IMC Taiwan (2003-5)-- Archeology and Memory

(Editor note: this article is written for indymedia book project which will come out later this year.)

By Gabriele Hadl and Sun-quan Huang (‘Inertia’)

IMC Taiwan (Twimc http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.twimc.org) was set up by members of POTS (Taipei alternative free weekly paper), and Twblog.net (an experimental blogging network), teachers, mainstream media people, grassroots and activist groups. The site existed from 2003- 2005, the collective was active from 2003-04.

Taiwan, long under Kuomintang (KMT) one-party rule, saw a burst of social movements in the 90s: the pro-election movement, youth culture movements, anti-war movements and not least the 911 labor strike. Media played an important role: pirate radio, print media, video activism, and not least the Net. The purpose of TwIMC was to build a hubs and spokes site, where people could speak for themselves without getting hijacked by party-politics and propaganda from KMT or DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, the pro-independence challengers). It was intended “not to be a movement for every viewpoint under the sun but a space for radical thoughts and social justice.”

From the beginning, the twIMC collective struggled with the anglo-centrism of the IMC process and technology. Translating the documents was doable, but the dada software was hard to adapt, servers garbled Chinese fonts, as did twiki and Mailman, leaving the collective the choice of using a Chinese yahoo group or talking to each other in English. This hobbled openness and transparancy. The afiliation process was a maze of English-only forms, lists and procedures. Inertia’s signature in his postings to the new-IMC list wryly read: “Don't hate the English, be English!” The only step towards full network membership that remained undone was to hold a public meeting and send a mission statement to the IMC-process list. Still, the site was up and running and linked to indymedia.org and most local IMCs for 2 years. In its heyday, in late 2003 and 2004, it had a sleek design (by Isis, a visual artist and one of the techies) an interesting mix of postings in Chinese about local movements (Tiennamen echoes art project, Gay/lesbian film festa, WSF, peace events), and in English from abroad (including South Korea, Iraq and North Korea). It was hacked in 2005 and though temporarily resurrected went offline in early 2006 after a year of sparse use (in which the newswire had become a spam trap).

The collective also had some contacts with IMC activists in mainland China and Japan, and one twIMC member followed the IMC-connected polymedia lab and organizing around the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva 2003. In 2005 IMC activists from Germany and Japan visited and met most of the collective. The collective members (not least through their other projects) were in touch with activists in Hong Kong (including IN-media) and bloggers throughout the Chinese speaking world.

Why did twIMC pass away? By 2006 everyone had a blog to speak out loud. Also, there were no big collective movements around democratization anymore. The only issue became one-China vs. independence. People wold always want to know which party twIMC stands for. No-one can accept that citizens can be party-free and truly independent. So there are many one-issue media: NGOs have their websites, parties have their own media. E.g., the DPP have Taipei Times and The Liberate Times. Each issue immediately gets claimed by one party or the other. In a fragmental divided society, no one can cross the lines that the parties draw in public space. Right now it looks like only party-oriented media can survive, or brutal tabloid populism, like that of Apple Daily, Taiwan’s biggest daily. Still, there are some excellent NGO sites, like the labor site Coolloud and the environmental info site. And the former twIMC people continue with POTS and Twblog.net and many other projects.