Not the workshop you are looking for

Slowly growing is this idea that for offline activism we have a fairly developed menu of opportunities from signing a petition to organising others, and / or high risk NVDA depending where ones path leads you. In the digital world this menu is far less thought out, clearly includes sending lots of emails, occasional acts of brilliance, but less robust thinking about what’s in between.

On my journey to figure out what is possible in between, I was at least intrigued by the idea of a Reclaiming the Media workshop at this year’s Anarchist bookfair.

Now whatever anarchist media looks like, and one could debate, there is a real strength in the Indymedia network, and in this world of increasingly corporate media, I’d like to at least sound them out as to where the common ground might lie. Equally there’s been some sort of schism between a very anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Maydaymedia or Indymedia UK - not UK Indymedia?), and a mainly anarchic grassroots Indymedia (now Be the media?), so if only for the lack of clarity I dragged myself out of bed to get down to Queen Mary.

From the side-lines, Indymedia has always done a good job of engaging people at citizen jouralists, photographers, videographers and small bundles of internet activism. As activists struggle to get into the mainstream media, taking control of our own stories seems simply to be a survival trait, so if I could bottle the essence of what’s involved and distribute it, then perhaps we could build another stepping stone, or network, on the paths of digital activism.

As a workshop this wasn’t it. Well not that is was even a workshop, more of a lecture with some interesting speakers from the NUJ (Donnacha DeLong), an investigative Guardian? journalist (Heather Brooke), and someone intelligent but more academic (Becky Hogge). But even though this wasn’t the workshop I was looking for, it sparked an idea, and a note to oneself to go buy some books.

So the idea of net neutrality is new to me (to be explored on a differemt day), as is this digital field, and the idea that one’s access to the internet may change is both scary and empowering. We live in the now, where we have unlimited freedom to browse what we want, without ones service provider choosing our preferences for us. Corporate and government control may be leading us towards Chinese style censorship, but for now we have the most powerful digital tools and freedoms imaginable to achieve change. Time to get on with it.