ABSTRACT
Alternative media and community media have always confronted sizeable challenges. Yet maybe these challenges should now succeed. This sentiment may seem a bit unusual, coming as it does from someone who has written and argued for years on behalf of alternative media and community media, so let me be clear. My admiration for the commitment and creativity of these varied projects and the people who engage in them (and who study and write about them) remains undiminished. I make the opening point not about the projects and people so much as about conceptions of ‘alternative media’ and ‘community media’, whose dated pedigree is being revealed most starkly today by commercial social media. Consider for a moment how many long-standing goals of alternative media and community media they seem to meet, such as virtually open access (granting users’ literacy skills), no direct financial cost to users, real-time interactivity, mobility, seamless scalable reach from the local to the global and multimedia capability. Given these features, it would seem that social media have forever rendered conventional conceptions of alternative media and community media as a means by which regular people can communicate outside the constraints of the media industries quaint if not delusional. After all, given what social media can do, who in their right mind would prefer mimeographed underground newspapers or public-access channels on local cable television?
