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Magazine
Newswire on the Net
SEVANTI NINAN
IMCs have allowed the people in West Asia to tell others what is really happening.
NATIONAL or regional, TV or print, it is currently open season on the fourth estate. It is everybody's favourite whipping boy. So with corporate media in the dock lets look at the alternatives that New Media makes possible. Just as the free software movement is spreading across the globe in a bid to counter the monopoly of Microsoft, so too is the concept of open publishing which takes media out of the monopoly of journalists and puts its in the hands of just about anyone who wants to create it.
The Internet has made possible the Indymedia idea: a movement for creating independent media centres that has followed the first experiment in 1999. The Independent Media Center (IMC) (www.indymedia.org) was established by various alternative media organisations and activists to provide grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle that year. It was a huge success: it acted as a clearinghouse of information for journalists, and provided up-to-the-minute reports, photos, audio and video footage through its website.
The site used for the first time a democratic open-publishing system, logged more than two million hits, and made news big time. And then the idea grew to become a movement. Through a decentralised and autonomous network, hundreds of media activists set up independent media centres in London, Canada, Mexico City, Prague, Belgium, France, and Italy over the next year. IMCs have since spread across every continent, there is now even one for India. But the place where it demonstrates its usefulness is in the Middle East. Both the Palestinian and Israeli Centres are generating many stories all the time, stories that come from ordinary people who know what is happening behind the battle lines to the affected population.
www.indymedia.org has a newswire where people can just post stories. It encourages people to become the media by posting their own articles, analysis and information onto the site. If that means opening up the possibility of hate-filled articles or pornography being posted, so be it. Anyone may publish to the newswire, from any computer that is connected to the Internet, by clicking the "publish" link on the www.indymedia.org page and following the easy instructions. No editorial collective previews it, or edits it.
What makes this proposition attractive is the philosophy. You don't have to depend for your news on corporations that make you watch ads to pay for your news, and slant it with their own agenda. It makes possible grassroots, non-corporate coverage. The Indymedia website tells you that "it is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth". None of this of course is borne out by what you encounter on the Independent Media Centre meant for India. Obviously they don't have enough volunteers here: many of the stories posted have nothing to do with India, even the pornographic picture that suddenly pops up apropos of nothing is one that features Whites.
But then they should just spread the word about themselves a bit more. Judging from the furious writing that goes on on Indian mailing lists and from the passionate rants that come into my mailbox, lots of people who are not journalists definitely believe they would make better scribes than us. Well, here's their chance — just go to www.indymedia.org, click on India, and on the link that says publish. Meanwhile the Editor's Guild report entitled "Rights and Wrongs" on the media coverage in Gujarat reveals that open publishing is an idea that has blossomed here, independently of the Independent Media Centre movement. A Muslim gentleman from an infotech company started a website at www.riotinfo.com as soon as the mass violence erupted, to preach communal harmony, talk of the law and Constitution and attempt correct and authenticated information. He got positive responses from some Hindus when he advertised for support, even as he got threatening phone calls. And we do know that after the earthquake last year there was a similar blossoming of grassroots publishing on the Net to meet the need for information about victims and rehabilitation.
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Nobody leaves anything to nature or inspiration, or native genius any more. Yukta Mookhey showed us how beauty could be manufactured out of a rather plain original, publishers have demonstrated how advances engender novels, artists paint to order after contracting to do shows, and now Coke and Channel V are busy pouring big bucks into manufacturing a pop group out of an assembly line process. In much the same way I guess, that they manufacture beauty queens from the Femina stable.
Not only do these girl wonders not have to write their songs or compose their music, they don't even have to have an extra good singing voice. What they do have to do is learn to live under the camera's eye, starting with waking up in the morning and brushing their teeth in the loo.
This too is an international idea, like all the other clones that Star is doing of TV series that have worked abroad — this exercise in manufacturing a native Spice Girls. It's India's turn to take a fresh-faced bunch of home grown teenagers and subject them to the works. It is one big aspirational binge, the series that has been filmed in the process. Other kids their age who avidly watch the selection process, possibly had a shot at it themselves, are now expected to watch and eat their hearts out. The girls next door are housed in a stylish, roomy Bombay penthouse, and worked on mercilessly to acquire The Look, and a collective singing style. One poor kid even has to undergo corrective lip surgery.
All the big names in the business have been lined up to provide the ballast needed. Javed Akhtar is writing the lyrics, other suitably long-haired, ear-ringed geniuses are priming them as they learn to sign as a band. Shabana Azmi drops by.
Photo shoots are done, the album's cover is being shot, even though the band does not have a name yet. In-between much is made of hair cuts and visits to dieticians.
From this duckling to swan, girl next door to celebrity process, chart topping hits are expected to emerge.
E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com
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