Chris Atton
Biographic Data
| ID | 303539 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chris Atton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chris |
| FAMILY NAME | Atton |
| SIGNATURE | ATTON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Edinburgh Napier University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Challenging authenticity: Fakes and Forgeries in Rock Music
Authenticity is a key concept in the evaluation of rock music by critics and fans. The production of fakes challenges the means by which listeners evaluate the authentic, by questioning central notions of integrity and sincerity. This article examines the nature and motives of faking in recorded music, such as inventing imaginary groups or passing off studio recordings as live performances. In addition to a survey of types of fakes and the motive…
The Routledge Companion To Alternative And Community Media
Curating popular music: Authority and History, Aesthetics and Technology
The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the 'new museology'. Self-curation can be employed by musicians to re-present their work as a historiographical project of popular music and as an intervention in dominant critical accounts of the musicians' creative practices. The challenge to conventional historiography can be understood as a project of a…
Trust, truth and objectivity: Sustaining quality journalism in the era of the content-generating user
This chapter begins from pessimism. It begins by arguing that the history of alternative media is predominantly one of failure: failure to reach any but the most specialist of audiences and a consequent failure to effect the political and social transformations that represent the ambition of so many of its projects. However, I do not wish simply to reproduce past arguments here. Emerging forms of journalism and user-generated content have begun t…
Citizens' Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia
Alternative and activist new media
Côté does not attempt to provide a structural analysis of the driving forces underlying the euthanasia controversy, such as the medicalisation of dying, the role of religious belief and church hierarchies, the relationship between the individual and the state or the dynamics of social movements.Nor does he probe into the complicated ethical and legal debates about life, death and dying.His focus is less on why things are happening and more on wha…
Genre and the cultural politics of territory: The live experience of free improvisation
This article is concerned with the relationship between performers and audiences in the live performance of popular music, a relationship that is examined through the concept of genre culture and a microsociological study of improvised music as a territory for behaviour. Normative practices of musical performance and audience behaviour are generally understood to be regulated within the ‘social order’ of live performance situations. By contrast, …
Listening to 'difficult albums: Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant-Garde
Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse…
Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre: Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre
Recent theoretical interest in Noise has drawn attention to the difficulties of making sense of it as a musical practice. Various claims have been made: Noise challenges the entire history of musical codes; it represents the end of music; it is a new, all-subsuming genre; it is not a genre at all. These tensions and contradictions suggest important questions about how genres are constructed (and how they are denied). This paper examines how liste…
New media and journalism practice in Africa: An agenda for research
Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the “Democratic Conversation”
Research into fanzines has tended to locate them as subcultural artefacts whose significance is found in their symbolic fit with the subculture responsible for producing them. As a consequence, fanzines have mostly been interpreted homologically as acts of political resistance, with little attention being paid to the aesthetic arguments they contain. By contrast, to consider fanzines as types of genre-cultures it becomes possible to examine amate…
Alternative and Citizen Journalism
This chapter examines journalism that is produced not by professionals but by those outside mainstream media organizations. Amateur media producers typically have little or no training or professional qualifi cations as journalists; they write and report from their position as citizens, as members of communities, as activists, as fans. This chapter will show how key writers in the subject area have understood the activities of these amateur journ…
Why alternative journalism matters
Writing about listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism
Alternative' publications challenge the conventional discourses of rock journalism. In particular, the dominant discourses of authenticity, masculinity and mythology might be countered by publications that emphasise historical and (sub)cultural framing, and that present radicalised 'spaces of listening'. Using Bourdieu's field theory to identify autonomous and semi-autonomous sites for rock criticism, the paper compares how a fanzine (the Sound P…
Alternative Journalism
Alternative Journalism is the first book to investigate and analyse the diverse forms and genres of journalism that have arisen as challenges to mainstream news coverage. From the radical content of emancipatory media to the dizzying range of citizen journalist blogs and fanzine subcultures, this book charts the historical and cultural practices of this diverse and globalized phenomenon. This exploration goes to the heart of journalism itself, pr…
Current Issues in Alternative Media Research
Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fan…
Far-right media on the internet: Culture, discourse and power
This study examines the discourse of the British National Party’s (BNP) website. It explores the site as a form of alternative media, focusing on how it involves members and supporters in its discursive construction of racism. It finds that the discourses and identities produced are played out through a radical reformation of the concepts of power, culture and oppression. Drawing on the post-colonial notion of the Other, the BNP seeks to present …
Sourcing Routines and Representation in Alternative Journalism: A Case Study Approach
This study is a first attempt to examine how the alternative media select, represent and deploy their news sources. The literature suggests that, in contrast to mainstream sourcing routines, the alternative media privilege “ordinary”, non-elite sources for their news and, through what has been termed native reporting (Atton, 2002a Atton, Chris. 2002a. Alternative Media, London: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), offer such sources a platform t…
An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
Chris Atton explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it.
An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
This book explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it. The book is characterised by in-depth case studies. Topics include the media of new social movements and other radical political organisations (including the far right); websites produced by fans of popular culture; and med…
What is `Alternative' Journalism
Reshaping Social Movement Media for a New Millennium
This article contextualizes Indymedia, the Internet-based network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs) that has developed since the 30 November protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization talks there in 1999. In a short space of time this network has become the backbone of communication for the broad coalition of groups that comprise the anti-capitalism movement. Context is sought from three perspectives: first, through a consideratio…
News Cultures and New Social Movements: Radical journalism and the mainstream media
Radical media can be viewed as an extremely democratic form of communication, where people normally denied access to the mainstream media are able to speak on issues that concern them. Radical media are especially important for new social movements, where “activist-journalists” seek to establish a counter-discourse to those typically found in mainstream media. One striking technique employed in radical media is “native reporting”, where first-per…
Alternative Media
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 …
Theorizing Anglo-American Alternative Media: Toward a contextual history and analysis of US and UK scholarship
Alternative Media
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 …
Far-right media on the internet: Culture, discourse and power
This study examines the discourse of the British National Party’s (BNP) website. It explores the site as a form of alternative media, focusing on how it involves members and supporters in its discursive construction of racism. It finds that the discourses and identities produced are played out through a radical reformation of the concepts of power, culture and oppression. Drawing on the post-colonial notion of the Other, the BNP seeks to present …
What is `Alternative' Journalism
Sourcing Routines and Representation in Alternative Journalism: A Case Study Approach
This study is a first attempt to examine how the alternative media select, represent and deploy their news sources. The literature suggests that, in contrast to mainstream sourcing routines, the alternative media privilege “ordinary”, non-elite sources for their news and, through what has been termed native reporting (Atton, 2002a Atton, Chris. 2002a. Alternative Media, London: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), offer such sources a platform t…
New media and journalism practice in Africa: An agenda for research
News Cultures and New Social Movements: Radical journalism and the mainstream media
Radical media can be viewed as an extremely democratic form of communication, where people normally denied access to the mainstream media are able to speak on issues that concern them. Radical media are especially important for new social movements, where “activist-journalists” seek to establish a counter-discourse to those typically found in mainstream media. One striking technique employed in radical media is “native reporting”, where first-per…
Living in the Past: Value Discourses in Progressive Rock Fanzines
At the height of its success in the first half of the 1970s, progressive rock was perhaps a surprisingly popular genre; surprising since its exponents strove to fuse classical models of composition and arrangement with electric instruments and extend the form of rock music from the single song to the symphonic poem, even the multimovement suite. Album and concert sales were extremely high; even albums that were greeted with less than critical app…
Alternative Journalism
Alternative Journalism is the first book to investigate and analyse the diverse forms and genres of journalism that have arisen as challenges to mainstream news coverage. From the radical content of emancipatory media to the dizzying range of citizen journalist blogs and fanzine subcultures, this book charts the historical and cultural practices of this diverse and globalized phenomenon. This exploration goes to the heart of journalism itself, pr…
Reshaping Social Movement Media for a New Millennium
This article contextualizes Indymedia, the Internet-based network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs) that has developed since the 30 November protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization talks there in 1999. In a short space of time this network has become the backbone of communication for the broad coalition of groups that comprise the anti-capitalism movement. Context is sought from three perspectives: first, through a consideratio…
Why alternative journalism matters
Writing about listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism
Alternative' publications challenge the conventional discourses of rock journalism. In particular, the dominant discourses of authenticity, masculinity and mythology might be countered by publications that emphasise historical and (sub)cultural framing, and that present radicalised 'spaces of listening'. Using Bourdieu's field theory to identify autonomous and semi-autonomous sites for rock criticism, the paper compares how a fanzine (the Sound P…
A reassessment of the alternative press
This article revisits the Comedia group's assessment of the alternative press as one of commercial failure. It examines the British alternative press of the 1990s and finds that, while financial exigency and anti-commercialism are still prevalent, new methods of reproduction and distribution have evolved that enable it to overcome the economic problems caused by such conditions. These methods are highly decentralized, relying on the sharing of re…
Curating popular music: Authority and History, Aesthetics and Technology
The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the 'new museology'. Self-curation can be employed by musicians to re-present their work as a historiographical project of popular music and as an intervention in dominant critical accounts of the musicians' creative practices. The challenge to conventional historiography can be understood as a project of a…
Theorizing Anglo-American Alternative Media: Toward a contextual history and analysis of US and UK scholarship
Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the “Democratic Conversation”
Research into fanzines has tended to locate them as subcultural artefacts whose significance is found in their symbolic fit with the subculture responsible for producing them. As a consequence, fanzines have mostly been interpreted homologically as acts of political resistance, with little attention being paid to the aesthetic arguments they contain. By contrast, to consider fanzines as types of genre-cultures it becomes possible to examine amate…
Current Issues in Alternative Media Research
Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fan…
An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
This book explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it. The book is characterised by in-depth case studies. Topics include the media of new social movements and other radical political organisations (including the far right); websites produced by fans of popular culture; and med…
Challenging authenticity: Fakes and Forgeries in Rock Music
Authenticity is a key concept in the evaluation of rock music by critics and fans. The production of fakes challenges the means by which listeners evaluate the authentic, by questioning central notions of integrity and sincerity. This article examines the nature and motives of faking in recorded music, such as inventing imaginary groups or passing off studio recordings as live performances. In addition to a survey of types of fakes and the motive…
Genre and the cultural politics of territory: The live experience of free improvisation
This article is concerned with the relationship between performers and audiences in the live performance of popular music, a relationship that is examined through the concept of genre culture and a microsociological study of improvised music as a territory for behaviour. Normative practices of musical performance and audience behaviour are generally understood to be regulated within the ‘social order’ of live performance situations. By contrast, …
Listening to 'difficult albums: Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant-Garde
Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse…
A reassessment of the alternative press
This article revisits the Comedia group's assessment of the alternative press as one of commercial failure. It examines the British alternative press of the 1990s and finds that, while financial exigency and anti-commercialism are still prevalent, new methods of reproduction and distribution have evolved that enable it to overcome the economic problems caused by such conditions. These methods are highly decentralized, relying on the sharing of re…
Alternative media in Scotland: Problems, positions and ‘Product’
Examines varied issues related to alternative media in Scotland. Analysis of a set of media practices collectively known as alternative media; Problems on finding an adequate definition for alternative media; Publication's position with respect to the relations of production; Intertwining of particular national and regional issues in the newspaper 'Free Press
Theorizing Anglo-American Alternative Media: Toward a contextual history and analysis of US and UK scholarship
Living in the Past: Value Discourses in Progressive Rock Fanzines
At the height of its success in the first half of the 1970s, progressive rock was perhaps a surprisingly popular genre; surprising since its exponents strove to fuse classical models of composition and arrangement with electric instruments and extend the form of rock music from the single song to the symphonic poem, even the multimovement suite. Album and concert sales were extremely high; even albums that were greeted with less than critical app…
News Cultures and New Social Movements: Radical journalism and the mainstream media
Radical media can be viewed as an extremely democratic form of communication, where people normally denied access to the mainstream media are able to speak on issues that concern them. Radical media are especially important for new social movements, where “activist-journalists” seek to establish a counter-discourse to those typically found in mainstream media. One striking technique employed in radical media is “native reporting”, where first-per…
Alternative Media
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 …
What is `Alternative' Journalism
Reshaping Social Movement Media for a New Millennium
This article contextualizes Indymedia, the Internet-based network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs) that has developed since the 30 November protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization talks there in 1999. In a short space of time this network has become the backbone of communication for the broad coalition of groups that comprise the anti-capitalism movement. Context is sought from three perspectives: first, through a consideratio…
An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
Chris Atton explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it.
An Alternative Internet: Radical Media, Politics and Creativity
This book explores how the Internet presents radical ways of organising and producing media that offer political and cultural alternatives, both to ways of doing business and to how we understand the world and our place in it. The book is characterised by in-depth case studies. Topics include the media of new social movements and other radical political organisations (including the far right); websites produced by fans of popular culture; and med…
Sourcing Routines and Representation in Alternative Journalism: A Case Study Approach
This study is a first attempt to examine how the alternative media select, represent and deploy their news sources. The literature suggests that, in contrast to mainstream sourcing routines, the alternative media privilege “ordinary”, non-elite sources for their news and, through what has been termed native reporting (Atton, 2002a Atton, Chris. 2002a. Alternative Media, London: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), offer such sources a platform t…
Far-right media on the internet: Culture, discourse and power
This study examines the discourse of the British National Party’s (BNP) website. It explores the site as a form of alternative media, focusing on how it involves members and supporters in its discursive construction of racism. It finds that the discourses and identities produced are played out through a radical reformation of the concepts of power, culture and oppression. Drawing on the post-colonial notion of the Other, the BNP seeks to present …
Current Issues in Alternative Media Research
Research in alternative media has burgeoned since the turn of the millennium. The majority of studies has examined the political and social dimensions of alternative media and has focused on the media of social movements. The value of these amateur media projects lies not only in the content they produce, but also in the educational and political empowerment they offer to their participants. Other forms of alternative media, such as blogs and fan…
Alternative Journalism
Alternative Journalism is the first book to investigate and analyse the diverse forms and genres of journalism that have arisen as challenges to mainstream news coverage. From the radical content of emancipatory media to the dizzying range of citizen journalist blogs and fanzine subcultures, this book charts the historical and cultural practices of this diverse and globalized phenomenon. This exploration goes to the heart of journalism itself, pr…
Alternative and Citizen Journalism
This chapter examines journalism that is produced not by professionals but by those outside mainstream media organizations. Amateur media producers typically have little or no training or professional qualifi cations as journalists; they write and report from their position as citizens, as members of communities, as activists, as fans. This chapter will show how key writers in the subject area have understood the activities of these amateur journ…
Why alternative journalism matters
Writing about listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism
Alternative' publications challenge the conventional discourses of rock journalism. In particular, the dominant discourses of authenticity, masculinity and mythology might be countered by publications that emphasise historical and (sub)cultural framing, and that present radicalised 'spaces of listening'. Using Bourdieu's field theory to identify autonomous and semi-autonomous sites for rock criticism, the paper compares how a fanzine (the Sound P…
Popular Music Fanzines: Genre, Aesthetics, and the “Democratic Conversation”
Research into fanzines has tended to locate them as subcultural artefacts whose significance is found in their symbolic fit with the subculture responsible for producing them. As a consequence, fanzines have mostly been interpreted homologically as acts of political resistance, with little attention being paid to the aesthetic arguments they contain. By contrast, to consider fanzines as types of genre-cultures it becomes possible to examine amate…
Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre: Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre
Recent theoretical interest in Noise has drawn attention to the difficulties of making sense of it as a musical practice. Various claims have been made: Noise challenges the entire history of musical codes; it represents the end of music; it is a new, all-subsuming genre; it is not a genre at all. These tensions and contradictions suggest important questions about how genres are constructed (and how they are denied). This paper examines how liste…
New media and journalism practice in Africa: An agenda for research
Alternative and activist new media
Côté does not attempt to provide a structural analysis of the driving forces underlying the euthanasia controversy, such as the medicalisation of dying, the role of religious belief and church hierarchies, the relationship between the individual and the state or the dynamics of social movements.Nor does he probe into the complicated ethical and legal debates about life, death and dying.His focus is less on why things are happening and more on wha…
Genre and the cultural politics of territory: The live experience of free improvisation
This article is concerned with the relationship between performers and audiences in the live performance of popular music, a relationship that is examined through the concept of genre culture and a microsociological study of improvised music as a territory for behaviour. Normative practices of musical performance and audience behaviour are generally understood to be regulated within the ‘social order’ of live performance situations. By contrast, …
Listening to 'difficult albums: Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant-Garde
Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse…
Trust, truth and objectivity: Sustaining quality journalism in the era of the content-generating user
This chapter begins from pessimism. It begins by arguing that the history of alternative media is predominantly one of failure: failure to reach any but the most specialist of audiences and a consequent failure to effect the political and social transformations that represent the ambition of so many of its projects. However, I do not wish simply to reproduce past arguments here. Emerging forms of journalism and user-generated content have begun t…
Citizens' Media Against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · Media studies (17 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Journalism (9 works) · Media Studies and Communication (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (8 works)