ABSTRACT
This chapters argues, first, that established mainstream media and their online equivalents usually support what different theorists call state-like, hierarchical, or vertebrate political forms of organization crucial to state/status quo survival. Second, that independent, alternative or peer-to-peer, networked media, usually support transnational, rhizomatic, cellular networks, such as ethnoreligious and sociopolitical movements or diasporic minorities and dissident networks within. Third, that small states and minorities are especially vulnerable to both these modalities, as they are frequently too small, too new or too insignificant to have been adequately mass-mediated in the past, so any representations by the mass media are registered automatically as negotiated in the global public sphere.
