Communicating Civil Society: participation as the main benchmark of Civil Society Media. The case of the III World Social Forum

Communication is a key resource in the process of development and reproduction of the organized civil society. The third World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre in January 2003, marked a turning point in that process: civil society organisations involved in the World Social Forum acknowledged for the first time the intrinsic relationship between media and social change, creating in the context of the forum a space for the discussion of communication in a broader sense. This growing interest has been confirmed in the following edition and in the national and regional fora. In an effort to disseminate information about their events and instances, several civil society groups, even those participating in the social fora, developed their own communication channels, which have been described as alternative, independent, collective or community media. They represent a different approach to media based on ¿being the media¿ instead of consuming them. I combined all these definitions under the term Civil Society Media: a broader concept that enables us to define media shifting from the concept of audience and users to the concept of civil society, from individuals as passive recipients to active subjects in a human-centred approach to media. In these terms I define participation as the most important characteristic of civil society media. I have developed a classification of civil society media covering the third World Social Forum, which allows assessing how, if and on which terms participation has become a reality in the production of information by the CS. The classification focuses on their form, paying special attention to their use of information technologies (ICTs). I applied the classification to a number of case studies ¿Indymedia, the World Association of Community Radio (AMARC) and Ciranda¿ taken from my more extensive research project on civil society media at the WSF. In chapter 1 I frame civil society communication, by defining Civil Society Media. In chapter 2 I describe the context in which Civil Society Media operate in order to evaluate their performance: the third World Social Forum, a crucial event in the development process of a social agenda in the field of communications. In chapter 3 I outline a classification that allows to determine if and in which terms participation has become a reality in the production of information by civil society. The aim is to understand if and how the proposals drafted at the World Social Forum ¿and encompassed under the slogan ¿another communication is possible¿¿ have been put into practice and understand how we can define participation within the civil society communication