Activism without borders.

RE: ACTIVISM: RE-DRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF ACTIVISM IN A NEW MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

OCTOBER 14-15, 2005

The two-day, international conference RE: activism: Re-drawing the Boundaries of Activism in a New Media Environment was organized by the Centre for Media and Communication Studies at the Central European University (CEU), the Centre for Media Research and Education at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Open Society Institute. The conference organizers set out to understand how the boundaries of activism are redrawn in the age of new media. Those in attendance, despite having never met prior to gathering in Budapest, seemed to share a common ground, an understanding that the new, networked, mobile, and digital media and communications infrastructure does indeed create new forms of social organizing as well as grassroots alliances among people who were formerly divided along territorial, institutional, or disciplinary lines. This sense of immediate connection was nothing out of the ordinary, considering that many had already been in touch via e-mail or were aware of each other's activities through blogs, mailing lists, or Web sites.

The night before the conference's official commencement, an audience of academic researchers, journalists, artists, and cultural and political activists gathered for a screening of Yes Men (2004) by Chris Smith, a film that documents the media pranks of the globalization-critical activist group of the same name. The opening and keynote speeches on Friday suggested a shift of potentially historic proportions with regard to how power is distributed, exercised, or opposed within our societies. The speakers, Yehuda Elkana, rector and president of CEU; Michael Delli Carpini, the dean of Annenberg; and Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, all stressed the responsibility of properly understanding the nature of this change in order to employ new media technologies in ways that best serve the needs of those who are far from centers of wealth and power--creating more open, equal, and sustainable societies.

In contrast to this hopeful general introduction to the changing mediascape of cultural, political, and artistic activism, the paper presentations and panel debates carried the discussion to a more concrete level, focusing on specific cases, issues, and approaches in four different fields: the new media use of locally-based civic movements, Internet-based activism as the potential foundation of an emerging global civil society, the effects of these communications technologies on the structure and functioning of public sphere in democratic systems, and the ways in which mobile and Wi-Fi networks and locative technologies change the way we use and experience the urban fabric.

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Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School, set the stage for the second day of the conference with his keynote speech presenting very clear examples of how nonprofit, grassroots, self-organizing models of knowledge and culture production proved far more effective than centralized and organized projects with similar aims and a strong profit interest. Benkler raised the issue of the need to renegotiate the social contract that governs the rights and benefits of consumers. The panels continued where Benkler left off, investigating the political economy of peer-production networks; the significance and boundaries of the culture jamming phenomenon as a strategy for dissent; the possibilities and copyright issues of digital archiving; and the tasks, challenges, and possibilities of state intervention in the age of global, digital networks.

Particularly inspiring were presentations by Paula le Dieu, who persuaded the British Broadcasting Corporation to open its archives for creative reuse; Samuel J. Howard-Spink on the Web-based tactics of downhillbattle.org, a small nonprofit organization working to support participatory culture and build a fairer music industry, and Ferenc Hammer on how new media journalism distorts the news it seems to mediate. Despite the presence of new media theory and practice heavyweights such as Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum, free culture ideologist Lawrence Lessig, copyfighter and cultural theorist Kembrew McLeod, Rick Prelinger of Prelinger Archives fame, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, more questions were raised than could be answered. However, the conference definitely fulfilled its role of connecting people and spreading news, methods, and strategies.

While the approximately three hundred conference participants talked, listened, and networked, more than twenty media artists--from Welsh poet Peter Finch and local community station pioneer Tilos Radio's DJ Sanyi to the representatives of Resonance 104.4FM, London's experimental sound art radio station--were busy installing their homemade, low-power radio transmitters around Budapest, each broadcasting a sonic art piece that had to do with its specific location in the city. Hundreds of flyers distributed at clubs, bars, pubs, and universities included maps marked with the locations where the thirteen ad-hoc radio stations had been hidden. Flocks of urbanists and media enthusiasts walked the streets carrying portable radio receivers in the hope of picking up the broadcasts. These "sonic tags" were the result of a week-long workshop and were intended to be both a demonstration of the potentials of low-budget, low-fi media activism as well as signposts for conference participants who wanted to explore Budapest.

The final event of the RE: activism conference was the launch of Creative Commons (CC) Hungary which took place at the new building of the Open Society Archives. The event began with a celebratory speech by Stanford Law School professor and CC founding-father Lessig, in which he voiced strong opposition to both copyright infringing behavior and the copyright fundamentalist points of view. Instead of advocating for either downloading movies illegally or lobbying for an extensively prohibitive legal framework, Lessig argued for legislation that would create a clear and manageable framework for the use of cultural products in digital form. Lessig surprised many in attendance with his proposal of a CC license that would allow producers to manage the usage of their digital content.

Although this new type of license is still in the planning phase, luckily the organizers considered the impossibility of attending all the panels and recorded everything for later download. Video recordings of the conference plenary and panel sessions will soon be made available under the already existing CC licenses on the conference Web site. Papers and slides that were provided to the organizers prior to the conference are already online. A selection of papers will also be published on the Web and in print in the first issue of Eastbound, one of the few peer-reviewed media studies journals and online hubs with a specific East-Central European focus.

For many of the participants, the conference was only the beginning of new friendships, alliances, and communal projects. Building on the connections made throughout the event, the RE: activism organizers are already working on setting up an international research network focused on further exploration of the questions and themes that were raised.

GABOR VALYI is a teaching assistant in the department of Sociology and Communiction at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

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For more information see www.re-activism.net.