ABSTRACT
What value motivates the making of ‘alternative media’, and defines its success or failure? Let us first define ‘alternative media’ as media whose operations challenge the concentration of resources (particularly the symbolic resource of making and circulating images and information) in large media institutions (Atton and Couldry, 2003; Atton, 2002). This definition by itself does not, however, make clear why people should be involved in the enterprise of alternative media. After all, control over many resources, such as basic utilities, is concentrated, but few are interested in challenging the centralisation that allows, say, water to be distributed. Indeed, the idea that ‘the media’ provide a basic utility in the domain of information held back for decades the idea of building and researching alternative media: the centralisation that came with the size of large media was, some thought, a basic and irreversible fact of large modern societies (Garnham, 1990). Now, however, in the digital age, when it is easy, or at least easily imaginable, to make media, with or without a large institution, the resistance to ‘alternative media’ is less automatic. But the value that motivates people and communities (rather than large corporations) to make media still has to be explained.
