T-Salon

Thanks to the Cultural Studies Course Wiki developed for Lingnan University that is currently available to the public, I have recently discovered Noam Chomsky's What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream and Michael Albert's What Makes Alternative Media Alternative? Both pieces offer new angles of looking at traditional media (e.g. New York Times) and new media (e.g. weblogs, wikipedia) in terms and definitions that I have never thought of before.

On what makes mainstream media mainstream:

"the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who read the New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing fashion. They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be political managers, business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of thing), doctoral managers (like university professors),
or other journalists who are involved in organizing the way people think and look at things."

[...]

"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don't bother us (us being the people who run the show)."

[...]

"The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn't appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn't happen, it would be kind of a miracle."

Such structure of media has serious implications on democracy. It is a tool for those in power to manufacture consent.

"By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we'll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That's applying the lessons of the propaganda agency."

On what makes alternative media alternative:

"An alternative media institution (to the extent possible given its circumstances) doesn't try to maximize profits, doesn't primarily sell audience to advertisers for revenues (and so seeks broad and non-elite audience), is structured to subvert society's defining hierarchical social relationships, and is structurally profoundly different from and as independent of other major social institutions, particularly corporations, as it can be. An alternative media institution sees itself as part of a project to establish new ways of organizing media and social activity and it is committed to furthering these as a whole, and not just its own preservation."

"Of course, there may be mitigating circumstances constraining the extent to which an institution seeking to be progressive can forgo profits and surplus, avoid commercial advertising, reach beyond elite audiences, remove typical hierarchies, and actively support other like-motivated projects. Social and particularly market pressures may make it hard for people to push in alternative directions on all
fronts at all times. But surely trying to make progress on these fronts should be a condition of being alternative, or we should find another word to describe ourselves."

[...]

"Typical hierarchies of power and influence over decisions should be reduced and, to the extent possible, eliminated. This has a twofold practical meaning. Means of decision making should be participatory and democratic with the goal, broadly understood, that participants should affect decisions proportionately to the degree they are in turn affected by them. But also, circumstances of work (and training)should empower all participants so that their voting rights are not a formality but instead each participant has the information, confidence, time, and security to develop their opinions, present them, and effectively champion them, when need be."

[...]

"Relations with audience should respect and promote the same values and norms internally pursued, particularly those of openness, dialogue, and full communication. The audience sought should be broad and socially relevant (not merely those with disposable income and attractive to advertisers)."

"Relations to other alternative media projects should be supportive. The agenda should not be solely self-preservation, but the advance of the alternative project as a whole."

Personally, I like the values and principles espoused in what is described as alternative media on above. But in the end, I like to use the term "new" rather than "alternative" when describing some of the weblog and wikipedia sites. When these sites gain a critical mass, they too, can have the power to set the agenda and become mainstream.