[imc-auckland-video] screenings at the ecofest

[Kim Mazur]

Did anyone every see this? I just found it on the net when I was looking
for something else.... 


http://antipodeanjournal.blogspot.com/2004/01/whats-wrong-with-indymedia
-aotearoa.html 

Saturday, January 17, 2004
What's Wrong With Indymedia Aotearoa? 
Indymedia Aotearoa (AIM) has to be one of the more depressing indymedia
projects in the entire world. Too often it's the preserve of the loony
left, arguing about Starhawk or the opression of bicycle helmets.
Sometimes you can even shiver in the terrible language of the cold war
when some comrade from an unreconstructed communist group climbs aboard.

I don't spend an awful lot of time over there, but from time to time, I
find myself going through the postings looking for the semblance of a
political discussion. Why? Well, I need to go somewhere. At heart I'm a
left social democrat. In my native environment, I almost flourished.
Here in New Zealand, the social democratic project seemed to die as a
result of the reforms in the mid-80's. All that's left are creepy people
who roam the internet with the bitterness of those who lack a political
home. 

I go on sneaking about, looking for what sustenance I can find. Often
you have to pick through some rather distasteful stuff. A good example
is some pretty disgusting anti-semitism that was posted on Indymedia
Aotearoa recently. Although AIM is alleged to be one of New Zealand's
most popular political websites, these anti-semitic comments passed
almost without criticism. For me, it calls into question the entire
ethos of the Indymedia project, an ethos that both recalls the
circumstances of the project's birth and the conditions of the internet
at the time. Writing in the anarchist webjournal Infoshop News, a guy
named ChuckO puts it like this:

It was a great idea when the Independent Media Center opened up its
first website for the Seattle anti-WTO protests in December 1999. The
first IMC website came out of years of alternative and grassroots media
activism. By a strange quirk of fate, the Seattle IMC also included
something called the "open newswire," an experiment that allowed every
reader to be a reporter, if they wanted to get involved in DIY,
participatory media production.

Think about this. It was five years ago. The internet was a very
different place. Broadband hardly existed. People still relied, by and
large, on the corporate media. So the idea of an independent network of
sites devoted to community activism sprang out of a condition of media
scarcity, a time when the culture of D.I.Y. was relegated to comics and
cassette tapes. It was only natural, then, that the pioneers who staked
out this part of the web were a little doctrinaire about the right of
free speech. Everyone who had been denied the right to speak were now
given access. Indymedia wasn't just a site. It was a movement.

The insistence on the right to free speech meant that the indymedia
sites became subjected to harrasment from the right wing, and as access
to the internet grew, from the fringes of loonieville. Racism,
particularly anti-semitism, began to find a place on the indymedia
network. It became normalised. ChuckO watched as the activist spirit of
the indymedia project ran headlong into the abstract demand for the
right to free speech:

.the inability of the IMC network to take aggresive action against
racist and anti-semitic posts further damaged the Indymedia's reputation
with Jewish people and people of color. We understand that some
pro-Israel extremists think that any criticism of Israel is
anti-semitic, but the IMC network became a hotbed of just plain
anti-Jewish articles, opinions, and comments. Part of the problem within
the IMC network is that most activists refused to stand up to the free
speech totalitarians within the network, who argued that everything
posted should stay visible to the public. 

The growth of these kinds of posts led to struggles within the indymedia
network between people who wanted to preserve free speech and those who
wanted to 'moderate' hate speech on the indymedia sites. The
proliferation of anti-semitic posts resulted in the discrediting of the
entire indymedia project. Fights over hate speech led to the
disintegration of several indymedia collectives, most recently in San
Francisco. 

What these 'free speech totalitarians' didn't understand was that the
internet in just a few short years became a very, very big place. When
the indymedia project began, weblogs hardly existed. Only a small, hard
core of computer-savvy geeks participated in usenet discussions. Five
years later, and it's a different virtual world. And because that world
has changed, it's vital to change the ethos of the indymedia movement.
What is important now is to support left-wing and progressive politics
in the welter of the internet, now no longer a new place, but just as
corporate and as commercial as any other media environment. I think this
is especially critical in New Zealand.

I call it editing, some call it moderation, while others call it just
plain censorship. 

posted by rohan at 1:13 AM