New media activism: Alternative media and new technologies from video to the digital age

Since the introduction of the Sony Portapak, the first commercially available video camera in the late 1960s, alternative media practitioners in the United States have utilized new and emerging electronic media technologies to support their political and social activism. This dissertation focuses on three major new media forms that have been integral to activism in the United States since the late 1960s: video, satellite broadcasting and the Internet. Specifically, I examine how alternative media collectives have been early adopters of new communication technologies and create their own systems of alternative communication, including the production, exhibition and distribution of progressive, radical and activist media texts.;While many analyses of this topic have been conducted in the fields of communication, political science, sociology and journalism, this dissertation approaches the study of activism and new media primarily from the methodologies of cinema and television studies, especially documentary and avant-garde film theories. I analyze several widely circulated activist media texts, including Top Value Television's (TVTV) video Four More Years (1972), Deep Dish Television's television series Gulf Crisis TV Project (1991), and the Independent Media Center's (IMC) video Showdown in Seattle (1999) and web site at www.indymedia.org. Using these representative examples, I argue that alternative media texts frequently blur the boundaries between documentary and avant-garde techniques. Alternative media productions often utilize documentary-style realism combined with avant-garde sensibilities in order to merge media production, politics and everyday life into a transformational political and social praxis.;Finally, these grassroots, independent, non-corporate media practices exist in a core-periphery relationship to dominant hegemonic media, and I examine the introduction of each new major technology within and against the political economy of mainstream corporate media. Thus, I situate alternative media production within its industrial, material and historical contexts: the video collectives Videofreex and TVTV during the age of network television broadcasting in the early 1970s; Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Television and their creation of a national alternative media network in the age of satellite broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s; and since 1999, the global IMC movement and their use of emerging digital technologies in the digital age.