This book presents ways to break the stranglehold of broadcast television on the American mind by using low-cost portable video-tape cameras, video cassettes, and cable television to design alternative television networks that favor portability and decentralization. The author's contention is that politics are obsolete and that information tools and tactics are a more powerful means of social change. To achieve true democracy, the author suggests that we develop a sense of media ecology in what he calls "media America," or the information environment. This is the first manual or how-to book for new media tools.

Before the Internet, camcorders, and hundred-channel cable- systems--predating the Information Superhighway and talk of cyber-democracy--there was guerilla television. Part of the larger alternative media tide which swept the country in the late sixties, guerilla 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 Corp. published Guerilla 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, Deidre 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 1970s--TVTV, Broadside TV, and University Community Video--Boyle 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.

This is a history of "guerilla television", a form of TV which was part of an alternative media tide sweeping the United States in the 1960s. Inspired by the fracturing issues of the decade and the theories and writings of various exponents, guerilla television put forth "utopian" programming.

The essays in this volume investigate the impact of all media, including the emerging technologies, on the social, cultural, economic and political climate in the context of aesthetic values, and issues of gender, race and class. Transmission examines the array of forces moving the contemporary video landscape forward, comparing the past with the present as well as the future as it looks at the impact of video on commercial television, the relationship of media to the social causes it (mis)represents and the effects of new communication tools on participating constituents.

Activism is action on behalf of a cause, action that goes beyond what is conventional or routine and is relative to the actions by others. Health activism is a growing area of interest for many who work to improve health at both national and international levels because it offers a more direct approach to achieve lasting social and political change. This book, for the first time, provides a clear foundation to the theory, evidence-base and strategies that can be harnessed to bring about change to improve the lives and health of others. For anyone working to improve the health of groups and communities, this will be thought-provoking reading. It has particular relevance for postgraduate students and practitioners in public health and health promotion.

Conflicting journalistic voices that were raised in the past have become such a jumble that merely identifying them is difficult. Dennis and Rivers define, categorize, present, and examine the voices that contributed to what became known as "the new media" environment in the 1970s. This new journalism came about as a result of dissatisfaction with existing values and standards of the early 1960s style of journalism.The authors are comprehensive in their concerns, as reflected in the national scope presented. They cover developments in the major cities, on both coasts, in the Middle West and Southin every major region of the United States. Most of the research required travel and interviews; all of it required reading almost endlessly and watching the video productions of journalists who built the structure of alternative television. Dennis and Rivers offer a representative view of forms and media, as well as the people who fashioned the new orientation.The authors claim that the wrangling over objective and interpretative reporting misses the main point, which is that neither is in close touch with reality. The best objective report may cover all surfaces of an event, the best interpretative report may explain all its meanings, but both are bloodless, a world away from the experience. Color, flavor, atmosphere, the ultimate human meaningall these, the new journalists contend, are far beyond the reach of traditional models of journalism. This is one of the central reasons for the emergence of different forms and practices in our time. This volume will help younger scholars understand the sources of quasi-journalistic practices extant today, including blogging and electronic-only publications.

An argument that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right; traces the theoretical genealogy of video and examines the different concepts of video seen in works by Vito Acconci, Ulrike Rosenbach, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others. Video is an electronic medium, dependent on the transfer of electronic signals. Video signals are in constant movement, circulating between camera and monitor. This process of simultaneous production and reproduction makes video the most reflexive of media, distinct from both photography and film (in which the image or a sequence of images is central). Because it is processual and not bound to recording and the appearance of a “frame,” video shares properties with the computer. In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, and current critical debates on new media still need to recognize this. Spielmann considers video as “transformation imagery,” acknowledging the centrality in video of the transitions between images—and the fact that these transitions are explicitly reflected in new processes. After situating video in a genealogical model that demonstrates both its continuities and discontinuities with other media, Spielmann considers three strands of video praxis—documentary, experimental art, and experimental image-making (which is concerned primarily with signal processing). She then discusses selected works by such artists as Vito Acconci, Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Dara Birnbaum, Nan Hoover, Lynn Hershman, Gary Hill, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Seaman, and others. These works serve to demonstrate the spectrum of possibilities in video as medium and point to connections with other forms of media. Finally, Spielmann discusses the potential of interactivity, complexity, and hybridization in the future of video as a medium.