Three Decades of Contention: The Roots of Contemporary Activism

Abstract

Back in 1999 a trio of scholars who at the turn of the 1970s had been active in the debate around NWICO, announced that

What started, historically, with the proposed restructuring of the international information and communication order has grown into an alliance of grassroots organizations, women’s groups, ecology networks, social activists, and committed academics. Some now call it a media reform movement, others emphasize media education, and still others focus on the entire cultural environment, of which the mass media are an important part. There is a new NWICO in the making which sees itself as a network of networks based in civil society.

(Vincent etal., 1999, pp. ix–x)

How did this “network of networks based in civil society” mobilizing on media and communication issues come about? How did emancipatory communication practices evolve within this “new NWICO in the making”? This chapter traces the historical evolution of the issue area of communication, media, and technology as it became a field of contention in its own right. It analyzes the political and socio-cultural contexts in which emancipatory communication practices emerged, in order to situate them in relation to past struggles.