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The Civic Media Center Celebrates Its 15th Anniversary
The Civic Media Center, Gainesville, Florida's alternative library of independent, non-corporate media, will celebrate its 15th anniversary this October 18th. Though the Center (also known as the CMC) looks at first glance like a funky, political, used bookstore, it is actually an independent nonprofit organization that functions as a library, a music hall, a poetry and arts venue, a hub for progressive grassroots organizing, and a social center for local liberal, progressive, and radical activists all rolled into one. In the lingo of the worldwide movement that developed originally in the 1970s and '80s in Europe, the CMC is a kind of "infoshop," a collectively run community space that relies on volunteers to provide facilities and services to the public, primarily in the form of access to information. Like the Alternative Reading Room in Asheville, NC, upon which it was initially patterned, the core of the CMC's mission is its lending library of alternative books, video and audio materials, and its in-house collection of magazines, newspapers, journals, and zines. But since its beginning, the Center has blossomed into much more than a library.
In 1991, as the Gulf War (I) wound down, activists with the Mideast Peace Group in Gainesville contacted dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky. They asked him to come and speak at the University of Florida as part of their campaign to expose the real motives behind the war and challenge the lack of critical thought and analysis that was on display across the mainstream, corporate-media spectrum. Chomsky was in high demand as a speaker at the time, and although he was happy to come to Gainesville, his secretary informed the group that it would be two-and-a-half years before he would be able to fit them into his schedule. They asked Chomsky to save the date. In the two years that followed, a group of Gainesville media activists who called themselves the Gainesville Alternative Press (or GAP) Group started organizing to promote local, regional, and national alternative media in their community. The group included the editors of the Gainesville Iguana, a progressive newsmonthly; MOON magazine, a "city paper" type alternative monthly with a countercultural slant and liberal editorial politics; Prairie Fire, a radical University...
