Alternative Media Global Project

Project Components

The project includes a section on research, a developing bibliography, a mapping project, a chronology, a yearbook, a blog, and a glossary. These different sections are linked to each other and many external Web resources.

The research section, first, addresses how to define, study, and theorize alternative media. So, should the meaning of media be reduced to newspapers, cinema, and broadcasting, or should it include graffiti, posters, flyers, music, dance, theater, documentaries, audiotapes, photos, and blogs? Why are there so many terms for out-of-the-mainstream media: alternative, radical, citizens', community, participatory, free, autonomous, underground, independent, clandestine, pirate, ethnic, dissident, marginal, parallel? Can they be defined only by their opposition to mainstream media? If not, can one term reflect their extreme diversity of form and content? Does their study require specific methodologies or theories? How can other media or social movement research be useful to understand them? Which possibilities and obstacles exist to developing international comparison of alternative media networks and histories?

Second, the multientry bibliography lists research publications, materials produced by community media producers themselves, and articles from mainstream media on alternative media worldwide. Alternative media studies come from several disciplines (information-communication, sociology, history, political science, anthropology). The AMPG hopes to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue. It also aims to facilitate research in specific geographical zones, international comparisons on alternative media networks, and to archive the historical memory of these media. Around 500 references had been classified by 2009 by media technology, country, and theme (e.g., alternative media and anarchism, alternative media in conflict situations).

Third is an interactive world map of hundreds of community radios, independent newspapers, free TVs, alternative video projects, and radical websites. Just 6 months after its creation, this “amazing map,” according to the alternative blog Waves of Change, had been visited more than 10,000 times. It pinpoints geographically 600 media projects in almost every country in the world.

Each is described, its conditions of birth and development, the difficulties or repression it has faced, its networks of production and distribution, its equipment, coordinators, internal organization, financing, publications, formats, institutional partners, website, address, contacts, logo, and its relationships with other alternative media. This inventory was made possible by a network of correspondents, working with Google Maps. Each correspondent can add important information about his or her geographical area. Internet research and field investigations facilitate gathering and recording relevant information.

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