Activist New Media: Alternative Perspectives on Collaboration

An alternative perspective on collaboration features in Leah A. Lievrouw’s recently published book, Alternative and Activist New Media (Polity Press, 2011), where the collaborative activity of digital activists, directed at blocking the smooth flow of dominant socio-cultural discourses, is a dominant feature of the five genres of new media activism surveyed -- culture-jamming, alternative computing, participatory journalism, mediated mobilisation, and commons knowledge. By surveying the activities at the fringe Lievrouw hopes to better understand the dynamics at the institutional centre. She concludes that these genres of media activism are good indicators of a contemporary cultural ‘turn’ from broadcasting to mediation. Mediation can ‘push’ culture in certain ways. In the context of digital cultures, mediation, Lievrouw argues, will continue to be an ongoing, mutually shaping relationship between personal uses of communication technologies (reconfiguration) and their communicative action (remediation) that will continue to inevitably produce social and technical change, thereby, constituting new experiences and new social relationships, including, one may suggest, new modes of collaboration.

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