culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

CREATING ALTERNATIVES.
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA THEORY AND SWEDISH PIRATE RADIO
rejecting the idea of peaceful co-existence as an ideological illusion, commonly
referred to as ‘co-optation’. Explained through Heath and Potter, co-optation’s
main function is described as: “At first, the system tries merely to assimilate
resistance by appropriating its symbols, evacuating their “revolutionary” content
and then selling them back as commodities.” (2005: 35).
Citizens and symbolic power
Another, and a supposedly more fruitful pathway towards a solution of the
bi-polar idea of domination and subordination has been to focus not on
unevenness but on power as a more dynamic and all encompassing concept. In
her theoretical exposition, Clemencia Rodriguez (2001) partly abandons efforts
to conceptualize alternative media. Instead, she introduces the term “citizen’s
media” as an attempt to define the practices of alternative media without (re-
)constructing the dichotomy of mass/mainstream and alternative, which
unavoidably position the latter as subordinate to the former. By placing smallscale,
grassroots mediations in the centre of attention she is capable of analysing
the symbolic power of electronic media without having to oppose these smallscale
activities to the mass media. Citizen remains a key concept: producing
alternative media is to enact an active citizenship.
The symbolic power of the media is examined further by Nick Couldry,
who refers to symbolic power as “media’s power of constructing reality” (2000:
4). This recognition of the power of mediation explains both the influence of big
media on society as well as the power of individual citizens or informal groups
on mediations. Media power is also central to Couldry & Curran’s understanding
of alternative media: “media production that challenges, at least implicitly,
actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may
take in different locations” (2003: 7). The benefit of this approach is that it
doesn’t necessary have to occupy itself with trying to define any ‘essence’ of
alternative media, but that it can be used for analyses on both ends of the
constructed bi-polar dichotomy of alternative and mainstream.
Another, more material or physical aspect of media power could be found
in studies within the political economy perspective, where power equals
economic power or put it another way, power over the means of production, and
is explained and theorised through macro level analyses of the relationship of
media systems to the broader social and power relations in society (McChesney
2003).
Thus media power could be understood as two-dimensional: a symbolic
dimension that sets the limits for what can be said or how; and one material
dimension that decides who gets to talk and when, in other words the speech
monopoly of the mass media. Through James Curran (2002: 110) this
recognition of two types of power could be derived from Michel Foucault’s
notion that manifold relationships of power are at play in different situations and
that these cannot be subsumed within a binary and all-encompassing opposition
of class or traced to the mode of production and social formation. With this
definition of power, media power could be found and understood in a multitude
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