world opportunities for radical reflection.
Even here, throughout the centuries sampled so far, the work of artists has only been touched
upon, with cartoons mentioned in passing. This means that Francisco Goya’s depictions of the
disasters of war, William Hogarth’s images of degradation in London, William Blake’s visions of
human repression and liberation, Anna Akhmatova’s rendition of Stalin’s terror in her poem
Requiem, Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock version of The Star Spangled Banner, Frida Kahlo’s
portrayals of pain, Billie Holliday’s against-the-wall evocations, and Pieter Bruegel’s
enthronement of our everyday lives, and other key works somehow tend to end up out of frame
when considering social movement media. This is a huge error.
Certainly in the aftermath of World War I’s trench slaughter, artists targeted the infamy of the
war in a great variety of ways, from the expressionism of Georg Grosz’s paintings, and Berlin
dada in particular, to some of the leading French surrealists. The relatively new communication
technologies (i.e., film, photography, and radio), enthusiastically adopted by the early Soviet
republic because of the very high illiteracy levels that it had inherited from the tsars, also stirred
the energies of German movement activists (Jelavich, 2006). Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei
Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, as well as photographers such as Aleksandr
Rodchenko, sparked enormous interest.
Moreover, the cheap Brownie camera allowed ordinary people to generate their own portraits,
so pictures were no longer the normal preserve only of elevated citizens who could pay to be
painted. In several countries, worker photography movements emerged (Ribalta, Wolf, & Koltsov,
2011). Cinema was far too costly for most to produce—New York’s Worker’s Film and Photo
League and Nykino (later Frontier Films) did not emerge until the 1930s—but still photography
was entirely possible.
Radio, quickly being mopped up by commercial entities in the United States and Latin America,
and by the state in Europe and beyond, would take a lot longer to be fully deployed by activists
(more on this later in this article). Meanwhile, the usual range of print media was deployed
continuously in antifascist struggles inside Italy, Germany, Spain, and other countries in the
1920s and 1930s, as well as in international solidarity campaigns. During the Spanish Civil War
of 1936–1939, photography was intensively used to try to garner international solidarity
(Fontaine, 2003). In Japan (Ito, 2011), the military-dominated government stamped out almost all
independent media by 1930, as well as the tiny remainder by the mid-1930s (although at war’s
end, they surged back).
Social movements and their media have a way of seeming to disappear into “tunnels.” The
tunnels may be easily identified (Japan’s militarized regime), but more often, they represent a
depletion of energy, a reverse, or perhaps even a leadership crisis. Most often, perhaps, there
was a decline in mainstream news coverage for whatever reason. The 1950s, in the United
States and many other countries, looked to be just such a tunnel period.
Yet in the southern U.S. states, the African-American civil rights movement became increasingly
active in the struggle to overthrow the ongoing vestiges of slavery. In Iran, the shah (king) was
overthrown, and Western oil firms confronted the forces of nationalization. In Egypt, the Suez
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Canal was nationalized as well, and Britain, France, and Israel, seeking to hold onto it, were
confronted. Hungary fiercely defied Soviet occupation in a revolutionary upsurge. Ghana
became the first sub-Saharan country to throw off colonial rule peacefully. Activism in Britain in
favor of unilateral nuclear disarmament grew by leaps and bounds.
Then, this was not a silent decade around the planet. Much else was quietly bubbling. Research
on movement media projects in those and other instances remains limited, although it probably
is best so far on U.S. civil rights struggles. Thus, the tumultuous movement decades of the 1960s
and 1970s did not emerge from a vacuum. The interwoven roles of music, artwork, pamphlets,
weekly papers, citizen education programs, flyers, placards, and pickets during—and often after
—those tunnel periods are yet to be significantly explored for country after country, location
after location. Oral history and archival projects have a major opening. Maybe trees falling in
the forest make no sound when no one’s around, but at the time, these movements could not
have persisted, let alone grown, without their media of communication.
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Moving On: Cinema, Radio, Video, Fax, Photocopier
Tunnels aside, a relatively short-format account of social movement media like this one has no
space to draw a step-by-step picture. So we leap forward to the 1960s and 1970s. Building
beyond the variety of print media formats, historically favored because they were relatively low-
cost for producers and users alike, activists not only took print itself to new points (Kaplan,
2013), but also began to exploit electronic media. Film, hopelessly expensive in 35 mm (whether
to buy, develop, or screen), became available in much more manageable 16-mm and Super-8
formats.
Before proceeding further, however, a word of caution: it is all too easy to slide into naïve
technocelebration. This is deeply unwise, for at least two reasons. First, it diverts analytical
focus away from social movements, users, and producers: the communicative matrix. Second, as
the saying goes, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”—in this sphere, the
surveillance and propaganda scope that newer communication technologies regularly afford the
power structure.
Radio, still at the time of writing the most widely used communication technology in the planet
as a whole, despite its reduction to a commercial music outlet for the most part in affluent
countries, began to be used by movement activists in some Latin American countries from the
1950s. The tin-miners’ radio stations in Bolivia (O’Connor, 2004) were the most dramatic
example, steering an independent trajectory among different revolutionary groups, surviving
bomb attacks by government units, and staying faithful to their base. With the disappearance of
tin mining from Bolivia, they scarcely exist today, but for some decades, they acted as a beacon
for other social movements in Latin America. Currently in Brazil, for example, there are
estimated to be some 10,000 free radio stations, ranging from temporary loudspeakers hung
from lampposts on the edge of street markets to ongoing broadcasters. In 2007, Uruguay passed
advanced community radio legislation to govern its 200 stations, including a registration process
to avoid government or business patronage.
The beacon cases in Europe were Greece, Portugal, Italy, and France. The Greek example was
short-lived—a transmitter set up for just a few days in November 1973 by engineering students
at Athens Polytechnic protesting the then-military government. It acted as a detonator of further
dramatic media developments. In April 1974, the fascist government ruling Portugal since 1926
was overthrown, and soon afterward, two radio stations were seized, one extremely conservative
owned by the Catholic hierarchy, the other by a firm friendly with the neighboring Franco
dictatorship in Spain. For some 18 months, these stations were suddenly open to many long-
banned voices and perspectives, reinvigorating the public sphere (Downing, 2001, pp. 237–265).
A few months after the Portuguese stations were being closed down in 1976 by a far more
conservative government, Italy’s Constitutional Court passed Decree 202, permitting nonstate
local radio broadcasting. New stations erupted through Italy, numbering perhaps 2,000 at the
crest of the wave. Some were not exactly stations—more like teenagers with a bunch of records,
an amplifier, and a small transmitter in their living rooms—but others were actual stations, and
some still flourish today, such as Radio Popolare in Milan and Controradio in Florence. Their
launch pad, so to speak, was Italy’s stultifying state radio, which had been in the hands of the
same government party since the late 1940s. Their backdrop was also the ongoing labor ferment
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from the 1960s, which in Italy continued without halt for a decade or more (Downing, 2001, pp.
266–298).
These radio developments drew considerable interest farther north, especially in France and
Germany. In the former, free stations began to mushroom in the last two years of the 1970s. The
incoming Socialist Party government in 1981 declared it would legalize nonstate broadcasting,
which opened the door to a wave of commercial radio and TV stations much larger in scale than
social movement stations (as was already transpiring in Italy). The German government initially
retained a much tighter grasp over broadcasting and tried promptly to shut free stations down.
One such station, however, Radio Verte Fessenheim/Radio Grüne Fessenheim (Radio Green
Fessenheim), began in 1977 as a combined French, German, and Swiss project in opposition to
the new Fessenheim nuclear power plant at France’s border with Germany and Switzerland. Its
French location managed to evade German and Swiss broadcasting restrictions. In 1981, the
project renamed itself Radio Dreyeckland (ThreeCornerLand), and later still, with an easing of
Germany’s broadcasting laws, the German wing of the project continued as a social movement
station (while its French cousin eventually went commercial, playing oldies). It is a good
example of cross-border media activism, but also of the often fluctuating character of social
movement projects. The power station, originally planned for a 40-year operation, was promised
to be closed in 2016—one year ahead—but only after decades of protest. Meanwhile, the German
government ordered the closure of all nuclear plants by 2022.
The radio story continues in many places, from a women’s station in Austria (Pfisterer,
Purkarthofer, & Busch, 2011), to low-powered FM radio in the United States (Opel, 2004), to
peace radio stations in Colombia (Rodríguez, 2011).
Let us now shift our attention, though, to film and video. Because of the high costs of the former
and the refusal of cinema exhibition chains to consider any but the most occasional documentary
screenings of any kind, social movement film documentaries were scanty for decades. The same
was true for feature films, although occasionally mainstream films would convey movement
sentiment, such as the antinuclear war satire Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Stopped Worrying and
Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), Malcolm X (1992), and Erin Brockovich (2000). An antinuclear
war TV docudrama such as British director Peter Watkins’s extremely powerful The War Game
(1965), funded by the BBC, was promptly banned from being broadcast by the British
government. As noted already, 16-mm and Super-8 formats opened up production and lab-
processing opportunities but did almost nothing about distribution and exhibition.
Two key developments in audiovisual activism emerged at the end of the 1970s and during the
1980s, at least in the United States. One was the emergence of significant social movements
against nuclear war and against the U.S. government’s political and military support for
murderous governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, and counterrevolutionary thugs in
Nicaragua. Involving community activists, educators, and some religious organizations, interest
in information, protest, and solidarity networked and blossomed. Simultaneously came the
portable video camera, often referred to as a camcorder, which was much cheaper and more
flexible than the huge 35-mm film camera. This, akin to the Brownie still camera, opened up
what came to be called guerrilla video-making (Boyle, 1997). Antinuclear war documentaries and
radical documentaries about Central American conflicts flourished on the alternative circuits. In
Britain, through an unprecedented expansion in patronage from the new Channel 4 television
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station in the early 1980s, a Black film movement emerged from virtual invisibility, and a series
of other imaginative and searching documentaries came to life.
One of the most interesting developments in the United States was Paper Tiger Television, led by
DeeDee Halleck (2002). Beginning in New York City in 1981, Paper Tiger generated extremely
low-cost, short documentaries (lasting around 20 minutes or so), often featuring a social
movement activist or writer. Their secondary purpose was to encourage people to realize that
they did not need costly props, fancy lighting, or immaculate audio to make short films, and that
videocassette technology made the process of producing multiple copies of movies for
distribution feasible. Soon there was a Paper Tiger collective on the West Coast, and not long
after that came Deep Dish TV, again with Halleck’s and her colleagues’ visionary activism in full
flood.
Deep Dish TV took the distribution and exhibition challenge a major step further. It issued calls
for short documentaries on key topics—prisons in the United States, AIDS activism, the 1990–
1991 Persian Gulf War, and many others. Those submitted and selected were then compiled on a
single VHS tape and satel-cast to more than 300 community TV access centers and stations
across the United States. They could be screened immediately or at another time. At this point,
distribution technologies has changed to DVDs and streaming, and Deep Dish has moved in
synch. At the beginning of the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003, Deep Dish distributed a compilation
titled Shocking and Awful (after the Bush Administration’s vainglorious “Shock and Awe”
terminology to trumpet its horrific bombing of Baghdad)—a three-DVD set, showing how far the
pool of social movement filmmakers had expanded. The distribution issue, with YouTube and
other vehicles, was not perfect from a social movement point of view, but it differed sharply from
the previous pattern.
Yet it would be a major error of technological reductionism to conclude that the issues were
nearly solved. Ultimately, the acid test for social movement media is not that people can readily
access them, but whether they watch them attentively, and especially whether they discuss
them. Cinema Politica, a very significant project based at Concordia University in Montréal, has
brought social movement film and video to this crucial juncture (Turnin & Winton, 2014).
Running since 2003, weekly documentary screenings have been attended by some 300–700
students and others, with lively debates following. Around 100 collaborating sites were active
around the world. Movement media activism is not just about production. How to engage the
public is ultimately the issue (Downing, 2003).
Lest we forget in this flying tour of analog movement media, the humble xerographic
photocopier and the equally obsolete fax machine also have their place. Eichhorn (2016) shows
how xerography was a medium of choice for gay activists, punk culture, zinesters, and many
other dissident communicators. A particularly potent and striking example was the AIDS-activist
group ACT UP in the 1980s through the mid-1990s. As for the fax machine, when the 1989
Chinese student and citizen insurgency against Communist party rule was crushed on June 4—
currently in Chinese media, The Great Unmentionable That Never Happened—while the press
and broadcasting were brought to heel, the aging Politburo never thought about fax machines.
So news of the massacre did get out to citizens globally via faxes, especially from activist
Chinese students in Western countries. In August 1991, an attempted coup in Moscow to roll the
clock back to Soviet rule was similarly publicized internationally as it happened because the
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sclerotic plotters were only aware of broadcasting and the press—not the humble fax machine,
then quite new in the fading Soviet Union.
We will analyze digital social movement media in a moment. But first, we must pause briefly to
review the uses that repressive social movements—fascist, white supremacist, anti-Jewish,
Islamophobic, homophobic, and xenophobic ones—have made of alternative media.
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Repressive Social Movement Media
It is important to recognize that repressive social movements also may see themselves as
revolutionary or, at the very least, as prevented by comfortable elites from having any real voice.
Their definition of alternative, of community, and counterinformation, and even of citizens, takes
the sense of those terms in a completely distorted direction.
Nonetheless, to understand the power of these media requires that we foreground their social
movement matrix too. A famous German photomontagist, John Heartfield, used a news photo of
Adolf Hitler standing and asserting “Millions are behind me,” his right arm raised in the Nazi
salute, hand open and tilted backward, and joined it to two others—one of million-mark
banknotes in Hitler’s outstretched hand, and the other of their donor, a German tycoon.
Heartfield wanted to challenge Hitler’s claim, saying that he was a mere puppet on a capitalist’s
string. This was true, at that point in time; but Hitler was right too, although he had fewer
members than the German Social Democratic Party and Communist Party combined (had their
leaders only heeded their rank and file’s call to join together). Nazism was a social movement,
not just a free-floating ideology, and in particular, it used posters, marches, and mass assemblies
during the decade before it acquired state power (its reputation for deploying radio and film
during that period is greatly exaggerated). It also published some 60 local newspapers during
that decade.
Turning to the United States after World War II (Hilliard & Keith, 1999; Simi & Futrell, 2010),
the stronger the Black civil rights movement became, the more active was the White
supremacist backlash. Over the next 60 years, the supremacist movement diversified, with the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), perhaps its best-known organization, becoming only one of its components.
Nonetheless, the KKK was one of the first movement organizations to use computers, it shifted
away from them once their capacity for unwanted surveillance became better understood. Racist
rock music became a significant vehicle in these circles. Racist talk radio became even more of
an everyday staple, although revolutionary racist activists preferred shortwave radio because it
was much harder to monitor.
Media of the religious ultraright in the United States—again, splintered into many currents—
deserve a much more thorough analysis than they receive. Kintz and Lesage (1998) still are the
best source for understanding how this powerful movement has grown. It has had huge funding
and highly focused leadership (Sharlet, 2008), but that is not sufficient to explain the tireless
commitment to tedious and time-consuming organizational tasks, on which this movement has
built itself to its great level of influence.
Authoritarian neopopulist currents have been widespread in Europe and beyond since at least
the 1970s. The rise of France’s Front National, a variety of groups such as the Lega Nord in Italy
and neofascist groups in Britain, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, the True Finns,
Golden Dawn in Greece, and others testify to this strong trend. Regrettably, the study of their
media, until quite recently, did not keep pace with their growth of influence (Mazzoleni, Stewart,
& Horsfield, 2003; Downing & Husband, 2005, pp. 61–85)—another prime area for careful
research, although signs suggest researchers are beginning to take up the challenge.
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Zone B: Digital Social Movement Media
Zone B, this second zone, should not be insulated from Zone A. Not only are analog social
movement media still alive and energetic—not least the book and the magazine, as well as live
music and theater performances—but they generally mesh effortlessly with digital media. The
ridiculous response of many Western media commentators to the political upsurges in the Arab
region that began in 2011, along with Spain’s very substantive Indignados movement and the
global Occupy movement, in all of which Facebook and Twitter played varying roles, was to
attribute their motivational power and impact to these digitally connective media. A less
sociologically informed analysis is hard to conjure up.
At the same time, these more recent media offer affordances that legacy media do not. Their
usage is still developing, so the full advantage of reflecting on their impacts over a couple of
decades is not with us yet. At one point shortly after 2000, the blog made its appearance and
was heralded as the best thing since sliced bread. It has indeed fulfilled some of its promise, as
witnessed by the major role that it played in Iran in the 2000s in releasing the theocracy’s near-
stranglehold over independent media communication (Sreberny & Khiabany, 2010). In Egypt,
blogging gave space to women to communicate in public, which they proceeded to do in a
variety of registers (Shokry, 2011). Yet today, it has settled into a particular groove within our
media ecology. The same will assuredly be the case for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram,
WhatsApp, and whatever may come next, but as yet, we have not arrived there.
So where, then, are we? Let us look at some significant in-depth analyses to try to set out the
state of play as it stands now. In a splendidly detailed study of global social justice mobilizations
and mass demonstrations in Europe, Juris (2008) mapped digital networking affordances onto a
revisioning of political debate and organizing, a shift from a hierarchical political party model to
an emergent, horizontal process. However, despite his attention to local detail in the case of
Barcelona, an activist epicenter, his analysis tended at times to tip over into a consecration of
networking as the movement hero, fusing politics with digital technology.
Gerbaudo (2012) took a different step, comparing the uses of digital and mobile technology in
the 2011 upsurges in Cairo and Spain, as well as the New York City Occupy movement. He paid
particular attention to digitally connective media (van Dijck, 2013)—a more accurate term than
the vapid social media. Two major findings transpired. One was the great variety of uses of
Facebook, Twitter, and other sites across the three locations. No single pattern stood out. The
other was, that despite common assertions that these movements were leaderless—roughly in
line with Juris’s interpretation—in practice, certain forms of leadership were not only present at
key moments, but vital.
This debate about political communication processes inside social movements rumbles on.
Bennett and Segerberg (2013) argued that spontaneous connective action of various kinds was
becoming increasingly evident with the advent of digitally connective technologies, and this
perhaps formed the initial base, a diffuse type of launch pad, for collective action in protest
activities. Like Juris, they detected an alienation among younger citizens in Western societies
from political parties—a deep desire to act politically, but without hierarchical shackles and
filters, let alone political sectarianism. Self-motivated sharing of ideas, comments, links,
retweets, and short videos was, they claimed, the heart of connective action, in its purest form
entirely self-organized and often operating simply through the sharing of memes (e.g., “the
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99%”). Between this pure format and conventional collective activism, they suggest that there
may be an intermediate level, where conventional political and advocacy bodies set up open
digital sites, as distinct from specific mobilization sites.
A necessary sociohistorical perspective comes from Wolfson (2014), who traces the story of the
U.S. cyber left from the new political activism of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, which first came
to Mexican and then global attention in 1994. The Zapatistas fused completely local with entirely
global issues, and the harsh conditions for the Indigenous communities of Chiapas state with the
rise of global market forces and fundamentalist policies (exemplified in the North American Free
Trade Agreement that went into effect on January 1, 1994). They, too, avoided Mexico’s political
parties, but they knocked conventional expectations of Indigenous peoples sideway by using the
then-novel Internet to convey their analyses and struggles across global frontiers.
Wolfson examines the Zapatistas’ direct influence on both the swift success of the global
Independent Media Center (IMC) movement and gave some reasons for its running out of steam
over time. IMCs emerged out of the four intense days of the Seattle World Trade Organization
(WTO) protests in late 1999, which in turn were a culmination of years of global social justice
movement organizing in the United States, Canada, and beyond (Kidd, 2003). During this period,
the experience of having set up in advance a temporary open-access physical site and Internet
service for photographers, audio- and video-documentarians, and print journalists, so that they
could provide multiple independent accounts of what went down, was potent—so much so, in
fact, that comparable linked sites were generated across North America, and then also in
Europe, Latin America, Australia, and some other locations (toward 200 at the IMC movement’s
height).
Very briefly, the IMC network enabled up-to-the-minute visual and audio information, and
reflection, on current social struggles in all the locations where there was an IMC site. As in
Seattle, the perspective was opposite to mainstream news (facing the police lines, not positioned
safely behind them). While English was the majority language, half a dozen others, such as
European languages, were in regular use, depending on location. Access to posts was entirely
open, although after a time, a separate archive was set up for purely abusive, racist, sexist, and
similar postings, where editorial judgment could be employed to evaluate their suitability.
In Wolfson’s argument, however, the Seattle IMC leadership, and consequently many of its
mirror sites, overread the Zapatista organizing approach—highly consensus-based, grassroots-
up, slow—as universally applicable. The Zapatistas themselves made no export claims for their
internal political communication activities, which were based on ancient Indigenous practices
(about 30% of the state’s population is Indigenous, although with more than 50 ethnicities). But
some of their admirers outside Mexico took that cultural model as a universal toolkit—almost an
upside-down Leninism. The essential conclusion to draw is that understanding digital
communication tools ripped from history and culture is not to understand them at all,
notwithstanding the IMC movement’s genuine contributions and achievements.
The same crucial lesson can be learned from a multifaceted study of the buildup to Tunisia’s
2011 movement revolution, which in turn helped spark further revolts across the Arab region
(Zayani, 2015). Framing his analysis within a social history of Tunisia over the previous 30 years,
and proceeding with a constant focus on everyday life, Zayani weaves a saga of the unexpected.
An increasingly repressive dictatorship, bent on modernizing and thus installing an advanced
Internet infrastructure (along with an Internet police to match), found itself increasingly caught
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up in its own contradictions, including a stagnant economy. Meanwhile, digital enthusiasts were
mostly pursuing their various fascinations without any intention (let alone anticipation) that they
might be engaged in a subversive process.
The dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s worms initially were tilling the soil without any signposts.
Only when they began to be suppressed by his Internet police for minor infractions did
opposition slowly begin to jell in the digisphere—and then beyond. Within a year or two, the
international affordances of the Internet made it possible for Tunisians living in France and
French people of Tunisian descent to share safely candid reflections on Tunisia’s state—and
government. As Zayani (2015, 108) writes, “[T]he gradual politicization of the Tunisian
blogosphere and its emergence as an incubator of cultural contention was a significant
development.” The generational dimension—half of Tunisians are under 25, but are often more
educated than their parents—is one that he explores carefully. His study is full of pertinent
anthropological detail whose implications go well beyond the 11-million residents of this North
African nation. It provides a model for grasping how connective digital media embed in the
fabric of everyday life during periods of gathering social change.
There is now a plethora of studies that address digitally connective media in the framework of
social movements, but there remains a strong tendency to suppose that only data from the
United States or Europe is of research interest. But there is no excuse for methodological
nationalism in this research zone. One excellent collection of essays engages with case studies
from no less than nine Latin American nations (Treré & Magallanes-Blanco, 2015). Several of its
studies examine student movements, where imagination was in power, representing
generational and educational divides of a type touched upon previously in this paper when
discussing the Tunisian case. Such movements often leave social high-water marks whose
presence continues to be felt underground, even when, as in mainland China, their open
discussion is banned.
A very different angle on these issues regarding movement use is taken by an ethnographic
study of working-class Chinese users of mobile phones and their efforts to carve out cultural
space and achieve civil rights (Qiu, 2009). Conducted over the 2000s, and focusing on what he
calls the “have-less” (i.e., not the rich, and not the very poorest either), it uncovered many
instances in which cheap cell phones were successfully deployed to spread awareness of police
abuse, to protest routine hardships of everyday living, to alert rural migrants to job
opportunities, and much more. The situation that Qiu detailed is endlessly changing, but he
graphically evokes the inventiveness of China’s huge working-class movement in formation,
wrestling with the shifting obstacles that it confronts. Comparable studies of India’s working-
class political and social uses of digital media would be very valuable.
To conclude this provisional foray into turbulent waters that are still to be charted, a challenge
to some frequent assumptions about digital social movement media is in order. Petrick (2016)
has queried whether the fundamental dynamics of digital media may stifle the development of
social movements’ accumulated experience of activism. The digital dynamics of speed, she
argues, may well be a process that atrophies activists’ capacity to learn from past strategies,
successes, and failures. Based on detailed interviews with global social justice movement
activists, she proposes that oral sharing, face-to-face storytelling as done in Walter Benjamin’s
famous essay is far more generative than the mere existence of a digital archive of struggle,
whose standard modes of usage tend to leave more questions unanswered than resolved. Rather
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than miracle technologies, digital media dynamics may be prime movers in blotting out our
capacity to learn how we got to where we are in movement struggle history, condemning us to
an endless reinvention of the wheel, an eternal sunshine of spotless consciousness.
Zone C: Reforming Corporate and State Communication Policies
Media activism takes this road as well. Uruguay’s successful community radio legislation has
been noted in previous sections. Brazil has an excellent law—on paper anyway. In Latin America,
Uruguay is a trailblazer, but the media reform movement there is far from alone (Soledad
Segura & Waisbord, 2016). In the European Union, local community media are enabled to an
extent under “Third Sector” laws, this being current grab-bag terminology for nonstate and
noncorporate activities, including philanthropy and advocacy (Coyer & Hintz, 2010).
In the United States, attempts to galvanize a movement against oligarchic corporate media
control began in 2002 with the formation of the Free Press organization, which soon began,
along with over 20 other allied groups, to organize intermittent but very large media reform
conferences. The craven mainstream U.S. media support for the George W. Bush administration’s
war in Iraq (2003–) did much to focus energy in this direction. At the same time, the Media
Justice movement emerged (Hill, 2011), which especially focused on the denial of media rights to
citizens of color. In 2008, the Center for Media Justice formed in Oakland, California, and
Brooklyn, New York. The media reform movement is found not only in the Americas, but in
Europe and beyond (Freedman, Obar, Martens, & McChesney, 2016).
However, the movement engages with more than concentrated media ownership and issues of
class, “race,” and gender in representation and access. A key dimension only slowly emerging to
public awareness at the present time is the issue of information and communication
infrastructure (Lentz, 2011). Satellites, cabling on land and in the oceans, cell phone towers, the
whole global pipeline of the Internet and mobile telephony are not owned by the public, which
therefore has little or no practical say in how they are used or how their uses might be changed.
This electronic infrastructure is a bedrock of contemporary democracy, but it is barely subject to
effective democratic control. Switching off citizen cell phone use in demonstration locations,
while retaining a separate frequency for the police, is just one example. An even-further
dimension of media reform activism consists of drawing attention to the dangerous ecological
dimensions of various communication technologies (Maxwell & Miller, 2012).
In the era since the 2013 state surveillance revelations courageously supplied by Edward
Snowden, the century’s most pivotal single information activist to date, more and more attention
has been paid to this dimension of communication policy reform (Lyon, 2015). Opposition to
commercial surveillance on this scale also has been rather slow, perhaps because George
Orwell’s 1984 has been part of mainstream culture for three generations; despite its brilliance,
the book did not anticipate the extent of the dizzy expansion of capitalist data-driven marketing
(a recent how-to book on “big data” is entitled The New Oil).
Zone D: Mainstream and Social Movement Media
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Citizens do not normally inhabit just one or the other media sphere (although obviously in many
countries, many inhabit the mainstream media universe, including Web 2.0, without having any
intensive nano-media exposure). Nonetheless, there is inevitably an interplay among social
movement media users between the two spheres. Movement activists often will use their media
to critique mainstream media frames or misleading information. Sometimes during major
upsurges, journalists will comb through movement media as a way of interpreting what is
happening (and perhaps to avoid uprooting themselves from their desks). Movement activists
often trust the business press, as distinct from the rest of mainstream news, and enjoy much
mainstream entertainment.
However, these levels of interaction do not exhaust the matter. Kenix (2012) has proposed that
the two spheres may be converging. She provides some instances from New Zealand’s media
scenario to suggest that mainstream media sometimes may carry more deeply radical material
than do nano-media. The point to extract from this argument, which perhaps posits an evolution
yet to occur in any major way, is that attempts to bifurcate absolutely between the two spheres
are pointless. Mainstream media are a mixed bag, with cartoonists, for example, often given
license to convey views quite out of synch with the newspaper’s party line. Political divisions
within the national elite, as in the United States concerning the Southeast Asian war from the
late 1960s onward, may open up a diversity of viewpoints hitherto shunned by mainstream news
editors.
An excellent example of the meld between mainstream and alternative-media social movement
strategies is given by the decades-long global campaign against the racist apartheid regime in
South Africa (Thörn, 2006). The international movement operated on several media fronts:
activist journalism in and out of South Africa; working with sympathetic professional journalists;
cultural events, such as two huge concerts in honor of jailed activist Nelson Mandela, held in
London’s Wembley stadium; and public demonstrations, especially outside South Africa House in
London’s Trafalgar Square, a large building directly between the National Portrait Gallery and
the iconic St Martin’s-in-the-Fields church. British business ties with South Africa went back
over a century and were the regime’s primary support, so that antiapartheid opinion in Britain
was especially important to foment.
Working with professional journalists in mainstream media is the province of what is sometimes
called “radical PR.” The studies of Charlotte Ryan at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell and
of Bob Jensen at the University of Texas–Austin are exemplary in this regard (Ryan, 1999;
Jensen, 2005). It is a ridiculous error to assume that there are no constructive individuals
working in mainstream media, not least in the business press. The same is the case, for instance,
with screenwriters, scriptwriters, and videogame makers.
Finally, the interpenetration of rightist established media and repressive social movement media
is a highly fertile combination—one without any mirror in labor, environmentalist, feminist,
Indigenous, and other social movement media. The established media frame immigrant workers
in “racial” or nationality terms; repressive movement media encourage neo-Nazis to beat these
people up and set fire to their homes.
The crossover zone is a prime area for further, action-oriented research.
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Concluding Remarks
This has been a quick tour of a continent (as in “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium”). To pull
the threads together, the vital points of emphasis in this article have been the social movement
matrices of these media; the necessity of thinking historically and over the longer term about
their multiple roles; their wide variety of formats; the crucial importance of imagination,
emotion, and the arts, not just accurate factual information; the still-emerging affordances of
network and mobile technologies; the need to avoid “methodological nationalism,” focusing on
one nation as if it stood for all of the nearly 200; the compelling requirement to include
repressive social movement media in the picture; the significant rise of media reform
movements, pushing for policy change; and last but not least, the crossover zones between
mainstream and movement media.
Yet, as noted at several different times in this discussion, there are so many more areas still
unresearched or underresearched. A contemporary ethnographic study of favela media activism,
focusing on young Brazilian media-makers and the paths that led them to commit their energies
in this direction (Custódio, 2016), is not only absorbing in itself, but it serves as a pointer toward
how little we know about the life histories of movement media activists, not least in the youth
generation, especially given the pronounced youth demographic in the global South (cf., Zayani,
2015). Indeed, so little still has been communicated about how readers and audiences use these
media (Downing, 2003).
Further Reading
Alternative Press Index (United States). Available at http://www.altpress.org.
British Library Spare Rib archive. Available at https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/.
Coyer, K., Dowmunt, T., & Fountain, A. (Eds.). (1997). The alternative media handbook. London:
Routledge.
Downing, J. D. H. (Ed.). (2011). Encyclopedia of social movement media. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Drew, J. (2013). A social history of contemporary democratic media. New York: Routledge.
Green, A., Roediger, D., Rosemont, F., & Salerno, S. (Eds.). (2016). The big red songbook: 250+
IWW songs (2nd ed.). Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Gumucio Dagron, A., & Tufte, T. (Eds.). (2006). Communication for social change anthology:
Historical and contemporary readings. South Orange, NJ: Communication for Social Change
Consortium.
Gumucio Dagron, A., & Tufte, T. (Eds.). (2008). Antología de comunicación para el cambio social:
Lecturas históricas y contemporáneas (in Spanish). South Orange, NJ: Communication for Social
Change Consortium.
Journal of Alternative and Community Media. Available at https://joacm.org/.
Journal of Community Informatics. Available at http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/.
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Rodríguez, C. (2001). Fissures in the mediascape: An international study of citizens’ media. New
York: Hampton Press.
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. Available at
http://library.nyu.edu/locations/the-tamiment-library-robert-f-wagner-labor-archives/.
Underground Press Archive (United States). Available at http://

www.undergroundpressarchive.us/.
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Social Movement Media and Media Activism: Four Broad Zones of Study

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Social Movement Media and Media Activism: Four Broad Zones of Study

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Social Movement Media and Media Activism

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

Summary and Keywords

1. What do we mean by “media”?

Although this greatly expanded definition is a game-changer, it is easily grasped. More of a

Underground, counterinformation, and independent media may be grouped together. The

Zone A: Subversive, Small-Scale Analog Media

Through World War I

Art, Radio, Film, Photography—and Tunnels

Moving On: Cinema, Radio, Video, Fax, Photocopier

Repressive Social Movement Media

Zone B: Digital Social Movement Media

Zone C: Reforming Corporate and State Communication Policies

Zone D: Mainstream and Social Movement Media

The crossover zone is a prime area for further, action-oriented research.

British Library Spare Rib archive. Available at https://www.bl.uk/spare-rib/.

Journal of Alternative and Community Media. Available at https://joacm.org/.

Journal of Community Informatics. Available at http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/.

Underground Press Archive (United States). Available at http://

Custódio, L. D. C. (2016). Favela media activism: Political trajectories of low-income Brazilian

Fontaine, F. (2003). La guerre d’Espagne: Un déluge de feu et d’images. Paris: BDIC/Berg

Ito, K. (2011). Social movement media, 1920s–1970s (Japan). In J. D. H. Downing (Ed.),

Lyon, D. (2015). Surveillance after Snowden. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Petrick, K. (2016). Media, memory and movements. Retrieved from https://iamcr.org/sites/

Shokry, L. A. E. (2011). Women bloggers (Egypt). In J. D. H. Downing (Ed.), Encyclopedia of

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