Citizens' media

Citizens’ media is a term used by communication and media scholars to refer to electronic media and information and communication technologies controlled and used by citizens and collectives to meet their own information and communication needs. As an academic term, citizens’ media belongs to a large family of concepts that include alternative media, community media, alterative media, autonomous media, participatory media, and radical media among others. Although all these terms express more or less the same reality of media controlled by citizens and collectives, each of them emerges from a different conceptual framework. For example, “alternative media” emphasizes the difference between these participatory, inclusive media and commercial media—driven by the need to produce a profit, produced by professionals, and limited to certain formats and genres. “Autonomous media” underscores the absence of political and financial interests in these media ventures. “Community media” highlights their collective nature and connects to theories of community-building. “Alterative media” accentuates the potential of these media to alter the social world in which they operate. “Participatory media” puts emphasis on the fact that these media are open to anyone in the community to produce their own radio, television, or any other media product. And “radical media” stresses their potential to express and embolden discourses, practices, and politics of resistance.

“Citizens’ media” was first coined by Clemencia Rodríguez in "Fissures in the Mediascape: An International Study of Citizens’ Media" (Hampton Press, 2001). The concept emerges from the need to overcome oppositional frameworks and binary categories traditionally used to analyze alternative media. As a concept, “citizens’ media” moves away from binary definitions in two different directions. First, instead of defining alternative media as that-which-is-not-mainstream-media, “citizens’ media” defines them in terms of the transformative processes they bring about for participants and their communities. In other words, while “alternative media” define community media by what they are not—not commercial, not professional, not institutionalized, “citizens’ media” define them by what they are—the processes of change triggered on media participants. Second, “citizens’ media” breaks away from a binary and essentializing definition of power, whereby the mediascape is inhabited by the powerful (mainstream media) and the powerless (alternative media); instead of limiting the potential of alternative media to their ability to resist commercial media owned by large media conglomerates—and restricting our understanding of all other instances of social change facilitated by community media—the focus of “citizens’ media” is on the metamorphic transformation experienced by their producers and participants. That is, "citizens' media" is a concept that accounts for the processes of empowerment, concientization, and fragmentation of power that result when men, women, and children gain access to and re-claim their own media.

As they disrupt established power relationships and cultural codes, citizens' media producers and participants exercise their own agency in re-shaping their own lives, futures, and cultures. “Citizens' media” is a concept anchored in political science scholars Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy and citizenship. Mouffe takes distance from liberal democracy’s definition of citizenship and proposes a move toward re-appropriating the term. Liberal democracy defines citizenship and citizen in terms of a legal status granted (or denied) on an individual by a state. Gaining citizenship is one of the foundational principles of representative democracies, because only citizens have access to full democratic rights. In this light, Mouffe proposes a re-interpretation and re-definition of the term “citizen” and “citizenship;” according to Mouffe, “citizenship” should be defined in terms of political action and access to power, and not as a legal status controlled by the state. Mouffe defines citizens as political subjects not on account of a legal status that secures individuals’ rights and responsibilities, but as localized subjects whose daily lives are traversed by a series of social and cultural interactions. Citizens exist in a mesh of interactions also localized in a specific context—family interactions, relationships with neighbors, friends, colleagues, peers, etc. It is precisely from these interactions that each citizen access different fractions of power—symbolic power, psychological power, material power, and political power. According to Mouffe, these differential fractions of power are the building blocks of a democracy—it is this power which allows (or not) citizens to shape their communities according to their own needs and visions for the future. Thus Mouffe defines a citizen as that individual who generates power from their quotidian interactions and relationships and uses this power to transform his/her community step by step. Rodríguez adopts this definition of citizenship and coins the term “citizens’ media” to refer to those alternative, community, or radical media that facilitate, trigger, and maintain processes of citizenship-building, in Mouffe’s sense of the term. Rodríguez’ “citizens’ media” are those media that promote symbolic processes that allow people to name the world and speak the world in their own terms, formats, and aesthetic values.

References

Atton, Chris. (2002) Alternative media. London: Sage.

Downing, John. (2001) Radical media: Rebellious communication and social movements. London: Sage Publications, Inc.

Fraser, Nancy. (1993) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually existing Democracy.” In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (pp. 109-142). Cambridge: MIT Press.

McClure, Kristie. (1992) On the Subject of Rights: Pluralism, Plurality and Political Identity. In Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe, 108-125. London: Verso.

Mouffe, Chantal, (ed.). (1992) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. London: Verso.

Mouffe, Chantal. (1988) Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Towards a New Conception of Democracy. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, 89-102. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Rodríguez, Clemencia. (2001) Fissures in the Mediascape. An International Study of Citizens’ Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.