Authors: Deirdre Boyle
ISBN-13: 9780195043341, ISBN-10: 0195043340
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: March 1997
Edition: (Non-applicable)
New School for Social Research
Before the Internet, camcorders, and hundred-channel cable- systemspredating the Information Superhighway and talk of cyber-democracythere was guerrilla television. Part of the larger alternative media tide which swept the country in the late sixties, guerrilla television emerged when the arrival of lightweight, affordable consumer video equipment made it possible for ordinary people to make their own television. Fueled both by outrage at the day's events and by the writings of people like Marshall McLuhan, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson, the movement gained a manifesto in 1971, when Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation published Guerrilla Television. As framed in this quixotic text, the goal of the video guerilla was nothing less than a reshaping of the structure of information in America.
In Subject to Change, Deirdre Boyle tells the fascinating story of the first TV generation's dream of remaking television and their frustrated attempts at democratizing the medium. Interweaving the narratives of three very different video collectives from the 1970sTVTV, Broadside TV, and University Community VideoBoyle offers a thought-provoking account of an earlier electronic utopianism, one with significant implications for today's debates over free speech, public discourse, and the information explosion.
1 | Underground Video | 3 |
2 | Subject to Change | 14 |
3 | Guerrilla versus Grassroots | 26 |
4 | The World's Largest TV Studio | 36 |
5 | Mountain Guerrilla | 48 |
6 | Four More Years | 55 |
7 | Communitube | 65 |
8 | Gaga Over Guru | 72 |
9 | Prime Time TVTV | 89 |
10 | Broadside TV | 96 |
11 | Impeaching Evidence | 105 |
12 | Changing Channels | 116 |
13 | Furor Over Fugitive | 128 |
14 | Living Newsletter? | 139 |
15 | The Good Times Are Killing Me | 146 |
16 | Super Video | 158 |
17 | Intermedia | 165 |
18 | Hooray for Hollywood? | 172 |
19 | The Big Chill | 183 |
20 | Epilogue | 190 |
Appendix | 209 | |
Notes | 223 | |
Bibliography | 259 | |
Index | 271 |