I’ve never believed the hype about indymedia (for good reason). I think that if you take a space and make it equally open to all then you don’t get utopia; you get a replication of all the existing power imbalances in society (although in this particular case there are more chickens).
But even with this analysis I was shocked to see this article on the newswire. Well not the article itself – that’s a standard rant about how drug prohibition is bad, but the image that accompanied it was astonishingly awful. It was a stereotypically sexy white woman, wearing a bikini and the tagline was “Marijuana: No Hangover, No Violence, No Carbs” I’m not even going to comment on the image itself – I’m sure anyone who reads this blog can guess my reaction, what I want to talk about in this post is what happened next.
So this sexist, objectifying image is posted to the indymedia news wire, and a whole lot of women (and a man) speak up and say “please take this down it’s sexist and objectifying”. The indymedia collective responds:
the ed collective is discussing this. if you want to email the editorial collective: imc-aotearoa-ed(at)lists.indymedia.org
solidarity
Call me easily pissed off, but how can the editorial collective sign off ‘solidarity’ when they won’t show any solidarity? Solidarity would mean taking that picture down, or taking it off the news-wire, or giving a fuck about the way women are treated as objects.
What is indymedia about, what is it trying to build, if an image whose only meaning is to make women feel shitty about themselves is acceptable? You can’t change society for the better without women, but apparently Aotearoa indymedia has other priorities.
I’m so used to this kind of stuff (PETA, anyone?), I often don’t react as I should, and ignore it. So thank you for being outraged on behalf of those of us who are too jaded to even notice…
And anyone who says “no carbs” about reefer, obviously hasn’t been paying attention to the side effects. ;)
indymedia was an interesting social experiment around the time of the people’s clash with the WTO in seattle, and the only real way to get factual blow-by-blow eyewitness news from the street – the mainstream media was completely on another planet. i would see and hear what was happening every day from people coming back from the front lines, and then turn on the TV news and see and hear a complete whitewash. so, indymedia was a good social network tool at that time.
however, their almost complete lack of any real moderation has, over time, made them no more useful than a Yahoo! chat room. under the window-dressing of ideological purity they practice what i see as an almost bureaucratic laziness. or maybe it’s just that they’ve grown too bloated. in either case, i simply can’t be bothered, especially when Alas! is about 1,000 times more informative, and not even “real-time”… :) blogrolls and other personal media networks of that nature are infinitely more useful.
My friend Brendan has this to say about Indymedia:
“The best thing about Indymedia is that anyone can post to it. The worst thing about Indymedia is that anyone can post to it.”
Announcements and reporting of local events is a strength of Indymedia. However, the newswire gets crammed with conspiracy theory claptrap, press releases from lunatic fringe organizations spammed worldwide, incoherent babbling, and what you describe.
The image is gone, apparently.
(The original poster tried to defend the picture as a satire of alcohol advertisements.)