Community media: institutions, trust and groups

This journal has arrived at a critical time. A new and very different information infrastructure is being built over the top of the internet. Platforms designed to bring certainty to that which is currently unsecure and unverifiable in online systems are currently under construction. Identity checks, contracts, payments and property will be transformed at the technical layer (Swan, 2015), with implications for everything from law and fiat money to organisations. The emerging online era is far from the open ideal of the early internet pioneers (for instance, Barbrook and Cameron, 1995), but it also offers new possibilities for cooperative systems. What we currently think of as community media may or may not feature in the Web 3 environment. However, we can learn from community media because it is a communications institution that has had to carve out a place among stronger organising forces antithetical to its group-centred design.