.
The 2007 ICA Conference's theme was "Creating Communication: Content,
Control, and Critique". Many interesting academic contributions about
this theme appeared in the Keynote Panels, Theme Sessions, and a series
of other conference sessions. But the 2007 ICA Conference did not just
feature academic reflections. In three so-called grassroots discussion
panels, alternative voices from outside academia also animated the
conference theme. These panels produced interesting dialogues between
academia and the people that actually organize, realize, and live the
participatory and bottom-up processes that we academics so eagerly
analyze.
Now, the practitioners' contributions from these panels are available
as an ebook entitled "Alternatives on media content, journalism, and
regulation." Edited by Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Benjamin De Cleen and
Nico Carpentier, and published by the University of Tartu Press, this
book brings together the fascinating stories of how civil society
intervenes (sometimes successfully, sometimes less successfully) in the
creation of alternative content, in the organization of alternative
journalism, and in the attempts to influence the regulation that
impacts upon the communicative processes.
