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98.
Guerrilla Television.
NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. First edition, softcover issue. 4to. 108pp. Cover and book design by Ant Farm (with whom Shamberg collaborated in the video 'supercollective' TVTV). Illustrated with drawings, diagrams, photographs and video stills throughout.
Former Time-Life correspondent Michael Shamberg co-founded the Raindance Foundation in 1969, a self-described "alternate culture think-tank" that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication. His book tells "how we can break the stranglehold of broadcast TV on the American mind… how low-cost portable video-tape cameras, video cassettes, and cable television can be used to design alternate television networks that favor portability and decentralization… [and contends] that politics are obsolete and that information tools and tactics are a more powerful means of social change… Guerrilla Television is the first manual or how-to book for new media tools."
Divided into two sections, Shamberg first offers his view of information/media obsessed America ("Americans are information junkies") and its dependence on corporate centralised one-way broadcast streams of information, and points to Guerrilla Television as the solution. In the second section, called the 'Manual', he provides a guidebook for creating alternative media, covering everything from using Sony Porta-Paks to techniques for video production, funding methods and distribution networks.
An early and influential 'media-ecological' critique of broadcasting and a manifesto for democratically controlled media that anticipated the rise of YouTube and social media by more than 30 years.
A tight, square Very Good plus copy, with the bookplate of Oz magazine editor Felix Dennis affixed inside upper wrapper.
