Tactical Media, but Whose Tactics?

Axel Bruns argues that citizen journalism (or tactical media) holds a new and important place in the mediasphere, opening up a space for discussion with traditional mainstream media. He says blogs and other forms of this tactical media "have added a second tier of news media that comments on, critiques, and regularly corrects the mainstream news . . ." This has led to journalism as a conversation, rather than as a lecture, Bruns says.

However, he discounts political antagonisms as holding any place in this new form of journalism: "a true 'rule of the people' can only be established through productive debate and deliberation; it cannot be reached through entrenched political antagonism," Bruns writes. Are productive debate and deliberation not precisely a product of antagonism, though? Bruns pinpoints it himself, albeit unknowingly, when he says "sites which do little more than publish content are in danger of becoming mere PR tools for oppositional groups, simply containing press releases for the latest cause."

Bruns also misses a crucial element of this conversation. While he does say that "each time news bloggers and other citizen journalists point to omissions, misrepresentations, or biases in the mainstream media content by contrasting news stories, press releases, and other background information, they use the news media's own tools and resources against it." On the other side of this, however, is that mainstream media sources are also quite adept at taking tactical media stories and recontextualizing them to fit the way that traditional media is covering any given story.

So, while Bruns contends (and he quotes Douglas Rushkoff here) that "'we are heading not towards a toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes, but towards their reinvention in a new, participatory context,'" I would ask how this is possible without antagonism. It seems to me that without antagonism, we wind up with simple echo chambers in which no real change occurs.