Shedding useless notions of alternative media

Abstract

The time is 1984. Somehow I find myself riding one of the mules that form our expedition, slowly wandering up and down a winding Andean trail. I can see our video equipment shaking and swaying on the mule ahead of me. “I hope the vibrations don't damage the camera,” I think. Four men travel with me and the mules. They belong to a grassroots organization of campesinos (peasants), what in Latin America we call grupos populates. This grupo popular struggles against the conditions of growing inequality and misery that progressively have fallen on the rural people of this coffee‐producing region hidden in the Colombian Andes: Samaná, Caldas. The goal of our journey is to produce a video piece about their work, the evolution of their movement, and the escalation of military and para‐military campaigns to exterminate organized grassroots mobilization in the country. More than ten years later, I've now participated in many different alternative media experiences. I've seen how marginalized urban women in Colombia and poor young Latinos in Texas produce alternative video; how Catalans of different ages, genders, and walks of life develop their own alternative television programming in Spain; how men and women from isolated rural areas in northern Nicaragua built their own alternative radio information system. My interest in alternative media was inspired by the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), and its hopes to balance the global flow of information and communication. This UNESCO project pursued this goal by first putting electronic media in the hands of citizens and communities who traditionally had been denied access to the production and distribution of media messages. According to the NWICO, alternative media would thereby alter the old power equation between big, powerful media corporations and small, powerless audiences.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.