Examples Of Alternative Digital Media

Drawing on appropriate scholarship and using relevant examples, evaluate arguments around 'alternative' digital media, activism and protest.

‘Alternative’ digital media challenges mainstream media, connecting communities that are isolated or minorities. In recent years, the internet and social media has helped communities rally together to form social movements to challenge the government’s power. The production of media is what deems it alternative and how it is shared among peers. This essay will focus on how the internet is used by people as a platform to help activists to organise protests.

Defining alternative media is a challenge. However, there is a problem with defining alternative media as everything could be alternative to something

A sense of community is felt within the people outside the mainstream media. Communities are formed between those minorities of which mainstream media doesn’t favour.

“The representation of ordinary people in alternative journalism does not set them apart as heroes or victims, but as voices that have as equal a right to be heard as do the voices of elite groups” (Atton 2008, p.221)

Atton’s argument is that alternative journalism doesn’t alter or undermine the minorities views like the mainstream media. Atton’s view is that everyone’s opinion is valid and should be heard. In groups such as Keep Britain Tidy, which relies on social media to spread the word and change people’s views on the topic. This group enables a safe space for people with similar views and people who want to act. However, there is a problem with social media as it is run by corporate

Gehl (2015 p.2) agrees with Atton’s point of everyone’s opinions being important and deserving to be heard “By offering access to decentralized, democratic methods of media production, alternative media challenge media power both at the level of organization (i.e., ordinary people can control production) and at the level of messages (if ordinary people make media, then their concerns will be privileged, rather than those of capitalists, politicians, or cultural elites)”. As Gehl suggests, when ordinary people are making media, their points are as valid as those ones who don’t use alternative media. Gehl points out that the ordinary peoples’ opinions would be taken over those of the government and mainstream media.