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While communication between fans may have been ameliorated through the Internet, it is mistaken to think that the formation of an international taste community was impossible or unsustainable before the Internet. International networks of fans have long histories. It is to some extent a matter of degree — the use of the Internet as an occasion for the construction and development of alternative media has multiple outcomes. Communities whose activities must not be thought as determined by the Internet have emerged with embedded radicalised notions of freedom, intellectual property rights and creativity into Internet practice. Alternative media practices are hybrid practices that embody continuation as well as reform and rupture. They are not to be understood solely in relation to political activism.

Chapter Seven presents a schematic account of the functions a social media platform would need to have in order to fulfil the roles required of it by anarchist cybernetics. Drawing on the negative critiques of existing social media platforms and the positive requirements outlined by activists and scholars, this chapter asks what an alternative social media platform would look like and how it would be different from the commercial platforms we use everyday. The chapter identifies four broad lines of critique aimed at the use of social media in anarchist cybernetic organising: (1) the privacy critique (2) the political economy critique; (3) the weak ties critique; and (4) the political subjectivity critique. The chapter provides a sketch of what such an alternative platform would look like, identifying the key features that aid the functionality of such a platform for self-organisation.

With the increased interest in alternative digital media in contemporary Cuba, scholars tend to overlook the fact that alternative media have a long and complex history that well precedes the so-called “digital revolution.” In adopting a broader, historical focus to analyze four convulsive periods of Cuba’s history in which technological affordances have enabled alternative communication to emerge, this chapter reconstructs radical media experiences during the Ten Years’ War, The Cuban War of Independence, and the dictatorships of Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista. It draws from the concept of Downing’s (2001) radical media and Rodríguez’s (2001) citizen media. The chapter offers an overview of the most important alternative media and their objectives and links to revolutionary movements. Media content, internal organization, use of technology, means of distribution, and the repercussions they faced are explored. It then proposes five traits that tie the different eras together with respect to contemporary alternative communication: illegality and repression, use of new technology, innovative means of production and distribution, professional expertise, and the intervention of diasporic communities. The chapter argues that alternative communication in Cuba has been a continuous historical, sociopolitical phenomenon, rather than an exceptional, ahistorical phenomenon merely afforded by today’s spread of digitalization.

At the heart of the cultural studies approach to media research is the notion of culture as a key to understanding specific features of a particular historical situation. This chapter explores ‘alternative media’ and how we might conceptualise and identify appropriate methodologies for studying the Internet. It discusses the banality of the Internet and the everyday practices that construct it and its relations to the wider world. It examines power relations and alternative media, the economic and cultural dimensions of globalisation, and the legal constraints on communication and freedom of expression. The chapter closes with a discussion of the nature and purpose of the social movements that have arisen to challenge these forces as they are played out on the Internet, and introduces topics such as electronic civil disobedience, and communitarian and libertarian approaches to electronic intellectual property.

This chapter examines the relevance of localism to the mass media sector in the U.S. It explores the history of media-reform movements and the emergence of alternative and community media as one strategy for opposing corporate control of the media. It discusses the negative coverage of localism in the American media and evaluates claims about the grassroots and democratic potential of Internet-based media. This chapter also considers the problem of consolidation for for-profit alternative media and the potentials and pitfalls of nonprofit ownership as a strategy of survival.

This chapter examines how technological and cultural resources are being deployed by far-right media in the United Kingdom, paying attention to how these ‘repressive’ media are being reconstructed by their producers as forms of progressive politics. It looks at the discourse of the British National Party's (BNP) web site and analyses the site as a form of alternative media, focusing on how it involves members and supporters in its discursive construction of racism. The BNP site reminds us that ‘alternative media’ need not solely be concerned with struggles for social justice and the liberation of the oppressed. The repressive media of the far right, however, share aspects of their discourse with that of progressive media such as Independent Media Centres. Notions such as post-colonialism, repression and multiculturalism recur throughout both. In the case of the far right these terms are turned on their heads and employed to represent the constituencies of the far right as victims of repression themselves.

Internet websites of Horn of Africa and Kenyan diaspora groups (broadly defined to include exile, transnational, emigrant, expatriate and refugee communities) provide alternative media sources to Kenya and Horn of Africa-based media as well as to media of the United States and Europe. These alternatives affect the internet, print and broadcast media, news and opinion media, and arts and entertainment media. The alternatives presented by these websites address specific diasporic and exile communities, transnational diasporic communities, and African and global audiences. They include what is excluded by other media sources; demonstrate creative use of technology; challenge the views presented in other sources; and provide services for, and work to organise and mobilise, diaspora communities.

This chapter explores the performative politics of the TeleGhetto project as performed by three “princes” in the “port”—Alex Louis, Steevens Simeon, and Romel Jean Pierre. The TeleGhetto project address the precarious lives lived in the streets of Port-au-Prince through the creative production of an improvised “Ghetto TV” that embodies an imaginative and performative politics of race, gender, sexuality, and populace that alters the cityscapes, mediascapes, and citizenscapes of the capital. Contextualizing the art performance piece within poststructuralist, feminist, and queer understandings of performativity, the chapter then argues that TeleGhetto is performance speech-act (doing things in words) as well as performance art and alternative media, or citizen journalism—a synergistic mode of creative production that produces social space in and on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

This chapter explores the local and alternative coverage of Sakia Gunn, an African American lesbian who was murdered in Newark, New Jersey, in a 2003 bias crime. Although Gunn is not a high-profile mediated girl like those previously discussed, she made the cover of newspapers. Her death led to sustained and continuing public discussion in various media; her murder sparked public debate and scandal; and she was posthumously adored, mourned, and celebrated. Gunn is considered a spectacular girl in alternative locations, as none of this attention happened in a sustained way in mass-market mainstream media sources. As an explicitly queer African American girl, Gunn is relatively atypical in the media, yet the chapter argues that she is a spectacular girl nevertheless, that one can see her if one looks to media texts other than grocery store magazines, girl films, and world-class athletes.

This chapter presents a historiography of a select group of Brazilian women's independent, alternative film and video production during the 1980s, which contributed to new definitions of citizenship during the last years of the dictatorship and the transition toward democracy. Concomitant to the goal to define new political and cultural identities, Brazilian women's alternative media at the time sought to reclaim and expand citizenship rights by intervening in understandings of brasilidade (Brazilian cultural identity) and shaping debates surrounding issues such as abortion and women's access to healthcare. The chapter then examines works by film and video maker Eunice Gutman, the Lilith Video Collective—a group of three women who dedicated themselves to bringing greater awareness to women's issues as the Brazilian constitution was being rewritten, and the feminist nongovernmental organization SOS-Corpo.

This chapter traces the historical outlines of Latin American feminist counterpublics to show the kind of organizing, including alternative media use, that provided the foundation upon which more recent counterpublics would build. Through their publications and face-to-face meetings, activists during the late 19^th and early 20^th century developed strategies to name and claim women’s rights long before the advent of the internet. Their work served as a model for the explosion of activism beginning in the 1970s, when new regional publications enriched an unprecedented, and globally unreplicated counterpublic space, that of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters, or large regional meetings. The chapter also profiles two global communication projects in which Latin American counterpublics were embedded, and ends with an analysis of the very first computer-mediated project to promote women’s rights at the international venue of the 1975 UN World conference on women.

Chapter 8 meditates on what it calls documentary ‘dispersion’, considering whether new markets, technologies, and social challenges can be met through documentary's distinctive modes of address and filmmakers' ongoing efforts to engage with and influence the social imaginary. Given the ever-broadening range of documentary production and consumption, this chapter focuses more narrowly on a pressing issue taken up by recent documentary: the representation of US wars, and in particular the Iraq War. It includes a close reading of Fahrenheit 9/11.

This chapter serves to alleviate “culture shock” and ease the reader into the unique structure this volume takes on. It demonstrates how this book operates as part of the Pathways Project, and emphasizes the disorientation necessarily involved in abandoning the default medium of the book in order to grasp the dynamics of alternative media. The chapter lays out the terms and definitions to be undertaken in showing how oral tradition (OT) and Internet technology (IT) support thinking and creating and communicating in ways that books can't match. It emphasizes the importance of “thinking outside the book” in order to better understand how media—and human communication—works from the recalibrated perspective this book seeks to engender.

Chapter 3 analyzes women’s prison newsletters as a feminist counterpublic that enabled incarcerated women to communicate with one another and with anticarceral feminist activists in the “free world.” Two newsletters, Through the Looking Glass and No More Cages, which were produced by lesbian feminist collectives from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, document prisoners’ resistance and collective action against gendered and racialized violence. Addressing the chasm between a prisoners’ rights movement focused on men’s institutions and a feminist antiviolence movement increasingly enmeshed with the carceral state, these newsletters created solidarity between criminalized women and those outside the walls.

The book’s concluding chapter discusses post-revolutionary developments in Tunisia’s digital spaces of contention as the country attempted to build a democratic system. It explores the mutations and adaptations the voices of contention have undergone since the revolution and reflects on their significance. More specifically, it looks at the extent to which those who played a role in digital contention prior to the revolution effected and were affected by the changes the country witnessed since 2011 and asks whether they lost their relevance or became embedded; whether they were marginalized or developed the ability to shape the emergent media systems and enhance democratic engagement.