ABSTRACT
In his magisterial work The Information Age, Manuel Castells has argued that flows dominate contemporary life: ‘our society is constructed around flows’, he writes, ‘flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organisational interactions, flows of images, sounds, and symbols’ (Castells, 2000:442). In an increasingly networked global society such flows have shown extraordinary growth in direction, volume and velocity. My aim in this chapter is to attempt a mapping of media flows, both as mainstream commercial commodities to be consumed by heterogeneous global audiences, and as alternative messages and images-emanating from a wide range of actors-from anti-and alter-globalisation activists to revisionist radicals circulating on an emerging ‘alternative Internet’ (Atton, 2004).
