Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet

Description

The revolution will not be televised. But will it be online instead? When the Internet first took off, we heard a lot about its potential for social change. We heard it would revitalize democracy. We heard it would empower us. We heard we would all be publishers, working together to created a new public sphere. Future Active tests such claims. With fierce intelligence and wit, Graham Meikle takes us behind the digital barricades and into the heart of Internet activist campaigns. In the first in-depth look at this global phenomenon, the author talks to key players in the Indymedia movement and introduces us to the activists behind gwbush.com, the website that provoked the President to declare "there ought to be limits to freedom." The founder of Belgrade radio station B92 explains how they used the net to thwart Milosevic's censorship, while McLibel trial defendant Dave Morris talks about the role of the McSpotlight website. And pioneer hacktivists the Electronic Disturbance Theater introduce us to virtual sit-ins and electronic civil disobedience - while US military analysts offer a different perspective on this kind of information warfare.

Graham Meikle is Associate Lecturer of Media and Communication at Macquarie University in Sydney.

""Future Active is a report from the frontlines of the guerrilla media war. Writing in brisk, skip-the-bullshit style, Meikle chronicles and critiques the tactical strikes of hacktivists, culture jammers and other mutant free radicals who are putting the Internet to political use --Mark Dery, author of" The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium ."