Citizens' Media

As an academic term, citizens' media belongs to a large family of concepts that include community media, alternative media, autonomous media, participatory media, and radical media. Benjamin Ferron lists the following terms that are associated with citizens' media: alternative, radical, citizens', marginal, participatory, counter-information, parallel, community, underground, popular, libres, dissident, resistant, pirate, clandestine, autonomous, young, and micro-médias.

In 2001, Clemencia Rodríguez coined the term citizens' media in her book Fissures in the Mediascape, which emerged at the crossroads between Latin American communication and culture scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s and the proposal for a global New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO).

[Page 99]During the 1980s, Latin American communication and culture scholars proposed alternative theoretical frameworks to understand cultural, communication, and media processes. Antonio Pasquali in Venezuela, Paulo Freire in Brasil, Rosa María Alfaro in Perú, Armand Mattelart in Chile, Luis Ramiro Beltrán in Bolivia, Marita Mata and Eliseo Verón in Argentina, Néstor García Canclini in México, Mario Kaplún in Uruguay, and Jesús Martín Barbero in Colombia proposed a series of pioneer conceptual frameworks that allowed Latin America to conceptualize communication and culture in its own terms and questioned theories imported from the global North. Also, Latin American communication and culture scholarship broke off from the “ivory tower” of academia, proposing instead a genre of scholarship deeply engaged with the Indigenous, labor, student, women's, and youth social movements that stirred political mobilizations and profound social, economic, and cultural transformations in the region from the 1970s onward.

During the late 1970s, representatives from third world countries had exposed a scenario of global communication inequities at UNESCO and the United Nations. They protested a situation in which the flow of information and communication from first world countries into third world countries was many times stronger than the reverse, and in which the communication infrastructure in the latter nations was sharply inferior. UNESCO commissioned the 1980 MacBride Report on this situation, which was translated into many languages and widely distributed and debated across the world. It demonstrated that most global media traffic was controlled by a few transnational communication corporations in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The MacBride Report also showed that global-South-to-global-South communication was then practically nonexistent.

Solutions proposed by those striving for more democratic communication practices included changing national communication policies, increasing South-to-South communication and information initiatives (such as press agencies), and a code of ethics for the mass media. However, when Rodríguez published Fissures in the Mediascape 20 years later, she noted that NWICO had never gotten off the ground. In part, this was because of corporate hostility channeled through the U.S. and British governments, which actually withdrew from UNESCO for 2 decades to punish its initiative, but most particularly because of the need to rethink the democratization of media from a grassroots perspective, closer to people and third world communities than to press agencies, large-scale media, and national information policies.

This new perspective visualized social movements and grassroots organizations and their alternative media as the new key players in the processes of democratization of communication. The hope was now for these newly politicized social subjects (social movements, grassroots organizations, grupos populares) to establish their own small-scale media outlets and to spin their own communication and information networks, bypassing the global communication giants. Apart from providing their audiences with alternative information, these new media—labeled alternative media—were expected to divert from the top-down vertical mode of communication. Whereas the big media function on the basis of a hierarchy between media producers and media audiences, where the latter have no voice and are restricted to a passive role of receiving media messages, alternative media were thought of as the panacea of horizontal communication, whereby senders and receivers share equal access to communicative power.

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