Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Alternative Media

Alternative media are produced outside mainstream media institutions and networks. They can include the media of protest groups, dissidents, fringe political organizations, even fans and hobbyists. They tend to be produced by amateurs who typically have little or no training or professional qualifications. They write and report from their position as citizens, as members of communities, as activists, or as fans. Alternative media also seek to redress what their producers consider an imbalance of media power in mainstream media, which results in the marginalization (at worst, the demonization) of certain social and cultural groups and movements. As well as being homes for radical content, alternative media projects also tend to be organized in nonmainstream ways, often nonhierarchically or collectively, and very often on a noncommercial basis. In these ways they hope to be independent of the market and open to change.

This entry examines the ways in which alternative media—and, in particular, the term alternative—have been defined, explores ways in which such media represent a challenge to media power, and discusses a typology of alternative media. The field theory of Pierre Bourdieu is drawn upon to consider the relationship between alternative and mainstream media production, and subsequently the particular ideology and practices of alternative journalism.

The definition of alternative media as presented here is not limited to political and “resistance” media. It is equally applicable to artistic and literary media (video, music, mail art, creative writing), as well as to forms such as zines and electronic communication. Not only social relations in general but also dominant practices of media production—text, visual forms, even distribution processes—may be transformed, and notions such as professionalism, competence, and expertise can be reassessed.

Defining Alternative Media

The apparent looseness in defining terms in this field has led some critics to argue that there can be no meaningful definition of the term alternative media. Whereas radical encourages a definition that is primarily concerned with (often revolutionary) social change, alternative offers a much looser purchase. Custom and practice within alternative media appear to have settled on alternative as the preferred term. Its strength is that it can encompass far more than radical, or terms such as social change publishing; it can also include alternative lifestyle magazines, an extremely diverse range of fanzine and zine publishing, and the small presses of poetry and fiction publishers.

Furthermore, definitions have historical and cultural contingencies. Alternative in West Coast countercultural terms invokes alternative therapies and New Age thinking. Radical for some can be as much to do with avant-garde artistic activity as with politics. For zine writers, neither term might be preferable: The even looser DIY publishing might replace both. John Downing talks of radical media, an alternative public realm, alternative media, and radical alternative media, but he also refers to counterinformation and popular oppositional culture. His discussion of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's work raises Antonio Gramsci's notion of counterhegemony that, Downing implies, is also a driving force behind the contemporary media he is examining.

The entire range of alternative media might be considered as representing challenges to hegemony, whether on an explicitly political platform, or employing the kinds of indirect challenges through experimentation and transformation of existing roles, routines, emblems, and signs that Dick Hebdige locates at the heart of counterhegemonic subcultural style. Karol Jakubowicz finds a wider meaning in alternative: not simply sects or narrow special interests but a wide-ranging and influential sphere that may include all manner of reformist groups and institutions.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution