As I write, George W. Bush has ordered a military build-up in the Persian Gulf, a move roundly approved by media commentators. Yet, scattered news reports (collected at such web sites as IndyMedia ) note many groups who argue that military attacks will not only fail, but also result in continued retaliation and even more civilian deaths.

Tit for tat, back and forth, back and forth. The more I try to follow such news coverage, the more I feel I'm just watching the bouncing ball in an endless tennis rally. Is this as much as I can expect? Or might there be other ways to participate in a media system?

Many people feel that media do not perform as they should. For example, practitioners and advocates of alternative media seek to counterbalance "official" accounts in order to provide additional views and insights to consider.

I'm all for a wider range of views and insights. Yet, does getting a wider range of views get me out of the stands and into the match-maybe even to stop the game and change the rules? Despite sometimes brilliant flares of activity that provide a glimmer of possibilities as-yet unknown, simply providing more information for us individual "news consumers" to, well, consume only keeps the same game going.

Why is it so difficult to come up with new ways of practicing media? It's not due to lack of trying or of interest, but due largely to seeing media as technologies instead of as relationships between people. Let me offer a specific example.

In 1996, a group of media activists met in a San Francisco Bay-area home to discuss the political potential of low-power FM radio. The group's guest was engineer and microradio activist Tetsuo Kogawa, who, before the group's eyes, assembled a microradio transmitter.

As Louis Hiken recounts in his forward to Larry Soley's book Free Radio, Kogawa talked "about the social and political uses of microradio technology" while "simultaneously soldering and scotch-taping a series of Radio Shack parts, worth about fifteen dollars, to a paper plate. Within fifteen minutes, he had completed his soldering and announced that he had finished 'building' his transmitter." After three more minutes of fine-tuning, "he announced that we were 'on the air'."

More startling than this transformation of readily available pieces into a radio transmitter was their loss at what to do with it. As Hiken puts it, "We adults were trying to figure out how to sound like some left-wing equivalent to [veteran US television news broadcaster] Walter Cronkite, and were, of course, silenced by the prospect." By contrast, the teenage daughter of one of the attendees "was the only person in the room who was so unintimidated by the 'new' medium as to be able to talk spontaneously over the air."

Why the adult paralysis? Hiken concludes that the problem was that they all were so used to listening "passively to what was broadcast over the airwaves, and only when 'permitted' or 'invited' to speak over an approved station were we able to prepare ourselves for such an event."

This example suggests how deeply we've all learned and accepted our "legitimate" spectating role in the existing media system. The bedrock of such a system is seemingly natural expectations and assumptions about what it is we're "supposed" to use radio (or television, or newspapers, or the Internet) for.

What are these expectations and assumptions? One can look back to the beginnings of broadcasting to get a glimpse of them at the time of their modern emergence. A 1921 news story in an obscure magazine notes that a wireless transmitting station was "used partly for broadcasting Press and other messages to ships, that is, sending out messages without receiving replies."

Put bluntly, broadcasting here means not expecting a reply. Ships that received this broadcast message could act on it or not, depending on their specific needs. But, by the early 20th Century, a non-response was constituent of what it meant to "broadcast."

In this way, broadcasting (conducted by mainstream or radical groups) is ultimately a particular way of viewing the relationship of communication. As Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams summarized in a 1961 essay titled "Communications and Community," in such a system "people are not even people, they are mass audiences, they are socio-economic groups, they are targets. And the aggression within those terms, the aggression within 'impact', the aggression within 'target', is the expression of people who want control."

Commercial broadcasters want people to watch their programming in order to sell their attention to advertisers. Alternative-media broadcasters-often with the most laudable intentions and often in support of goals I share-also seek control of the audience: to convince them of the value of their view and to mobilize the audience in support of it.

To overcome this reduction, new ways of "doing" media need to be invented. Historically, it has been the government, the military, and business that have engineered new media technologies. By contrast, most innovation in "doing" media comes from radical political movements.

In the early 20th Century, labor activist Big Bill Haywood portrayed the role of the mineworkers' union magazine he edited as enabling "long-distance handshaking" between local unions. Sending "information" was not the goal, but building close, collective, egalitarian relationships was.

In a 1930s essay titled "Radio as a Means of Communication," playwright and political radical Bertolt Brecht argued not just for making radio a two-way technology, but to also invent through it a new form not of control, but of public deliberation as a means of critical, collective self-education. As he wrote, "the technique for all such projects has still to be developed; but it will be directed towards the prime task of ensuring that the public is not only taught but must also itself teach."

Media scholars have, I think, an important role to play in all this-certainly not as authorities with answers, but as co-experimenters in exploring new ways of "doing" media.

As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it in a recent essay "Social Scientists and the Social Movement" in his book Acts of Resistance, scholars' objective should be "not only to invent responses, but to invent a way of inventing responses, to invent a new form of organization of the work of contestation and of organization of contestation, of the task of activism."

Some glimmerings of different ways already exist in such forms as critical analyses of news coverage written for general audiences (attempting to encourage readers via example to practice such kinds of reading themselves) and so-called "teach-ins," with scholars as clarifiers and equal participants with whomever else chooses to

participate. But more needs to be done. As I write, the armies march, the planes fly, and we are shown the isolated views and arguments, which bounce back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

James Hamilton teaches courses on advertising and society, communication history, and cultural-critical theory at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on the history, theory and practice of alternative media, and on critical media pedagogy as assisted by digital technology. He is currently writing a critical history of alternative media.

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