Reconceptualizing Citizen Media: A Preliminary Charting of a Complex Domain

This chapter draws on established scholarship in a variety of disciplines, the rich contributions to the current volume, and a wide range of concrete examples of different practices to chart the territory of citizen media as an emerging field of study and offer a critical examination of the main concepts that underpin it: public(s), citizen/citizenship and media. It further explores a range of features that characterize and delimit the concept of citizen media from related terms such as citizen and participatory journalism, alternative, radical and community media, and social and digital media. We conclude with a provisional definition of citizen media that encompasses content and practices, values and narratives, the collective and the individual, the local and the global, the concrete and the virtual, and that acknowledges the complex dynamic of appropriation and reverse appropriation within which all citizen media initiatives operate.