When Users Push Back: Oppositional New Media and Community

The progressive privatization of Internet infrastructure in the U.S. throughout the 1990s fostered the resurgence of a mass media-style "pipeline" model of online content distribution favored by the media and entertainment industries. Nonetheless, and despite various attempts at suppression by corporations and law enforcement, a diverse community of artists, activists and citizens has found the Web and related technologies to be effective media for expressing their ideas and interests. In this paper oppositional new media are examined as a means of response and resistance to a popular culture that many groups regard as dominated by consumerism, political apathy and cultural and economic oppression. Cases are presented to illustrate key genres of oppositional new media, including the responses of mainstream corporate, government and lawenforcement authorities. The paper concludes with an overview of characteristics of oppositional new media and their implications for establishing and maintining community. Prologue: The Internet and 1990s Media Ecology "Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. "Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on." Umberto Eco, "The Multiplication of the Media" (1986: 150) "Revolution has to be reinvented, that's all." Guy Debord, "Instructions for Taking up Arms" (1981 [1961]: 63) When the World Wide Web and browser technologies were introduced in the U.S. in the early 1990s, technology advocates believed they had the potential to expand Internet use beyond the ranks of elite academic, government and privatesector corporate users. Observers like Stewart Brand and Howard Rheingold, among others, predicted that relatively inexpensive client-server architecture would at last give "ordinary" or "marginal" communities and groups a powerful mediated voice that would allow them to extend their ideas and influence in ways that the few-to-many, top-down, content-distribution model of mass media had prevented. Groups like the Well in Sausalito, California and Berkeley's Community Memory, with their roots in the 1960s counter-culture, embodied the early ideals of empowerment and participation, in Rheingold's famous phrase, of "homesteading on the electronic frontier" (1993). In fact, Web browsers and the rapid accumulation of Web-based content did help boost hardware and software sales and subscriptions to Internet service providers in the 1990s, particularly among home users. But it wasn't just the availability of content that drew novice users: MUDs and MOOs flourished, chatrooms proliferated, and email was rediscovered to be the fabled "killer app" for personal and leisure uses as well as in the workplace. New opportunities for interpersonal communication, as much as mainstream media content repackaged for the Web, attracted people to the Internet who had never thought of using computers before. Some observers predicted the end of mass media, as Web browsing, chatrooms, email and games began to draw audiences away from broadcast and cable television, radio and theatrical movies. Meanwhile, the traditional media industries looked at browsers and the World Wide Web and saw a new frontier of a different sort, one of advertising, distribution and sales. They rapidly recast themselves as "content industries," whether their products were books, periodicals, movies, recorded music, or any other format. They collaborated with software firms to repackage or bundle their products with other kinds of "software." As the decade went on, they built alliances with telecommunications firms to gain greater control over the new media infrastructure, particularly the "final mile" of cable or telephone wire into the home. They anticipated a surge of demand for entertainment content delivery that would require major increases in bandwidth. Throughout the 1990s the conglomerate media-telecoms-computing firms lobbied the U.S. Congress, the Justice Department, the Federal Communications Commission, and any other agencies where they could wield influence, to shape a more advantageous legal and regulatory environment. The Federal government obliged, in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Digial Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, among other legislation. The Clinton administration appointed FCC commissioners who ushered in a market-oriented era of media deregulation. In the name of reducing restrictions on corporate "speech" (a movement begun under Presidents Reagan and Bush), media ownership constraints were substantially weakened, and equal-time and must-carry rules were abandoned. At the same time, in the prevailing rush toward privatization, the "property" metaphor swept every corner of the media, computing and telecommunications industries. The radio frequency spectrum -formerly considered a scarce natural resource and therefore a public good -was redefined as an over-abundant commodity and important segments were put up for auction. Internet service providers (ISPs) such as AOL eschewed longstanding service models from telephony, postal mail, or publishing. Instead, they claimed both the systems they operated and the messages they carried (e.g., subscribers' email) as their private property and subject to monitoring and control. Meanwhile, in what copyright scholar Jessica Litman tagged the "intellectual property epidemic" (1994), intellectual property rights were extended to entirely new types of information (including previously-exempted facts like mathematical algorithms, sequences of genetic code, or the "click" of a computer mouse to order merchandise online), and for unprecedented periods of time. New "anticircumvention" provisions of the DMCA prohibited the creation or use of any new technology that might conceivably used to infringe intellectual property rights -whether the technology is actually used that way or not (see the Hacker Quarterly case, below). The dot-com collapse at the end of the decade led to a precipitous shake-out of smaller enterprises and start-ups across the media, telecoms and computing industries. In many cases their assets were sold to the larger surviving firms, thus further concentrating ownership into a handful of global-scale companies. In this climate, worries about personal privacy became widespread in the U.S. and prompted cover stories by major news magazines, horror stories about identity theft and telemarketing abuses in the popular media, consumer protests, and the proposal of new legislation. But those worries were forgotten in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Shortly thereafter, initiatives like the Patriot Act gave the U.S. government sweeping new powers to withhold and control public information and to monitor the movement, activities and communications of citizens. Now, a few years into the new century, it would seem that (to paraphrase Mark Twain) the death of the centralized, industrial-style mass media model has been widely exaggerated. After the initial shock of the Internet challenge to existing markets, media industries have responded by attempting to extend the mass content delivery model to online content "consumption." They have vigorously fought any distribution scheme or technology -peer-to-peer computing being the most vivid example -that threatens its gatekeeping, rent-extracting role in the distribution and circulation of information in whatever form. Though a glut of bandwidth (especially fiber-optic networks) was built in the 1990s, those nets have largely remained dark because the handful of major media conglomerates that control them are unable or unwilling to generate revenue by allowing users to create and share content among themselves. Broadband services to the home (i.e., digital subscriber line [DSL] and cable modem services) were built asymmetrically, with much more downstream capacity (from the network to subscribers) than upstream capacity (from consumers to the network), reflecting a view of households as primarily consumers, rather than producers, of content. Indeed, the widely-heralded, late-90s goal of streaming video to the home via high-speed data networks has quietly been shelved. At present, the U.S. has one of the slowest "high-speed" consumer broadband networks in the world, and lags most of Europe, Korea, Japan, and other nations (Belson & Richtel, 2003). The Internet and Media Ecology Today In this contemporary "media ecology," then, what has happened to the early vision of small groups and individuals gaining greater political and economic voice and participation online? In fact a wide array of community groups, political and cultural activists, artists, and ordinary citizens have found innovative ways to use new media technologies and content to express their ideas and opinions online, despite the legal, economic and technological barriers that have been put in their way. Collectively, these new forms might be called oppositional new media, echoing what Lovink and Richardson (2001) call "the media of opposition." They are oppositional in the sense that they constitute a response, reflection, critique, parody or rejoinder to situations and events created by or portrayed in mainstream media. Oppositional new media is an umbrella concept that encompasses a variety of forms and content. For example, Geert Lovink and his associates have coined the term tactical media and in different works describe its relationship to similar forms, such as alternative media. For the purposes of this paper, however, both tactical and alternative media are included as oppositional new media. In terms of both ontent and technology oppositional new media evolve, bottom-up, in response and resistance to a media environment that some groups regard as being fully saturated with consumerism and political spin designed to impress rather than to inform or instigate. For these users, the Internet, mobile telephony and related infrastructures are tools for creating hospitable spaces to develop and express unpopular or even 'fringe' ideas, and to resist the homogenization of mainstream computing, telecommunications, media and culture. The sites they design and build are necessarily low-budget, quickresponse forms of communication that are specifically intended to "cut through the clutter" -sometimes, by borrowing and subverting it. When they are welldesigned and thoughtful, these sites can be memorable, effective, and can motivate impassioned response and participation. They advance the "alternative" philosophy of the early Internet proponents and visionaries, but they also depart from previous forms in important ways. Groups like ®TMark and the Surveillance Camera Players may not have the cachet, pundits, or Microsoft bankroll of Slate, and blogs may never reach more than a few dozen loyal readers. Nonetheless, new genres of digital media have become a sort of laboratory for tinkering with political and cultural expression. In the rest of this paper several important genres of oppositional new media are described and illustrated with recent cases. The characteristics that make oppositional new media a distinctive form of communication, and its role in fostering community participation and involvement, are discussed.