Indymedia and Standing Rock: Media-historic moments

Abstract

This article reviews the legacy of the global Indymedia Center (IMC), a news and information network of 175 autonomous media centres that operated in every world region autonomously of the dominant corporate and public service communications and information systems. Emerging first during protests against the neo-liberal practices of the World Trade Organization, the IMC represented a media-historic moment, one of the first times that social movement media activists were able to bypass the dominant media to produce their own reports and circulate them directly to activists and supporters around the world. My review examines the composition of the IMC’s infrastructure and volunteer force, and their technological and communications repertoires in relation to the dominant communications systems, and consider their legacy in succeeding cycles of social movement contention. I then compare the legacy of the IMC with the more recent media-historic moment of the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors who in 2016 tactically employed a land-based mobilization with a movement-directed online and offline communications assemblage to mobilize against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on their traditional territory. Capturing more US and international dominant media attention than any previous Indigenous movement, and reaching even more people with their self-generated media, they countered the neo-liberal extractivist paradigm of resource exploitation and also affirmed their Indigenous sovereignty, history and knowledge systems. Finally, I summarize some of the similarities and differences between the two cases and suggest questions for further study.