Suchergebnisse

To start with an analogy, for many, reading this book will be like the experience of eating Marmite! The way in which the subject matter is dealt with will be loved by some and hated by others, according to personal taste, politics and ideology. Although dealing with contentious issues of recent history, this book immediately reminded me of some of the early publications from the Glasgow University Media Group, such as 'Bad News', which I first read when completing a radio journalism course back in the 1980s. That said, the book is none the worse for pursuing similar angles to those earlier titles, and for many students, at undergraduate level in particular, the modern context will certainly make some of the issues involved a little more accessible.

The term 'alternative media' covers a tremendous range of activities and technologies. Sometimes referred to as community, or participatory media, it is also a somewhat flexible phrase, having a variety of meanings, depending upon the geographical and socio-economic context within which it is employed. There are however perhaps a couple of constants which help pin down a reasonably generic definition. For example, it is possible to claim that alternative media are inherently produced by those on the fringe, socially, culturally or politically. In addition, alternative media are perhaps also usefully defined by taking into account the processes which they employ and the outputs which they achieve as a result.

The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to t