Community-based media is alive and well in Barcelona, where activists have set up independent TV and radio stations on public airwaves discussing themes like immigration, gender and genetically modified food.

The project is called Squat the Waves (Okupem les Ones) and is being run by the Social Communication Assembly, a group of 18 organizations, and other individual volunteers.

The stations are not yet legal. But the SCA is trying to prove to the Spanish government that they should be, since the Spanish constitution states that if you are part of a representative mass, you have a right to a space for public communication.

The SCA sees itself as clearly representative of Barcelona's social and cultural panorama, and their central goal is to encourage public debate on social issues by demonstrating how people can create their own media instead of being passive observers. It plans to work towards this in several ways.

Encouraging diversity

"We're trying to [make people] conscious that they can break this monopoly of [opinions in] the media by corporations," says SCA member Quelic Berga. The organization hopes that their TV station encourages debate by helping to give audiences greater access to views that reflect society's diversity.

In the media today, he says, the only opportunities that people have to express their opinions are in inconsequential arenas. For example, on some programs, people can vote for their favorite singer or comment on a given athlete, but you won't hear much honest criticism regarding the motives of the people who shape foreign policy.

"There is not a directly democratic place for the people to express [themselves]. Public TV is for the government and the institutions that are supported by the government. And commercial [TV is] for the corporations."

In an effort to change this, there is no censorship of the media created by the SCA—even of hateful comments.

Anyone can submit their documentaries and films to be aired on the channels. "TV cannot kill anybody. TV can just create communication," says Berga. If mean-spirited material is submitted, Berga hopes that rather than simply get offended, people will answer and create a debate.

"We are talking about democracy, we are talking about freedom. And if it's true that we're talking about these [things], then we are also talking about being wide open to [listening] to everybody and to creating a really big forum."

Berga wants to empower people to believe they have a place in the public debate and sees this as the strongest kind of activism. Rather than go to demonstrations or other venues where opinions are limited, he thinks it's important to hear each other and to realize we are not alone.

He believes that even if an opinion seems like nonsense, it should be made available to be listened to because "this person is saying nonsense for some reason [that is worth understanding]. We have to learn respect. We have to learn to love each other and to understand that everybody has different points of view."

Berga says that the task of promoting open communication is also being made easier by recent changes in copyright laws. Now anyone can make their works "copyleft," which leaves things open to reproduction without any special permission.

Encouraging creativity

Berga says many people hesitate to be creative and submit material because of their ingrained assumption that their opinions are less valuable than the opinions expressed by the kinds of people we usually see on TV. The SCA hopes its initiatives will work towards creating a society in which the views of those people are not given such disproportionate amounts of prestige.

He says another impediment to creativity is today's technology, which is made to discourage thinking, such as digital cameras that help you forget about the art of photography and encourage you to just push a button. "It's not hard to understand technology. We should explain what's happening when you press a button [and] how to use your TV."

The SCA offers free workshops in which people bring their video cameras or other technology from home, and participants explain how everything works to one another. Berga himself develops teaching material for the organization's website (okupemlasones.org); courses that explain how to plug in TV cameras, record, illuminate, put images on computer, compress images for TV, and so on.

As well as technical skills, the workshops show participants how to overcome fears that they might break their equipment if they take it apart, or that they have to use it in any kind of uncreative or pre-ordained manner. This is important because for the SCA, how we create is valuable. People need to see that "their way of recording, expressing and talking is also important," says Berga.

Creating a network

One of the biggest advantages of interactive media, says Berga, is that it feels good to participate as you're not doing it for money, "but for the family you create when you're working with people." As you talk with people and express mutual interest, you create a community, he says. "And you cannot buy a community. You cannot find a community. You can just get involved in a community."

The SCA hopes to create such a community by encouraging dialogue via a network of independent communication sources. To this end, their website features news that is automatically updated from other alternative media websites like Indymedia. There is also file-sharing, similar to the way people download films and mp3s. The difference is that if many people download a certain film, it will actually be broadcasted (with enough changes to avoid legal hassles) on the TV station itself.

Ideally, Berga would like to see a media that is interactive enough that writers and musicians could receive money directly from readers and listeners, cutting out the middle-men (producers, promoters and so on) who inflate the price we pay for media.
Advertisers assert that TV is free, says Berga, whereas in the end we pay for the costs of advertising in the products we buy. The actual value of the product itself is less. So TV as we know it isn't free anyway, "it's just that you don't move money. They move it for you."

Organizers of the SCA speculate that corporate media and other interests will oppose their initiatives to expand, and become internationally linked. "We will have legal and many [other] problems. But I'm really optimistic. I know it's a good idea, and it's going to work."
 

Visit the Squat the Waves website at http://www.okupemlesones.org/

—Darren Shore is studying political science at Concordia University. This article is part of an ongoing project on the value of alternative media, and was originally published in The Link on October 12, 2004.