In January 1994 the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico inaugurated a new era of media use for dissent. Since that time, an array of dissenting collectives and individuals have appropriated media technologies in order to make their voices heard or to articulate alternative identities. From Zapatista media to the Arab Spring, social movements throughout the world are taking over, hybridizing, recycling, and adapting media technologies. This new era poses a new set of challenges for academics and researchers in the field of Communication for Social Change (CfSC). Based on examples from Mexico, Lebanon, and Colombia, this article highlights and discusses four such research challenges: accounting for historical context; acknowledging the complexity of communication processes; anchoring analysis in a political economy of information and communication technologies; and positioning new research in relation to existing knowledge and literature within the field of communication and social change.
Citizens' media is a term used by communication and media scholars to refer to electronic media (i.e., → Radio, → Television, → Video) and information and communication technologies (i.e., text messaging, cellular telephony, → Internet) that are 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, among others, include community media, alternative media, autonomous media, participatory media, and radical media (→ Activist Media; Communication Technology and Democracy; Community Media; Participatory Communication).
In 2002, 14 indigenous radio stations began operating in Colombia reaching 78.6 percent of the national indigenous population. Colombian indigenous radio stations are shaped by intense deliberations among each indigenous people about the poetics of information and communication technologies, understood as the exploration of the specific sets of social, cultural and political relations in which each radio station would exist if brought into each indigenous territory. Colombian indigenous peoples' appropriation of information and communication technologies is framed by new legislative frameworks made possible by the Colombian constitutional reform of 1991, by indigenous peoples' critique of Colombian mainstream media and, more significantly, by discussions among indigenous peoples about the adoption of radio — what we call a poetics of radio.
This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project-the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media platforms, algorithms, and contents. Third, the article examines how the democratization of media is a key element in the struggle for social justice. It argues that effective media access-in terms of distribution of media resources, even relations between spaces of connection and the design and operation of spaces that foster dialogue, free speech and respectful cultural exchange-is a core component of social progress.
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