Ptqk_blogzine

Ptqk >> Web 2.0 has made the media-activist statement of "becoming the media" absolutelly real. Today everyone can make his/her own media (You Tube, podcasts, blogging, etc). But the situation is not what we expected from media-activism movements: 2.0 applications all belong to big corporations, more and more concentrated, and the use of them is far from political ("becoming the media" to put online millions of videos on Amy Winehouse? Why not but that was not the idea). And it all has happened very quickly. I have the feeling that media-activism has been beated in its own field, that somehow we have to "eat back our own words" and specially that we haven't been able to elaborate new critical perspectives to respond to it.

Paolo >> That's an interesting issue. I tried to animate this debate for some years in Italy, I was also commissioned to write a book about it and I gave up last year when I was at one third. I'll try to put it briefly.
IMHO the web 2.0 is the corporate response and the capitalization of the long wave of DIY media. The wave that essentially started from the 70s with the Radical Software magazine and that culminated in the early 00s after the contamination with the punk and hacker countercultures.
As media activist hacktivists we failed to provide decentralized and autonomous platforms that could compete with social networks and user generated content portals. Indymedia never changed since its inception and the best minds within the movements were probably too busy in producing obscure and unfriendly applications for linux.
But overall, if media-activism is just about empowering people and challenging the unidirectional corporate-controlled media, we basically won the battle. If the point is the radical transformation of society becoming the media is just not enough 'cause if you give means of communication to a random person you would probably have (bad) products that reflect the cultural hegemony.
Anyway, I think media activism has been overrated, communication is the easiest, funniest part of activism but it's certainly not the most important one. I think we should continue to defend and create autonomous spheres of communication but at the same time fight back the connection/informational consumerism. Get more digitally disconnected and more analogically connected. Apply the transformative efforts to the dynamics of material production. I mean food, goods, energy and so on.