Audiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the Virtually Unknown

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2003 25: 625Media Culture SocietyJohn D. H. Downing

Virtually UnknownAudiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the

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Audiences and readers of alternative media: theabsent lure of the virtually unknown

John D. H. DowningTHE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

There is a distinctly disturbing gulf between our currently fragmentaryknowledge or debates concerning how audiences and readers use1 alternat-ive media, and the mass of descriptions and theorizations of alternativemedia at last now becoming available. The welcome surge in researchattention includes Atton (2001), Downing (2001), Fairchild (2001), Gumu-cio Dragon (2001), Halleck (2001), Land (1999), Rodrıguez (2001), Soley(1999), and was instanced in 2002 by the 70 papers delivered in the second‘OurMedia’ pre-conference and the Community Media Section panels atthe IAMCR (International Association for Media and CommunicationResearch) Barcelona conference.

I am taking a fairly wide definition of alternative media here, thoughfocusing principally on the politically radical. I am not, however, includingfor the purposes of this discussion those alternative sectors whose mediaproducts cater for the affluent or very affluent, such as ski hobbymagazines or oil industry bulletins. Such parameters are always porous, tobe sure, and in addition there are excellent arguments for avoiding tidydefinitions (Rodrıguez, 2001: 21–3) of alternative media, which always riskrequiring them to be evaluated by standards peculiar to large-scalemainstream media – and by which they are bound to fail! A huge extraspiral in this problem of producing a tidy definition of alternative media isthe multiplicity of formats and technologies involved (see Downing, 2001:Part II).

It is a paradox, however, that so little attention has been dedicated to theuser dimension, given that alternative-media activists represent in a sensethe most active segment of the so-called ‘active audience’. One would

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imagine that they above all would be passionately concerned with howtheir own media products were being received and used.

The gap is definitely an urgent one to fill, not least (1) given globaltrends to giant media corporations and the international growth of anti-corporate sentiment and action, all of which create a particularly importantsetting for understanding small-scale oppositional media; but also in anycase (2) considering the multiple social roles of myriads of alternativemedia, constantly expanding on the Internet and elsewhere, but notnecessarily limited to those with an ostensibly radical agenda.

We need to flag as well (3) the actual and potential roles of extremerightist alternative media (Downing, 2001: 88–96, 2002) and their appeal.The Nazi newspapers Volkischer Beobachter and Der Sturmer in the 1920sand 1930s (Kershaw, 1983; Showalter, 1982), and Radio-Television Libredes Mille Collines during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Chretien, 1995;Human Rights Watch, 1999: passim), serve as chilling examples of what ispossible at this end of the alternative media spectrum. For while somepeople will cynically sniff at the impact of leftist alternative media, andtherefore at their uses, hopefully few would be so unwise, given the historyof the 20th century alone, as to dismiss how people may respond to ultra-rightist ones. Not that these are limited to agents of mass repression andgenocide, as per the two cases cited. The studies in Kintz and Lesage(1998), for example, illustrate the importance of rightist religious media inthe contemporary USA.

Usage of this considerable spectrum of alternative media thereforerepresents a huge gap in our research knowledge, one with directimplications for the study of labor and other social movements, communityformation, minority–majority ethnic relations,2 transitional political re-gimes, the arts and the Internet, to name only some of the most obvious.For those considering engaging in this minimally developed audience andreadership3 research, the prolegomena that follow are designed in order toencourage and guide researchers, raising as they do key conceptual andmethodological questions.

We will commence then by analyzing reasons for the virtual absence ofalternative-media user research. We will then proceed to note two initialresearch priorities. The first will be to incorporate the play betweenalternative-media uses with their frequent focus on challenging the struc-tures of power, and mainstream-media uses, with their more typical focuson hegemonic integration. The second will be to propose a political ethicsof listening. The former priority will be discussed with a variety ofexamples, mostly from the experience of soviet-style polities, the lattermuch more summarily. We will then proceed to typify mainstream-mediauser research by way of establishing a ‘listening’ contrast with the demandsof alternative-media user research. We will conclude by exploring fourfurther research priorities, namely to focus on the mesh between

626 Media, Culture & Society 25(5)



alternative-media users and (1) social and political movements; (2) opposi-tional consciousness; (3) the conditions of reception; and (4) the variety ofcommunication technologies, genres and formats in alternative as comparedto mainstream media.

The weak appetite for user research within alternative media

As we suggested above, if media activists are so disenchanted withmainstream media neglect of their concerns that they expend great energymaking their own media, is it not predictable that they should be absorbedwith knowing their own users’ reactions?

But the answer is, not so much as this logic proposes. One of the goodreasons is the colossal effort needed, especially when activists are unpaid,to launch and sustain many alternative media projects, leaving little overfor user research. To this we may sometimes add political repression thatdeters people from even admitting to using alternative media; sometimesthe intense 24/7 dynamic of an ongoing political crisis that leaves no timefor longer-term study of the users; sometimes large demonstrations insupport that prove beyond any doubt a strong measure of public enthu-siasm.4 Let us also, though, explore the bad reasons.

While, not surprisingly, the ethos of commercial user research holdsrather little interest for alternative-media activists, sometimes its casualideological dismissal creates problems. One result may be a cavalierattitude to basic financial realities, which can mean that the project goesbust for entirely avoidable reasons, or staggers along but without achievingits feasible goals.

A second case consists of alternative media that strive just to sustain adistinctive orthodoxy and therefore not to engage with casual bystanders oropponents (e.g. religious or political zealot newspapers, ethnic separatistpublications). So long as the faithful stay loyal, the locked circuitcontinues.

A third example is where activists have effectively colonized analternative media outlet and it has become their entire, sometimes quasi-messianic, raison d’etre. While their worldview may be secular andpluralistic, they nonetheless represent a particular cultural niche, perhaps agenerational one,5 which effectively closes off access to groups alternativeto themselves. Cable television access centers in the USA in the 1990s and2000s quite often had what looked like a tenure system for local producers,who represented a variety, to be sure, but the identical variety – and people– year after year. Just because people think their voice is not representeddoes not mean they are interested in other voices than their own.

627Downing, Audiences of alternative media



A fourth case is where public support is unmistakably tangible during aperiod of acute political contention, but misleads the activists into seeing itas more widespread and durable than it is, so that they take it for grantedbeyond the point they should.

Indeed, we might be inclined to pursue this disconnect a step further. Isit not the case that the wooden, even leaden, language of some alternativemedia and their sometimes unappealing appearance (see Downing, 1980:180–99; Violi, 1977) gives us immediate pause as we wonder how couldthose supposedly organic intellectuals be sincerely interested in their users?

Yet on this issue we need a note of methodological caution: the languageand aesthetics of alternative media can be more complex questions thansuperficial comparisons with mainstream media aesthetics would suggest.Let us examine briefly Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo and Soviet samizdat ascases in point, the first in regard to language, the second in regard to‘look’.

During Italy’s Red Biennium in 1919–20, Turin auto workers, then themost pivotal sector of the Italian industrial working class, did not simplystrike but actually took over the running of the factories, displacing for awhile the supposedly essential management. L’Ordine Nuovo (The NewOrder) was one of the newspapers that circulated in the factories, but itwas pretty tough reading (Williams, 1975). Agnelli senior, Fiat’s founder,assumed a dissident member of his engineering staff had to be writing it,such was its intellectual acuity. Yet at the time and in the conditions, it wasnot simply shrugged off as a series of ivory tower pronunciamentos,struggle with its language was probably at the very least what a number ofinsurrectionary auto workers had to do.

We could, in graphical layout terms, compare early Soviet samizdatmedia. These were simply typed sheets with neither margins nor spaces atthe top and bottom of the page, because of the difficulty of getting hold ofblank typing paper in any quantity without attracting KGB attention, andwere also typed using carbon copy-sheets between nine further pages. Thismeant the lower copies were very blurry and hard to read. Nonetheless,they passed from hand to hand like hot cakes, despite the severe repressionthat would attend their discovery by the authorities.

In other words, notwithstanding the fact that there are alternative-mediainstances which evince a really profound lack of interest in their users, weshould not, without attention to the context, rush to negative judgment ofseemingly unattractive alternative-media aesthetics and writing style, andtheir impact on users.

To sum up, however: the various reasons, good or bad, for alternative-media activists not to engage in user research do offer a valuable role, ifthey choose to adopt it, to politically engaged academic media researcherswith the needed time and resources. There is, however, an importantintellectual and ethical caveat about how the academics judge their role:




. . . audience images are always inscribed: the institutional according toinstitutional goals; the academic according to methodological and other scien-tific (theoretical) discourses; and the audience’s image according to culturalcodes for good taste and decent lifestyles, that is, according to moral hierarchiesin the culture. (Hagen, 1999: 145, my emphasis)

This quotation is not intended to plant a Total Relativism flag on the terrainof alternative-media research, denying there are real people using media. Itis simply to emphasize the degree of reflexive self-critique with whichacademic researchers should deploy their methods, and the respect theyshould maintain for alternative-media users they research.

Two contrasting but complementary views of audience agency

A pivotal difference that research into alternative-media use confronts wasposed in principle by Indymedia Italia, which, on 16 March 2002,organized a Reclaim Your Media march in Rome, along with Radio OndaRossa.6 They developed a telling watchword for the demonstration’splacards: ‘Don’t hate the media! Become the media!’ In other words, theysaid, we can all become media communicators: in Italian socialist terminol-ogy of the 1970s, the subjects (agents) of struggle can become the subjectsof information (Downing, 2001: 278).

To clarify this perspective, let us contrast it with the postmodernistanalysis of audience agency developed by Abercrombie and Longhurst(1998). They argue that with the diffusion of commodity-exchange-basedspectacle via television and other media, the world has recently added anextra cultural dimension in which, in our habitual role of being audiences,we are typically also ‘performing for an imagined audience’ (1998: 96, myemphases). Yet our ‘narcissistic’ responses as performers/audiences leadmostly to ‘a dedicated interest in clothes, perfume, hair-style, homefurnishing, cars, houses, music, food . . . the management of appearance’(1998: 93).

Their attempt to construct a mass psychology of media-modernitytends to lead, however, not to any focus on the extension of the public’spotential to communicate independently – despite their obvious sympathywith amateur musicians (1998: 162–6) and their emphasis on ludic agencyin fandom (1998: 154–6) – but ultimately only to attention to highlybounded consumer culture options. They do note the distinction, followingLawrence Grossberg, between ‘everyday life’ for affluent consumers in anaffluent economy and ‘daily life’ for the majority of the world’s public(1998: 167–8), but the ‘daily’ media realities and audience agency depictedin the 50 alternative media case-studies provided by Gumucio Dragon(2001) are clearly not pivotal to their vision. The common Nigerian pidginresponse to being asked how you are – ‘Patch de patch’ (= ‘I’m sewing a




new patch to hold the old one, surviving by the skin of my teeth’) –conveys a lifestyle and set of options quite outside their chosen radius.

Their wish to move beyond a pure and reductionist binary of power–resistance is perfectly reasonable, for that basic agenda and an interest inthe ludic is as valid for analyzing politics and culture in the global South asanywhere else. But the authors effectively sideline rather than complicate(their avowed intent) the stubborn continuing question of sharp powerdifferentials, which is a little surprising and rather a pity given theirexplicitly heavy debt (1998: 82–5) to Guy Debord’s and the Situationists’notion of the advanced bourgeois society of the spectacle.

In the contrasted problematic of ‘us the objects’ becoming ‘we thesubjects’ of media communication, the relationship between alternativecommunicators and audiences/readers/users may at first blush appear to bemerely a constantly circulating switch of hats. As media activists research-ing alternative-media users we the subjects would not be investigating asociological category, a niche market, or an election target group – objects– but simply ourselves wearing our other hat. This would not magicallycancel all differences between researchers and researched in language,cultural capital, ethnicity, gender, experience or anything else, but it couldsubstantially reduce the ‘knowledge-for-manipulation’ factor that character-izes conventional research on media-users, for the demographics-robots ofthe commercial sector and the Hochkultur elite of public broadcasting havealways shared an icily remote relationship to actual media users.7

Nonetheless, we need to be cautious if we move in this ‘object-to-subject’ elision. Historically, the Soviet utilization of worker and farmercorrespondents (rabselkory), closely linked to the Soviet institution of the‘wall’ newspaper (Gorham, 1996; Kelly, 2002; Lenoe, 1999), was super-ficially similar to Indymedia Italia’s vision of ‘becoming the media’, one inwhich differences between media users, media makers and thereforeaudience researchers virtually melted away into insignificance. Wall news-papers were mostly written entirely by local volunteers, not professionaljournalists, and displayed on walls, or notice-boards or display stands, inspecific localities – a factory, an office, a school, a hospital, after 1928 in acollective farm administration building. Developed originally in the early1920s by Russian Communist enthusiasts as a grassroots initiative, thenquickly blessed by the Party authorities in order to cope with newsprintshortages, and thereafter becoming a mediascape fixture, the wall news-paper consisted typically of very short reports on the local institution ofaround 50 words each, sometimes getting as far in literary terms asagitational doggerel and satirical anecdotes. On the face of it, this wasindeed the public becoming the media, and thus, in a sense, who neededresearchers into media uses in this tight nexus?

In reality the wall-newspaper and rabselkory phenomenon, reproducedthroughout Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam and North Korea during the




Soviet era, wore a very different complexion. ‘Blessing’ by the Partyauthorities, locally speaking, meant not only their approval for starting it,but editorial control and guidance by Party cells and the Communist Youthorganization, and the ever-present potential for unwelcome attention fromState censorship offices. In practice, in the Russian case at least, thecontents seem often to have been a blend of official propaganda communi-ques, critiques set firmly within Party policy confines of particularmanagers’ behavior or local work-policies, and local trivia or gossip(sometimes seasoned with personal venom). In periods of the tightestrepression, even some of this variety was flattened out, though in the post-Stalin Thaw period the wall newspaper enjoyed a short-lived resurgence ofenergy.

The institution of people’s correspondents during the Sandinista regimein Nicaragua (1979–89) owed much to a certain rather under-informed andpopulist image of the rabselkory tradition, derived via Cuba. As Rodrıguez(2001: 65–81) notes, however, the early promise of this grassrootsmovement in opening up the voices of the public began to deteriorate aftersome years, largely in response to the Sandinista leadership’s determinationto have ‘politically reliable’ correspondents in place in the context of theUS-funded guerrilla war against the regime. In China too after 1949, bigcharacter posters (dazibao) were also at times vehicles of popular expres-sion, but at others, or sometimes simultaneously, methods of massmobilization by one elite fraction against another. Certainly when theywere closer to being the former, they were only permitted for as long as itsuited the tactics of the winning fraction of the elite (Downing, 2001:170–2). Thus Soviet, Maoist and comparable experiences are well worthstudying, but in order to learn from past transmutations of a democraticmedia ideal how perhaps to avoid such pitfalls in future. They were nevertrue exemplars.

Much more lively instances of democratic media agency are the Britishexamples of anarchist press reader-writers reviewed by Atton (2001:103–28). He carefully depicts the considerable variety evidenced in hissample of publications, including even within a single publication: ‘Interms of content Green Anarchist is an odd blend of the colloquiallypragmatic (often expressed confrontationally), the densely theoretical andat times the simply baffling’ (2001: 124). His brief comments on a self-selected sample of 50 SchNEWS readers’ responses to the weekly (2001:128–32), suggest that for them its main merits were honesty and credibility,the fact no money-making was involved in the newspaper’s production, andthe networking of information concerning protest actions and oppositionalcultural events. He is however careful to stress the great variety of thereaders’ motivations and uses.

An important lesson in this regard may also be drawn from the specificexperience of People’s Radio (Radio Popolare) in Milan over nearly 30




years, where virtually from the inception of the station its leading activistswere very conscious of certain pragmatic realities (Downing, 2001:275–86). Those with the time to devote unpaid or barely paid to the stationwere mostly those with sufficient financial resources of one kind or anothernot to have to work, very often students (in Italy, undergraduate study isquite often pursued over the best part of a decade). In turn, students’ moreacademic language-style and allusions did not necessarily enable them tocommunicate easily with a diverse audience. Furthermore, in a city with agrowing migrant worker public from Arab and other nations, not tomention issues of gender or age, media communicators were not simplyinterchangeable members of a single social class. Rather than proceedby presupposing this implausible fusion, the station’s leaders sought tobring these contradictory factors into open debate as a means to try to keepthem from surreptitiously balkanizing and disrupting the radio station’soperation.

Thus neither the attractive directness of ‘becoming the media’ norAbercrombie and Longhurst’s sidelining of the continuing thorny dilemmasof responding to corporate, transnational and state power refracted inmedia, provide us with sufficiently solid analytical ground by themselveson which to base research into alternative media users and uses. Theformer simply wipes out Abercrombie and Longhurst’s acknowledgment ofour multiple levels of interaction with and attractions to mainstream media– alternative media users rarely switch off from mainstream media, andcertainly grew up with them. Their point is crucial, but they simplyjuxtapose a prior power/resistance audience dimension to the new‘diffused-audience’ dimension they put forward, without engaging withtheir mutual imbrication and its implications.

In the analysis of alternative media uses, incorporating this mesh intoour models is the first priority. But there are others.

Further priorities, social-ethical and analytical

We need to be alert to another dimension if we are to ‘become the media’,namely the dimension of social-ethical concern not to translate ourcommitment as alternative-media activists into a dystopia of incessant andcompulsive public communication, where the question will not be the usualone of who will keep the corporate media owners under surveillance (quiscustodiet ipsos custodes?), but who will actually have the stamina to listento this myriad of popular communicators pounding out their messages? AsCharles Husband (1996) has argued, a purely sending mode of communica-tion need only produce a Tower of Babel. Listening, literally andfiguratively, needs also to be central to the alternative media process andmust be the ethical dimension at the heart of our models. For Habermas,




attending carefully to the interlocutor’s intentions and meanings representsa yardstick by which we may measure our democratic practice. ForHusband, the issue is not simply one of measurement, but an imperative.

We need to admit in all frankness that there have been only too manyexamples of people, like instances from US cable access cited earlier, whostarted alternative media ostensibly to allow ‘other voices’ but actuallyonly to express their own, and where the term ‘dialogic’ has definitely beenhonored far more in the breach than in its observance. Husband (1996)proposes a (third-order) human right ‘to be understood’, but in dialogicmedia this has to entail careful attention to public audiences/readers, forthey too have the right to have media activists listen to and engage withtheir experiences, their dreams and their nightmares, and not simply to becommunicated at.

How to hew to this ‘listening’ principle needs to be the topic ofextensive analysis of practical experience, for which there is no space here.But it is fundamental.

Before exploring four further research priorities in this sphere, we willproceed in the section that immediately follows to typify some primaryelements in conventional mainstream-media user research, and thus estab-lish a basic template with which to conceptualize the contrasting dimen-sions of alternative-media user research. This contrastive approach isinspired in part by Eliasoph’s (1997) illuminating study of how newspriorities and practices at a Pacifica Network alternative radio station in theUSA were thrown into relief by comparing them with the station’smainstream counterparts.

Conventional research on media users

Most user research, especially if at all current, is not available to thegeneral public, but is a market commodity strictly reserved for contractedfirms. It is based, obviously, on demographics, and at its simplest correlateseyeballs (or ears) and wallets. Why the public may like or not like aparticular program or song is a secondary question that may also beresearched if profit may plausibly be made from doing so. The researchmay be quantitative, or qualitative (e.g. the famous Hollywood focusgroups),8 or both. But only to that point does it assess the public’sinvolvement, the mainsprings of its media uses. For media executives theshifting news or programming balance is perpetually between the tried andtested and the decreasingly flavorsome, and to monitor this does not requirescouring the public’s thinking and emotions in detail. What they willapparently switch on to suffices.




Indeed it is an open secret that the standard methods of broadcastaudience measurement are riddled with flaws (Meehan, 1984, 1993);nonetheless there has to be some common currency between mediaexecutives and advertising buyers for them to be able to sign contracts witheach other. Their normal acceptance of ratings is based on mutual financialconvenience, not on scientific precision.

To understand mainstream media producers’ and journalists’ relation tousers, one level down from the corporate executives, it is useful to beginfrom Hagen’s (1999: 133) deployment of a distinction she draws from thesocial psychology of organizational management, namely ‘single-loop’ and‘double-loop’ learning. In mainstream media the former would denote animage of media users that professional communicators derive from eachother within their own closed circles, while the latter would signifyaudience-images they might draw from external sources. Hagen providesan excellent summary of empirical studies that demonstrate the typicalreliance of professionals within established media on each others’ judgment(1999: 133–5), in other words their determinedly single-loop learningpractices. Husband’s assertion of the centrality of listening receives onlythe faintest of echoes.

There are also intensive media marketing modalities. The vast promo-tional system, the star system, the fan clubs, the Oscars, the Emmys, majorannual film festivals, and all their national analogues outside the USA, playsignificant roles as well. But they are all about stimulating consumermarkets, not about understanding audiences/readers,9 and certainly notabout the public’s social agency.

In other words, the history of mainstream media-user research up to thepresent is firmly anchored within this marketing dynamic: expensive,initially secret, quantified, but actually very loosely estimated broadcastratings, based on particular programs and products; a star system; giantpromotional budgets which for a blockbuster film may equal or surpass itsproduction costs; focus groups whose role is to warn of box-office disaster;and producers’ ‘single-loop’ learning. Academic research still often pursuesthe commercial research paradigm, although since the 1980s there has beena small wave of ethnographic-style studies – accompanied by a torrent ofhypothesizing – investigating details of audience uses.

Commercial research studies and most of their academic counterparts areradically different from the world of alternative media. The passion forengaging with media users is certainly absent and, in addition, thesubstance of mainstream media content is tendentially very different.

Let us now proceed to a discussion of the four key factors in alternative-media reception proposed above, beginning with their relation to socialmovements.




Alternative media and social movements

Not all such media are part and parcel of such movements, either in fact orby intention. But often they are and when they are, whether the movementsare in full flood or in abeyance or somewhere in between, standard researchassumptions about the public, audiences, readership and users must altersignificantly. Not only is the established relation between communicatorand user potentially not in play in the case of social movement media, butwe are no longer just in the realm of stable television viewers, settledaudiences, habitual decisions, ‘program flow’, the daily newspaper readingritual, drive-time radio, the TV screen as everyday distraction in bar andairport.

Like the definition of alternative media, so too social movements havesuffered from reductive definitions, beginning with the mob model favoredby 19th-century commentators, on to the rational actor model influenced byfacets of the US Civil Rights movement, and in the 1980s and 1990s to the‘new social movement’ model based on readings of the feminist, peace andecological movements (Atton, 2001: 80–102; Cohen, 1985). More recently,debates have opened more widely, for example around the notion of‘contentious politics’ (see Aminzade et al., 2001), and seek to addressfacets of social and political movements still typically left un-examined byacademic research, such as emotion, space, time, religious and seculardimensions. Other recent work includes studies of solidarity movements(Giugni and Passy, 2001). The snare of reductiveness is as acute in socialmovement research as it is in the attempt to produce a single set definitionof alternative media, not surprisingly since they have some of the samemulti-faceted and tendentially unpredictable qualities.

So much so that it would be pointless in this short compass to try tocapture more than a few key points in the relation between the two. Onesuch however is the question of time, which I will subdivide into (a) thegenealogy of social movements, (b) the role of specific events in their life-cycle, and (c) the difference between ephemeral and long-running alternat-ive media.

Major 20th-century social movements such as the South African anti-apartheid movement and the US Civil Rights movement were very far fromflashes in the pan. They were decades in the making, in the case of theanti-apartheid movement going back at least to the protests led by Gandhi acentury ago and the foundation of the (predecessor to the) African NationalCongress in 1912. Media and communication networks of resistancedeveloped very painstakingly and slowly in symbiosis with those struggles,so that to evaluate alternative-media uses over such a period requires alongitudinal or historical study, only feasible today by oral historymethods10 that conventional audience research practically never even




considers undertaking. Yet to grasp the roles of these media over thelongue duree, no alternative offers itself.

Obviously some social movements are much younger than these, and itis correspondingly easier to research their media, but social movements donot explode into life overnight even if they seem to do so to externalobservers. Study of alternative-media users in movements’ gestationperiods addresses one facet; of users when movements are in full flood,another; and of users during periods of abeyance, a third. An example ofthe first would be the early phase of US lesbian and gay movements(Morris and Braine, 2001: 23–5), and of the third, the persistence of the USfeminist movement.

The second time-dimension, to which McAdam and Sewell (2001) drawparticular attention, is the pivotal role of particular events in the growth ofsocial movements. In the anti-apartheid movement inside and outside SouthAfrica, the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, the first Soweto uprising of 1976and the second of 1983, were such events, catalyzing broader and broaderinvolvement against the regime. Social movements are not steadily evolu-tionary, and insofar as this is central to their understanding, equally centralare alternative-media representations of major turning points, and theirimpact – or maybe absence of impact – among oppositional forces. Theirmeaning hangs on their immediate and continuing representation. Mediauser research especially needs to be able to evaluate alternative-mediaeffectiveness at these crucial points in time.11

The third time-dimension is that which distinguishes, approximately atleast, between what we might call one-shot alternative media such asgraffiti, song, performance art or political cartoons, and ongoing alternativemedia of which perhaps one of the most signal instances is the US politicalweekly The Nation, in existence since 1865. Both may be associated withvery long-running social movements, or with shorter-term ones, butobviously function differently in temporal terms. Ephemeral alternativemedia are typically much closer to artistic than to journalistic models, andseek to make an instant and hopefully lasting imprint by concentrating agreat deal into a very compressed and often pungent format. Long-runningalternative media, whatever their content, have more formally in commonwith mainstream media, although obviously the political cartoonist’s workoften overlaps the two formats.

In this time-context, notions of memory overlap considerably withalternative-media formats and uses. On the one hand, memory as anaccumulation of exposure to ongoing counter-hegemonic definitionalframeworks, information, images and debates; on the other, memory as therepository of single arresting images and experiences, in some cases theencapsulation of a whole iceberg of critique. And also memory as the agora




of competing critiques and counter-critiques, among them the superficial,the misconceived, the searching, the silly.

These are just some examples of how the temporal dimension needs tobe taken into account in research on alternative-media users when they areenmeshed in social movements, either closely or on the periphery.

Alternative media and the question of consciousness

However, as insisted already, we must acknowledge that these morehegemonic media habits interact with alternative-media uses, both in termsof their prior communicative accumulation and simultaneously. People donot categorically switch off mainstream media in the present moment,however intense that moment, nor can they elect simply to erase theiraccumulated mainstream media inheritance by some magical act of will. Itis normal for there to be a dynamic mental co-habitation among usersbetween the two types of media source and their variants.

One index of this is the question of credibility of alternative newssources. For some, there is always the nagging doubt that these ragtag andbob-tail media can possibly have gotten it right. For others, there is a rigidrejection of all mainstream media as polluted sources. Both responses intheir different ways betray the hegemony of mainstream media, the firstrather obviously, the second in its fear of complexity.

Addressing the question of consciousness, not least oppositional con-sciousness, is fundamental in this regard. Acknowledging its messiness,that it is pushed and pulled by many vectors simultaneously, that it isunstable over time, is equally so. Mansbridge (2001: 240–1) argues thatoppositional consciousness requires identifying with an unjustly sub-ordinated group, recognizing a group identity of interest in doing so,understanding the injustice as systemic, and accepting the need for andefficacy of collective action. She also argues that it forms an oppositionalculture in both an additive and an interactive process (2001: 249), where avariety of motivations are in play within the group. We might add to thislist a fifth dimension, namely having a strategy or strategies to address theinjustice. Mansbridge’s discussion of the relations between individual andgroup consciousness and culture stops short of a thorough exploration,and tends to posit individual-versus-group as straightforwardly binarycategories.

However, there is also typically a core–periphery dimension to be takeninto account in alternative-media user research within oppositional cultures,with some super-committed and highly conscious and others more tangen-tially so. To take a disquieting example from an ultra-rightist movement,Billig (1978) found that the neo-Nazis leading the National Front in 1970s




Britain focused their propaganda against people of color because theyfound that gained them white recruits, although their own personalconvictions, which they kept rather quiet in public pronouncements, werethat Jews represented by far the greatest danger. This is also an explicitlymanipulative instance, but the phenomenon is common of partial versusthoroughgoing commitment to a cause. Over time, too, individuals andgroups in a social movement may move for a variety of reasons moreclosely to the core or out toward the periphery.

Thus the questions researchers ask alternative-media users need to beinfinitely more complex than those posed in commercial surveys. Some ofthe qualitative research conducted by media and cultural studies researchersis more likely to bring illuminating results.12 But simply asking peoplewhich are their favorite programs or what kind of sports news they preferdoes not engage with most media users at any profound level, whereasmany alternative media, in ways too numerous to list, and not only inexplicitly political ways, do.

Indeed one pivotal dimension of research on consciousness in socialmovements has typically been poorly handled, namely a focus on emotionand its relation to social involvement. The rational-actor model of socialmovements excluded it, the mob model demonized it, and the ‘new socialmovement’ literature, insofar as it addressed it, mostly harnessed it toquestions of identity-politics. But as Aminzade and McAdam argue (2001:17–18), in the understanding of social movements, emotion is directlyrelevant both to collective mobilization and the onset of individualactivism. They do not pose emotion as operating in a binary opposition torationality, but rather as frequently spurring more rational forms ofcollective action than heretofore. These emotions may be both reactive (toparticular situations or events) and at the same time deeply connected tonational cultural patterns (relation to family, or government, for example).

For research on alternative-media users, the emotive and affectivedimension is crucial. Partly as a heritage of the simplistic definitions ofconsciousness and culture characteristic of early Marxist analysis and theirlong influence within leftist movements, a counter-information model ofalternative media has often predominated (e.g. Baldelli, 1972). People arestarving for the truth, they are being lied to, they are going out to kill andbe killed in war, so our job is to feed them factual vitamins instead ofcardboard capitalist ideology. Under dictatorships and even other regimes,not least in the USA during its aggressive ‘world policing’ administrations,this vision is very far from dotty in and of itself, but it is always radicallyinsufficient. Gobbets of truth by and of themselves may simply breedcynicism and fatalism. We are not simply jigsaws waiting for the crucialpieces.




The conditions of alternative-media reception

Next in this very introductory discussion we need to note how theconditions of reception, not least questions of space and location, must befactored in to alternative-media user research. Quite often, the situations inwhich alternative media are used will vary from the stable home or officeenvironment associated with broadcasting, VCR/DVD and computer use.They may include all sorts of collective gatherings, school and collegeclasses, voluntary clubs, solidarity groups, religious groups, undergroundorganizations, labor union auspices, demonstrations and outdoor assem-blies. Or they may be individually used.

Bennett (1990: 133–48), in her study of theatre audiences, rightly laystremendous emphasis on the huge differences that the location of adramatic performance has on its forms of reception (to take a patentexample, whether in a Victorian gilt-and-plush multi-balcony theatre or inthe street). The impact is likely to be, not least, on how free people feel toexpress their reactions and debate with each other in response to what theyhave witnessed or are in the very process of witnessing. Sheltered spaces,where people feel safe from violent police or fascist intervention as theywatch an illegal film or video and conduct subversive political discussion,are another very obvious example of this issue.

In his discussion of theatre audiences, Brecht (Downing, 2001: 62)raised by implication the further, simpler issue of the standard culturalexpectations people bring to different kinds of public spectacle. Hisexample was the difference between the energy and confidence with whichpeople will shout their support or critiques of particular plays in sportingcontests, and the disciplined timidity with which people will feel free tointervene while they watch a play on stage. His observation is notculturally universal however. Black and Latino cinema audiences in theUSA often comment noisily upon the film as it is running, and this culturalpractice may well be widespread elsewhere.

However, in the case of international solidarity movements and theirmedia (Giugni and Passy, 2001), the situation is more complex still. Thereare likely to be at least four audiences, each one using the movements’media and press releases/conferences in very varying contexts. One is thesolidarity movement itself, often operating under liberal democratic condi-tions, that is, under police surveillance but permitted open activity. Thesecond is the opposition movement in the nation or nations with whomsolidarity is expressed, including its political prisoners. The third is theforeign regime and its embassies, or the transnational corporations, or both,against whom the movement is protesting. The fourth is the domesticgovernment and corporate elite, which may have a variety of interests inplay in the countries with whose publics human rights movements areacting in solidarity. Whatever is said publicly by foreign or domestic




governmental or corporate paid spokespeople to dismiss as uninformed,ineffective or lunatic the efforts of domestic opposition or internationalsolidarity, we know only too well now from archives and political memoirsthat in private, elite discussions of those efforts are often conducted inentirely different tones. We also need to acknowledge both the boost topolitical prisoners, and the frequent overflow of political activism amongthe solidarity militants on to associated political issues.

Taking a quite different level in the analysis of the conditions ofreception, let us conclude this section by noting the empowering impactupon fresh alternative-media users of their new experience. Rodrıguez’s(2001: 109–28) account of the tremendous impact on women in a poverty-stricken Bogota neighborhood of the videos they themselves made abouttheir lives, and Couldry’s (2000: 155–74) account of English activists’media strategies and understandings, both nicely illustrate this. Theexamples are highly local in these cases, but they return us in the mostdirect way, though hopefully seasoned and cautioned by the discussionabove, to the Indymedia Italia watchword: ‘Don’t hate the media! Becomethe media!’

Indeed, for Rodrıguez, emphasis upon – and consequently the validationof – local audiences and users, is a defining characteristic of mostalternative media. The central argument of her book is that beginning atthis level of the conditions of reception is essential, if we are to avoid thegeneric error of framing alternative media process in terms of mainstreammedia process, thereby glissading past their actual modes of impact (andmaybe not even spotting the latter at all).

Technologies, genres and formats: variety and connections

Much too much mainstream media-user research – and this could be anunintended problem with the generic term ‘user’ – tends silently to conflatetechnologies, genres and formats. News becomes all of television, fictionbecomes all of cinema, media become simply broadcasting and print, weeven allude to ‘the’ Internet as a single phenomenon. Or we pursue theopposite track with regard to advertising, as somehow out on its own, andin a different way so too with popular music, or videogames, and by sodoing we conceptually sever their intertextual relations with the total mediaecology.

Yet if this is a problem with research into mainstream media uses, itwould be far more so with alternative media, which span a giganticspectrum from performance art, graffiti and dance through to Internet andsatellite use, and from the construction of alternative news services to thecreation of satire and visual shock, whether on lamp posts or transmittablecomputer files. No researcher or even large project can possibly engage




with this spectrum simultaneously. The research challenges and opportun-ities are tremendous, but the consequent need for caution in makinggeneralizations is even more essential than in mainstream user research.

An example of the need for caution is Khiabany’s stimulating andinformative comparison of British Leninist and non-sectarian leftist pub-lications, which proposes that the former ‘have survived longer and haveattracted more readers than did the attempt to construct a broader and morecommercially sophisticated alternative’ (2000: 462). Survival here isdefined as pivotal, and a narrow focus as proven to be most attractive toalternative media users. Yet by these criteria parish magazines too wouldstar, and while marketing and distribution energy is not automaticallysuccessful, its absence may not be either. Khiabany’s crisp conclusions begtoo many questions, although they would be an excellent jumping-off pointfor further research.

Conclusions

This has been a preliminary foray into this terrain, and has focusedfrequently on alternative-media uses in social movement mobilizations.There are many other kinds of alternative media just in this category,notably media of migrant workers and of political refugees, as well asmedia of settled minority-ethnic and indigenous groups, women’s move-ment media from the suffragists onwards, lesbian and gay media, labormedia. Reactionary and fascist media, local issue media, minority-ethnicmedia, religious media, hobby media, sharply different from each other incontent, represent still further categories.

A further question, also suitable for extended separate treatment, is theInternet. For some, it represents the very apotheosis of the ‘alternative’ inits dizzying range and in its interactivity, and both these are solid issues,even if sometimes hyped to screeching point. Yet, on another level, theInternet’s diversity tremendously complicates the issue of ‘What is alternat-ive?’, inasmuch as the current weakness of widely accepted and tough-minded criteria for evaluating its sources risks devaluing the currency (orcachet) of the alternative and the different.

Nor have we engaged in depth with the tension between Abercrombieand Longhurst’s emphasis on the ludic in the sphere of audience agency,and emphasis on power and oppositional movements. These may bealternative dimensions, but their existence and operation need urgently tobe analytically interrelated, not to become some pointless theoretical zero-sum game.

This complex terrain – much more complex, as has been shown, thancommercial media-user research bothers to register – is in urgent need ofcareful, sensitive exploration by communication researchers, in conjunction




with cultural anthropologists, cultural geographers, historians and the moreinnovative among political scientists and sociologists. For the reasons setout above, and despite the inevitable limitations of our academic problem-atics, it is likely to be academic researchers or no one who will engagewith these matters. Yet especially in our corporate-media-saturated world,they are crucial to address.

Notes

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Community CommunicationSection at the July 2002 IAMCR Conference in Barcelona.

1. I deliberately employ the word ‘media user(s)’ rather than media ‘consumers’,in part because of the passivity implicit in the latter term, and in part because ofmy skepticism as to the utility of applying the discourse of consumption,effectively derived from the reductionist model of the consumer in economics, tothe cultural process. Barker (1998: 186) puts it wittily: ‘such terms suggest a risingintake of media calories, a digestive stuffing of the senses and mind . . . the “heavyviewer” who “consumes” all the time is understood to be accumulating deposits ofmessage-fat . . .’. Furthermore the term entirely obliterates distinctions betweentypes of media and media format and the varied purposes to which people putthem. ‘Media users’ is appropriately agnostic rather than reductive. On the otherhand, the individualist bias in the ‘uses and gratifications’ tradition (Elliott, 1974)is not one to which I subscribe.

2. The most interesting work to date, small as it is in volume, has been done onminority-ethnic users of minority-ethnic media. Outstanding in this regard havebeen the studies by Naficy (1993) and those collected by Cunningham and Sinclair(2000/2001). The focus in this article is tendentially on social movement media,but in no way is designed to exclude the numerous other forms of alternativemedia.

3. I use ‘readership’ to include Web and Internet use as well as print media use,inasmuch as both mostly involve alphanumeric symbols, and in modern times areprincipally an individual activity. The ‘new tyranny of the visual image’ is a mythbeloved of nostalgic anti-modernists: what do they make of millennia of religiouspainting and sculpture? Have their ears fallen off too?

4. The San Francisco Bay Area support for KPFA in 1999–2000 and the Lisbonsupport for Radio Renascença in 1975 are two cases in point (Downing, 2001:258–61, 343–9).

5. E.g. in France the soixante-huitards, in Italy the sessantottini, in Russia theshyestidyesatilyetniki, i.e the 1968-ists or the Sixties folk.

6. See www.italy.indymedia.org (consulted 1 September 2002).7. As Hellman (1999: 125) puts it, ‘Whilst traditional arguments based on “what-

the-audience-needs” have partly been replaced by arguments based on “what-the-audience-wants”, commercial broadcasters have also compromised their populistprogramme policies, resulting in a rapprochement between the two policy discourses.’In terms of serious interest in the public’s involvement in media-making, neither sidecan claim significant credit at any point in its history.

8. The ending of the film Fatal Attraction was changed at the cost of $US3million to have the psychotic seductress female lead shot to death, because the




chosen focus groups were outraged she met with no punishment for her viciousattempts to break up her lover’s family.

9. I refer to the official fan clubs and their utilization. Jenkins (1992) and othershave explored the social agency in autonomously constructed fandom.

10. Payne (1996) and Egerton (1994) provide model and moving accounts of thegrowth of the Civil Rights movement based in significant part on oral histories,though both unfortunately focus little on its media or communication dimensions.

11. Lahusen (2001) has a useful discussion of celebrity rallies as mobilizingmega-events.

12. This is not to assert that survey methods can never be applied to thisresearch area. That would be a theological claim. On the other hand, alternativemedia with a very shifting social base would present practical problems in thisregard.

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John D.H. Downing teaches in the Radio-Television-Film Department ofthe University of Texas at Austin. His graduate degrees are from theLondon School of Economics. He has previously taught in London and NewYork. His published research is mostly on alternative media and socialmovements (including the indymedia phenomenon), racism and media, andmedia in the former Soviet bloc. He is currently editing the Sage Handbook ofMedia Studies and an encylopedia of alternative media.Address: Radio-Television-Film Department, University of Texas, 1 Uni-versity Station, #A 0800, Austin TX 78712, USA. [email: [email protected]]




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Audiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the Virtually Unknown