You are looking at the very tip of the top of a gigantic iceberg. Indeed, you have the absolute right, if you are a social movement media activist, researcher, or historian and have examined the list of entries, to complain that this particular media project, that particular media project, or even a fleet of media projects seem to be off this encyclopedia's radar.

This editor regretfully agrees. Social movement media represent a dizzying variety of formats and experiences, far greater than mainstream commercial, public, or state media. A single-volume encyclopedia can deal with only a tiny sample. The guiding principles in selection have been to ensure as far as possible that experiences from the global South are given voice; that women are properly represented among the contributors (approximately half); that the wide spectrum of communication formats is included, from graffiti to the Internet; that further reading is provided where relevant in languages other than English; and that some examples are provided of repressive social movement media, not exclusively progressive ones.

The many different terms used to denote such media effectively testify to their huge variety: alternative media, citizens' media, community media, counterinformation media, grassroots media, independent media, nano-media, participatory media, social movement media, and underground media. This is quite apart from subcategories, each with its own cornucopia of descriptors, such as environmentalist media, feminist media, Indigenous media, minority-ethnic media, radical media, rhizomatic media, tactical media, and youth media.

So, think of this encyclopedia as a first edition, a downpayment on a second, much more extensive project hopefully using web and Internet resources even more systematically than in this first edition to provide or link to original texts and to both visual and aural materials. As shown by the list of book-length studies—English-language ones only—that follows this Introduction, research in this field has been thriving over the past decade. This volume deploys an anthropological and social movement perspective on media rather than a technologically based one. Murals, graffiti, popular song, and dance rub shoulders here with video and cinema. Low-power community radio and hitech digital networks are in the same dance.

Social movement researchers, however, are likely to complain that the term “social movement” is used in the encyclopedia title without being theorized systematically in the volume, not to mention other nomenclature such as “community” and “network.” I have also perhaps cavalierly taken it for granted that social movements can range from the very local to the transnational. This is all true and is the case for two reasons. First, I and others have addressed these definitions and issues elsewhere (readers are encouraged to track down those discussions), thus I resisted simply rehearsing them here (e.g., Atton, 2003; Downing, 2008; Guedes Bailey, Cammaerts & Carpentier, 2008; Juris, 2008; Pajnic & Downing, 2008; Rennie, 2006; Rodríguez, 2001). Second, and probably more important, social movement research, although voluminous at this point in time, has largely been disfigured to date by (a) its virtually obsessive concentration on social movements in the global North (the “New Social Movements” research literature is a perfect case in point) and (b) its splendidly self-confident neglect of communication and media as integral dimensions of social movements. Both these limitations represent conceptual myopia of a high order. I will leave it to those who specialize in social movement research to reflect on how the sociology of knowledge might assist in explaining this myopia's genesis.

Furthermore, although the Nazis, the Rwandan génocidaires, the “beheading” videos made by murderous fanatics, and some other examples of [Page xxvi]venomous movements do find their way into these pages, much less examination of media of extreme right movements occurs in this volume than there might be. They unquestionably demand thorough analysis. The other issue of importance that this volume does not address is the “how-to” of making, distributing, and upgrading social movement media. Kate Coyer, Tony Dowmunt, and Alan Fountain's The Alternative Media Handbook (2007) is a model in this regard.

All these issues matter greatly. The dominant forces pushing our planet down at the beginning of this century are antidemocratic and antisocial. Climate change, ocean disintegration, lethal poverty, war—all of which shatters women's and children's lives, in particular—confront us with extreme urgency. A great variety of constructive projects and social movements, small and large, are active spaces of hope. But there is far more agreement and discussion of what should not happen and why current economic and political structures must be reshaped than actually how to reshape them.

For this purpose, the flourishing of social movement media is crucial because they are pivotal vehicles within which global civil society can collectively chew on solutions, float and discard them, track their trajectories, and evaluate them, from the most local and immediate to the international and long term. If defiance to the existing order is to be effectively mobilized and if other “worlds” are to become realistically possible, then reflecting critically on the experience and potential of these protean media is nothing less than crucial.