When Users Push Back: Oppositional New Media and Community

Abstract. The progressive privatization of Internet infrastructure in the U.S. throughout the 1990s fostered the resurgence of a mass media-style "pipeline " model of online content distribution favored by the media and entertainment industries. Nonetheless, and despite various attempts at suppression by corporations and law enforcement, a diverse community of artists, activists and citizens has found the Web and related technologies to be effective media for expressing their ideas and interests. In this paper oppositional new media are examined as a means of response and resistance to a popular culture that many groups regard as dominated by consumerism, political apathy and cultural and economic oppression. Cases are presented to illustrate key genres of oppositional new media, including the responses of mainstream corporate, government and law-enforcement authorities. The paper concludes with an overview of characteristics of oppositional new media and their implications for establishing and maintining community. Prologue: The Internet and 1990s Media Ecology "Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. "Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.&quot

Beyond black and red : the situationists and the legacy of the workers' movement

This paper has two purposes. The first one is to show how Situationnists (especially Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, and Raoul Vaneigem, in The Revolution of Everyday Life), while trying to renew Marxist and Libertarian traditions by critizising capitalism and hierarchies, claimed to go beyond the antagonism between Anarchism and Marxism, both considered as partial ideological truths, specific of a particular historical situation in the workers movement. The second one is to expose the way the ambition of going beyond the black and red opposition expresses itself, theoretically and philosophically, by returning before the differentiation between Anarchism and Maxism. To do so, with many hidden quotations, they use concepts and themes of the Young Hegelians movement, through which the two emblematic figures of the opposition between Red and Black went, namely Marx and Bakunin.L'objet de cet article est double : le premier est de montrer comment les situationnistes (en particulier Debord dans La société du spectacle et Vaneigem dans le Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations), tout en essayant de renouveler les traditions marxistes et libertaires par une critique du capitalisme et de toutes les formes de hiérarchies, ont prétendu dépasser l'antagonisme entre anarchisme et marxisme, considérés tous deux comme des vérités idéologiques partielles propres à une situation historique particulière au sein du mouvement ouvrier. Le second est de montrer comment cette ambition de dépasser le noir et le rouge s'exprime, d'un point de vue théorique et philosophique, dans un retour en deçà de la différenciation entre anarchisme et marxisme. Pour ce faire, les situationnistes usèrent de nombre de citations masquées, de concepts et de thèmes propres au mouvement jeune hégélien, mouvement par lequel les deux figures emblématiques de l'opposition entre le noir et le rouge (Bakounine et Marx) étaient passés