ABSTRACT
The story of citizen journalism as a social and cultural practice is in many ways tightly intertwined with the story of the technologies that are used to do citizen journalism. One of the founding myths of citizen journalism (see for example Meikle, 2002 and 2003; Platon and Deuze, 2003; Bruns, 2005) is the introduction of the first Indymedia publishing platform, just in time for the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization summit and the ‘alternative globalisation’ activities and demonstrations which accompanied it. Supported by the then brand-new ‘Web 2.0’ publishing technologies that enabled the rapid publication of updates in text, audio and video from the summit, the Seattle Independent Media Center (IMC) became a first highly visible example of citizen journalism, and inspired a substantial number of follow-on projects (not least the global Indymedia movement itself): “In the ten months following Seattle, a network of more than 30 such IMCs had been set up, each using the same freely circulated software, and each relying on individual participants or visitors to submit content” (Meikle, 2002: 90).
