What are `alternative media'? Are they the same as underground, radical or oppositional media?

In this book, Chris Atton offers a fresh introduction to alternative media: one which is not limited to `radical' media, but can also account for newer cultural forms such as zines, fanzines, and personal websites.

Alternative Media:

· Examines how and why people produce and use alternative media - to make meaning, to interpret, and to change the world in which they live

· Encompasses a wide range of alternative media and draws on examples from both the United States and United Kingdom

· Locates contemporary alternative media in their cultural, historical and political contexts

Alternative Media provides a timely corrective to media theorizing which focuses almost exclusively on the output of the media conglomerates. As such it will be an essential purchase for all students and researchers with an interest in the true nature of the contemporary media environment.

Approaching Alternative Media
Theory and Methodology
The Economics of Production
What Use Is a Zine? Identity-Building and Social Signification in Zine Culture
Alternative Media and New Social Movements
Writers, Readers and Knowledge in New Social Movement Media
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Alternative Media

Chris Atton is Professor of Media and Culture in the School of Arts and Creative Industries of Edinburgh Napier University.  His research is primarily interested in popular culture that is produced by "ordinary," non-professional writers and editors of fanzines, radical newspapers, independent publishers and social media.  He is particularly interested in how audiences and fan communities make sense of popular culture through their own writing.  He has made special studies of music fanzines, radical political newspapers and the use of the internet for the distribution of "amateur ideas."  His books include Alternative Media (Sage, 2002) and Alternative Journalism (Sage, 2008, with James F. Hamilton).