From TVTV to YouTube: A Genealogy of Participatory Practices

in Video
Stephanie Tripp
Journal of Film and Video, Volume 64, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer
2012, pp. 5-16 (Article)
Published by University of Illinois Press
DOI: 10.1353/jfv.2012.0002
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Nanyang Technological University at 01/07/13 4:00PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jfv/summary/v064/64.1-2.tripp.html
5 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
From TVTV to YouTube:
A Genealogy of Participatory Practices in Video
stephanie tripp
stephanie tripp is an assistant professor of
communication at the University of Tampa. She is
a digital media artist and scholar.
chris hills description of early ex-
periments in video as a radical paradigm
for a participatory democracy (5) could easily
be mistaken for one of the exuberant claims
made on behalf of amateur video in the age of
YouTube. As video dened as a specic me-
dium came to an end in the mid-aughts, the
emergence of near-instantaneous distribution
through YouTube and other video-sharing sites
evoked the utopian vision of early practitioners
that low-cost portable video equipment would
allow everyday people to engage in a democrat-
ically produced, decentralized public sphere.
That early vision had waned by the close of
the 1970s as programs distributed through
local-access cable television failed to gain wide
audiences, and entry into commercial markets
proved elusive for most independent produc-
ers. Yet the proliferation of a new technology
may be reviving the promise of an older one.
This article seeks to trace a genealogy be-
tween early practices in video as social experi-
ment and contemporary video production as
part of a globally distributed participatory
culture. Nearly forty years after the develop-
ment of the Sony portapak gave rst-generation
videomakers the means to document a coun-
tercultural revolution, the ubiquity of the hand-
held consumer video camera combined with
the ability to share images almost instantly
has given a new generation unprecedented
potential to effect change by bearing witness.
The new video technologies proved the political
undoing of US Senator George Allen in 2006
after he hurled his notorious macaca epithet
at S. R. Sidarth, a campaign staffer for Allens
opponent who wasted no time uploading his
video recording of the encounter to YouTube.
In 2009, several people used cell phones
and portable cameras to record the shooting
death of twenty-two-year-old Oscar Grant at the
hands of Oakland transit police, and the foot-
age posted to YouTube played a large role in
the resulting criminal case against the shooter
and the broader public discourse related to
the incident. Indeed, amateur videographers
worldwide have combined portable cameras
with almost instantaneous mass distribution
to bear witness to an array of misdeeds, from
the merely embarrassing to the indisputably
egregious. Although this assortment of citizen
journalists, from chance eyewitnesses to enter-
prising storytellers, may not be conscious heirs
to the alternative media movement of the late
1960s and early 1970s, some members of the
YouTube community have remarked its poten-
tial for, in the words of Gooyong Kim, realizing
grassroots democracy (15). Examining the
phenomenon of YouTubes citizen documentar-
ians against the earlier countercultural video
tradition raises the question of what it means
to participate in todays video culture.
Much has been written about YouTubes sta-
tus as a social platform for video distribution,
but I aim to focus on the production and organi-
zational practices embraced by early communi-
ties of videomakers and how those practices
have continued amongor have been discov-
6 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
ered anew by those making videos today. The
practices I refer to are evident in work such as
TVTVs Four More Years (1972), in which the
use of lightweight portable equipment proves
an obvious foil to network television cover-
age of the Republican National Convention,
and David Cort and Curtis Ratcliffs Mayday
Realtime (1971), which captures the turmoil at
an antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC,
from the point of view of those experiencing it.
They also are apparent in the video festivals
and community screenings organized by groups
such as Global Village, Video Free America,
and Peoples Video Theater. Fortunately, online
sharing sites have facilitated a renaissance
of sorts for videos produced in the 1960s and
1970s, launching new efforts to digitize and
archive early video footage and reenergizing
existing ones. Efforts such as the Media Burn
Independent Video Archive and Video Data
Bank provide access to materials that were not
widely available only a few years ago.
Although todays videomakers have an op-
portunity to learn from archived work, it is far
from clear that many of them do. Tom Wein-
berg, founder of as Media Burn, notes that a
lot of young people view archived video on his
groups Web site or through its YouTube chan-
nel. Theres an audience whos looking for it
as historical and theres a signicant audience
whos looking at something thats fresh and
new to them, he states. Weinberg, an original
member of TVTV and a longtime independent
television producer, suggests that many vid-
eomaking techniques simply lter down into a
main consciousness, and newcomers adopt
them or alter them to suit their needs. After all,
he asks, Does it matter if you know where your
techniques come from? Regardless of the ex-
tent to which videomakers of the YouTube gen-
eration comprehend their inheritance, its traces
are visible in much of the work they produce.
The alternative video movement emerged in
the milieu of 1960s counterculture and was fa-
cilitated by the introduction in 1967 of the Sony
DV-2400 Video Rover, a lightweight mobile
production unit that recorded up to twenty min-
utes on half-inch magnetic tape (Sharpe). Tape
from a portapak, as the DV-2400 and similar
units came to be known, could be played back
quickly on a portable deck, enabling the timely
turnaround enjoyed by large-scale media oper-
ations at a cost affordable by amateurs. Within
a short time, alternative media groups such
as Raindance Corporation, Videofreex, and
Peoples Video Theater were using portapaks
to cover events that they believed were being
ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream
media. Their subject matter included womens
liberation, gay rights, and antiwar demonstra-
tions; interviews with movement leaders;
protest actions; and musical performances. The
production practices adopted by these groups
grew out of their countercultural afnities as
well as the affordances of the new technolo-
gies. Turning the limits of their technology into
a virtue, underground videomakers invented a
distinctive style unique to the medium, writes
video historian Deirdre Boyle. Tripodswith
their xed viewpointswere out; hand-held u-
idity was in. Videos unique ability to capitalize
on the moment with instant playback and real-
time monitoring of events also suited the eras
emphasis on process, not product (A Brief
History 52). Accessibility, portability, rapid
playback, and the ability to erase and reuse
videotape supported the mantra of process
partly inspired by Marshall McLuhan and trans-
lated into practice by his research assistant
Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg of Raindance, the
editors of Radical Software, and others.
Videomakers working around the country
relied on publications such as the magazine
Radical Software (197074) and various do-
it-yourself technical manuals to keep track
of technical developments and the work of
their peers. By describing what people were
doing with video and how they were doing it,
these publications helped identify the style
of a nascent medium. Fewer artifacts of the
alternative media movement had greater inu-
ence at the time than Guerrilla Television, a
book coauthored in 1971 by Shamberg and
the Raindance collective. Part manifesto, part
descriptive narrative, part instruction manual,
Guerrilla Television went further toward shap-
7 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
ing the style and tactics of video as alternative
media than anything else. Its single volume
comprises two separately paginated sections:
a meta-manual that situates the guerrilla
television movement within the milieu of
Media America and against the establish-
ment mass media and an Ofcial Manual that
identies the movements key players, primary
tools, and activities. Guerrilla Television is
grassroots television, Shamberg explains. It
works with people, not from up above them
(Shamberg and Raindance, Ofcial Manual
8). He illustrates his point by comparing two
stills from a video of an antiwar demonstration
in Washington, DC. The rst image features a
long shot of NBC News correspondent Sander
Vanocur standing atop a platform looking
over the crowd of demonstrators. The second
is dominated by the head and shoulders of a
young woman with dozens of other demonstra-
tors behind her and a distant White House in
the upper left-hand corner (Ofcial Manual
8). The rhetorical effect is clear: the mainstream
media sets itself apart from those participat-
ing in the event (above them, as Shamberg
says), whereas the alternative media videomak-
ers from Raindance remain part of the action.
Under the guerrilla model, then, stylistic in-
novation assumes a political role, even if it is
not employed to convey any openly political
message. As Marita Sturken explains, The
term guerrilla television, with its implications
of aggression and subversion, came to signify
a specic kind of activist videotape, one that
functioned as an ironic observation of the fol-
lies of the establishment as well as a stylistic
revolt against the conventions of television
(10708).
Of course, many techniques described in
Guerrilla Television and practiced by young
videomakers did not originate with the in-
troduction of portable video. The absence of
voice-over narrative is characteristic of Ameri-
can cinma vrit lmmakers of the 1960s, for
example. Yet nding the essence of the new
medium was a conscious concern for many.
Skip Blumberg, an alumnus of Videofreex and
TVTV, notes that an important contribution
of many early videomakers involved simply
exploring the medium and discovering what
was different about it. Interviews with and
publications by several videomakers about
their work underscore a resolve to distinguish
their approach from both lm and mainstream
television production. For instance, videomak-
ers realized early on that they could afford a
much more casual approach than those work-
ing with 16mm lm, which was considerably
more expensive than videotape and could not
be reused. Film makers and video people have
radically different styles of working, writes
Parry Teasdale, a founding member of Video-
freex. We would turn on our cameras and enter
a scene, sometimes observers, sometimes par-
ticipants, usually some combination of the two,
but always with the idea of allowing events to
unfold at their own pace (45).
The immersive shooting style championed
in Guerrilla Television was a signature of street
protest videos produced in the early 1970s.
Mayday Realtime (1971), by David Cort and
Curtis Ratcliff, which documents an antiwar
demonstration in Washington, combines per-
son-on-the-street interviewing techniques with
long takes and street-level camera perspective.
Unlike that of the tightly edited segments on
the nightly news, the pace of Mayday Realtime
unfolds as events occur, moving from desul-
tory street-corner discussions to the panic of a
group of demonstrators as police pursue them
with batons and tear gas canisters. As police
charge the group, the camera pans and tilts
wildly as terried people brush past it and as
Cort himself is struck by a baton. At one point,
one of several demonstrators blocking trafc is
run down by a car. As he follows a group that
carries the injured man to a park for rst aid,
Cort, far from being the distant observer culti-
vated by mainstream television journalists, is
obviously embodied in the scene: people speak
to him, their faces moving closer to the camera,
and they jostle him, causing the camera to
jerk. Womens Liberation March NYC (1971) and
Gay Pride March NYC (1971) by Peoples Video
Theater, though less frenetic than Cort and
Ratcliffs footage of the turbulent Washington
8 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
demonstration, still convey the kinetic energy
of the streets through the use of handheld
cameras. These videos focus on the voices
of participants as they tell their stories, often
responding to an interviewers question of why
they are (or, in some cases, are not) taking part
in the events being recorded.
If Guerrilla Television asserted videos su-
periority over broadcast television, the 1972
national political conventions gave its followers
a chance to prove it. Comprising a crew from
three of the best-known media collectives of
the time (Ant Farm, Raindance, and Video-
freex), TVTV was the brain child of Michael
Shamberg and a group of associates that in-
cluded Allen Rucker, Megan Williams, and Tom
Weinberg, an old friend of Shambergs from
Chicago (Boyle, Subject to Change 3638).
Armed with press credentials and just enough
funding to send crews to both conventions,
TVTVs strategy was to cover the stories the
networks were ignoring. The result was two
documentaries: The Worlds Largest TV Studio
(1972) and Four More Years (1972).
With network coverage of the Republican
convention focused dutifully on the unsurpris-
ing nomination of Richard Nixon for a second
term, Four More Years glances along the side-
lines of the event, taking in everyone from
party boosters making merry to protestors
demonstrating outside the Miami convention
center to jaded members of the press corps
grabbing a break from the grind. Working with
the lightweight portapaks, the TVTV crew
navigates nimbly around the convention oor
as its network counterparts remain tethered
to their cumbersome production units. The
crew members lithely follow Ronald Reagan
through a crowd of delegates as he glad-hands
supporters while en route to the podium. They
capture the crush of demonstrators outside the
convention center at eye level with the harried
delegates trying to make their way in. They tell
their story from the groundno sweeping pan-
oramas or voice-over from the control booth.
True to Deidre Boyles description of guerrilla
television practitioners, the TVTV crew proudly
announced they were shooting from within the
crowd, subjective and involved (A Brief His-
tory 57).
Perhaps even more characteristic of TVTVs
alternative approach to the conventions than
its immersive camera work is the unapologeti-
cally subjective personae its crew reects on
camera. Skip Blumbergs off-beat interviews
with the network television personnel ac-
centuate the contrast in style. Some network
personalities, such as Walter Cronkite of CBS,
answer Blumbergs questions in earnest,
whereas others come across as pedantic or
even sarcastic. What may be the most telling
interview is not really an interview at all, but
rather a prolonged sequence of Roger Mudd
from CBS News stonewalling Blumberg. After
Mudd refuses even to utter a reason for demur-
ring, Blumberg impishly asks Mudd whether he
may be too tired. Met with Mudds continued
silence, Blumberg redirects the question to
camera operator Nancy Cain. Mudd eventually
provides a grudging nod, and the crew moves
away. In what might be described as a perfor-
mative riposte to Mudds refusal to take on the
role of the subject of an interview, Blumberg
displays his own subjectivity in grand style,
pulling out a harmonica and delivering a series
of ad hoc riffs he calls the Republican Conven-
tion Drag.
Despite the critical acclaim garnered by Four
More Years and subsequent projects, TVTV ulti-
mately could not get enough of its productions
in front of large enough audiences to support
its ongoing work, a problem videomakers had
faced from the beginning. Indeed, the chal-
lenges of distribution and the strategies that
various groups adopted in response often de-
ned the nature of their work. For some, expo-
sure to wider audiences through broadcast tele-
vision enabled them to get their countercultural
messages and alternative modes of production
in front of a mass audience. For others, the
pursuit of television exposure was a distraction
from goals of community building and organiz-
ing for social change. The availability of public
funding for video projects, especially under the
9 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
New York State Council on the Arts in the 1970s,
eased the pressure on groups to seek wider au-
diences to sustain themselves nancially (Hill
2729; Sturken 11112). Boyle suggests that
groups began to settle into camps around is-
sues of funding and distribution, with guerrilla
television producers such as TVTV on one side
and community video activists on the other
(A Brief History 56). Before that time, how-
ever, individual videomakers and even groups
embraced both models, as was the case in the
in the early days of the Videofreex collective.
The partnership between the Freex and CBS
to produce the ill-fated Now project is the
stuff of early video legend. After hearing about
the work of Videofreex founders David Cort
and Parry Teasdale at the Woodstock festival,
CBS executive Don West commissioned them
and several of their peers to roam the country
producing a video compendium of US counter-
culture. CBS canceled the project at the end of
1969 after spending a considerable amount of
money on equipment, travel, and rent, but be-
fore airing a single episode of the serieseven-
tually named Subject to Changethat the net-
work had hoped to broadcast on Sunday nights
as a replacement for The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour (Boyle, Subject to Change 1625).
Although the Videofreex came up with some
socially signicant footagemost notably an
interview with Black Panther leader Fred Hamp-
ton a few weeks before his murder in a Chicago
police raidCBS executives, obviously uncom-
fortable with the groups freewheeling style,
declared the project at least ve years ahead of
its time (Subject to Change 25).
Within a few years after CBS pulled the plug
on the Now project, the Videofreex would
move to Lanesville, New York, a small town in
the Catskill Mountains, and set up a distribu-
tion model that could not be further removed
from their early network TV aspirations. Based
in a rambling house on a property known as
Maple Tree Farm, members of the video collec-
tive set up the nations rst pirate TV station
(Teasdale; Hill 13). Between March 1972 and
February 1977, Lanesville TV aired 258 low-
power weekly broadcasts, favoring an unpack-
aged, community-responsive, seat-of-the-pants
production approach that was, in Teasdales
mind, inherently superior and incompatible
with the media establishment (88). In the
spirit of community engagement, the group
invited local residents to appear on the air and
frequently used on-air telephone call-ins to
make their programs more interactive.
Unlike the Videofreex and other groups that
explored distributing their work on television,
Peoples Video Theater (PVT) considered itself
a community video activist group from its in-
ception. Ken Marsh and Elliot Glass founded
PVT in June 1970 as a means for exposure of
community peoples ideas, goods and services
to be supported by those using it (Marsh 18).
In an article in Radical Software published that
fall, Marsh states PVT serves to explore more
responsive handling of information in working
with groups and covering their needs (18).
Marsh and Glass made numerous videos on
the streets of New York and around the region,
sometimes covering public events, demonstra-
tions, or local happenings and at other times
conducting video polls on issues of the day.
Videomakers would invite people whom they
taped to visit the groups loft in the West Village
to watch the videos and discuss them. Screen-
ings were open to the public; a yer for one of
PVTs weekend shows invited prospective at-
tendees to see mini documentaries, speak
back to the news, become part of the news,
and see yourself (qtd. in Shamberg and Rain-
dance, Ofcial Manual 18).
In addition to its public screenings, PVT also
showed its videos to community stakeholders
as a method of mediating (literally) disputes.
Marsh cites as an example a controversy over
construction at Washington Square Park. In Au-
gust 1970, the group spent several days taping
people in the park about the construction and
edited together a fty-minute segment iden-
tifying the who and what of the park (Marsh
18). They gathered responses to the segment
from park visitors, city ofcials, and others
and added that footage to the original tape.
10 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
They showed the nal version in the park on a
Saturday afternoon. Although public feedback
was crucial to PVTs video mediation, a mass
audience was not. The work of Peoples Video
Theater exemplied an alternative distribution
model centered on community-based participa-
tion and decision making.
By the 1980s, the alternative media move-
ment had lost its momentum. Although many
groups managed to survive thanks to public
funding and private philanthropy, opportuni-
ties became more competitive as the freshness
of video wore off. Few independent producers
could reach large enough audiences through
local-access cable television or videotape dis-
tribution to sustain their work, and any support
from broadcast television required compro-
mises on content that only a few were willing to
make. Those who became successful produc-
ers for the mainstream media, most notably
Guerrilla Television author and TVTV principal
Michael Shamberg, were accused of selling
out (Boyle, Subject to Change 18589). In
the meantime, broadcast producers appropri-
ated the signatures of alternative style to add
novelty to their own offerings, which by the end
of the 1980s amounted to little more than pro-
totypes for the worst of reality television. The
pathetic thing of course is [video] never did
quite fulll its promise, laments Beryl Korot,
the New Yorkbased artist who co-edited Radi-
cal Software. The computer actually is much
closer to what Radical Software was about than
whats become of the video medium.
1
Yet if
alternative video failed to realize the hopes
of its early practitioners, the blame cannot be
attributed solely to economic reasons. After all,
as Marita Sturken points out, the expectations
were great:
Not only were the media towers going to
topple and the individuals going to have
their say, but the realms of art and society
were to lose their boundarieseveryone
would be a producer; everyone would control
information ow. Videos arrival came to
symbolize this potential redenition of the
system. It has inevitably disappointed those
expectations. (108)
Ironically, what has superseded video as the
great hope for participatory democracy carries
on its shoulders far greater expectations than
early videomakers ever could have imagined.
As Korot perceptively notes, todays global
high-speed computer networkscombined
with palm-held digital cameras and powerful-
yet-intuitive editing softwaregive everyday
people unprecedented opportunities to pro-
duce and distribute their own media messages.
Its the portapak on steroidswith its own
satellite uplink. Indeed, many claims for the
liberatory power of online video have rivaled
the heady utopian predictions made on behalf
of the early World Wide Web. Although many
scholars and members of the press have cited
compelling examples of video sharing as a
mode of populist empowerment, critics such
as Toby Miller have warned against embrac-
ing cybertarian assumptions about YouTube
and other Web 2.0 technologies without more
sustained and broader-ranging study.
2
In the
interest of maintaining a more tempered per-
spective, I would prefer to avoid speculating
too much on Web 2.0s potential and instead
concentrate on what some members of the
YouTube generation are actually doing with this
technology and how they may be viewed as
heirs to the portapak generation.
One might argue that the ubiquity of inde-
pendently produced video segments appearing
on YouTube and other sharing sites makes
a strong claim in itself for the democratizing
potential of online distribution. Evaluations of
democracy at a meta level aside, though, the
prodigious volume of videos on these sites
quickly raises practical problems of how to ap-
proach this mass of work at the level of content.
Thus, video in the age of YouTube presents a
double-edged sword to those who would study
it: the number and variety of offerings that
result from the democratic possibilities of
distribution necessarily make it impossible to
evaluate systematically the content of those
11 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
offerings.
3
In view of this challenge, I have
decided to focus on organizations or communi-
ties of videomakers who, like so many earlier
video groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
experimented with available technologies and
modes of storytelling in order to challenge the
values and conventions of mainstream media.
I believe that my ndings provide insight into
how some alternative video practitioners today
have adopted existing mainstream and alterna-
tive production practices and have crafted a
variety of distribution strategies, to suit their
particular needs.
Although what follows is a discussion
primarily of video from the YouTube genera-
tionwork created after video-sharing Web
sites were introduced in the mid-aughtsit
is crucial to acknowledge the ongoing work
of those who got their start in the portapak
era as well as others working in alternative
video who have crossed over to working in the
digital networked environment. Paper Tiger
Television, which began operating its New York
local-access cable channel in 1981, is among
those old new media entities that have a
robust online presence and have seized on new
technologies to expand their reach. The work of
numerous other groups that arose during the
heyday of local access is nding its way online,
making it easier for scholars and the general
public to understand within a broader context
projects that were far-ung and often isolated.
In addition, activist groups such as WITNESS,
an international human rights organization
founded in 1992 by musician Peter Gabriel,
have leveraged Internet video-sharing technolo-
gies to further their work. In the case of WIT-
NESS, the organization has trained people in
more than seventy countries to use handheld
cameras to document abuses and messages of
dissent and has logged thousands of hours of
video into its archive (WITNESS). The WITNESS
Web site credits the 1991 videotape of Los An-
geles police beating Rodney King as inspiration
for the project.
Among the lessons gleaned from the Rodney
King incident was one that early alternative
media proponents had been espousing for de-
cades: in the era of lightweight video, anyone
can produce the news. The launch of YouTube
in February 2005 extended that message:
anyone can broadcast the news. Since then,
people have been uploading citizen journalism
of all stripes, from the banalities of backyard
meteorologists to accounts of human rights
violations, from video blogs of angst-ridden
preteens to professional-level documentaries.
S. R. Sidarths macaca video was among the
rst to gain national attention, and countless
others soon followed. Yet few of the millions of
videos posted to YouTube each year carried the
weight of a handful of chaotic clips depicting
the shooting of Oscar Grant on an Oakland sub-
way platform. The video accounts of the Grant
shooting stand out as a reminder of both the
witness-bearing power of video and the chance
encounters that can turn anyone holding a
smart phone into a journalist.
When the Bay Area Rapid Transit train she
was riding pulled into the Fruitvale station at
around 2:00 a.m. on New Years Day 2009,
Karina Vargas had no aspirations of becoming
a citizen journalist. When BART transit ofcers
began restraining several young men on the
platform, however, the young Hayward woman
started recording the incident on a pocket cam-
era. I gure, peoples rights are being violated
right in front of my eyes. Let me turn my camera
on, Vargas says in a video interview with Josue
Rojas and Paul Billingsley for New America
Media (Vargas, The Eyewitness). As angry
bystanders continued to crowd the platform,
Vargas stepped back into the train, but when
ofcers began striking Grant, she braved the
platform again and had moved to within ten
feet of him when ofcer Johannes Mehserle
red a bullet into his back. They just shot
him! Vargas can be heard exclaiming to her
friends as she rushes back to the train. When
a BART ofcer tried to seize her camera, Vargas
was able to retreat behind the closing doors as
the train departed the station (Vargas, Oak-
land). Her video account, provided a few days
later to a local network afliate and uploaded
12 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
to YouTube, initiated a national furor. Vargass
documentation of the event, combined with
video uploaded by others shortly afterward,
assured that Mehserle would be prosecuted
and played a key role in his trial. It also high-
lights the increasingly common phenomenon of
accidental journalism and its relationship to
both alternative and mainstream media.
Because Vargas chose both avenues of
distribution for the two video sequences she
captured that nightYouTube and a local
news stationwe have the opportunity to see
how they are framed within a variety of public
storytelling contexts. Whereas local TV cover-
age inserts a voice-over narrative from its own
reporter to serve as an authority over what is
happening on the screen, in two independently
produced segments shown online, interviews
of Vargas accompany the footage. In the rst,
produced by the Oakland unit of alternative
media group Youth Radio, excerpts of the
video are shown without any added sound or
graphics. The shooting footage is intercut with
footage from Youth Radio of Vargas revisiting
the Fruitvale station and recounting events on
the train platform (Vargas, Oscar Grant). In
the second piece, posted on the YouTube chan-
nel of GioSifaTaufa, Vargas is shown watching
her video on a laptop computer in someones
home, possibly her own. Medium shots of
her watching and commenting on the video
are intercut with footage from the video itself,
which is sometimes combined with audio from
the interview segment to provide the sense of
a play-by-play of events on the platform in Var-
gass own words (Vargas, Oakland).
Community members abil-
ity to control the context of
their media participationbe
it uploaded video, in the case
of Vargas, or simply words
recorded during an inter-
viewhas been a rallying cry
for alternative media since the
rst days of video, from the video mediation
experiments of Peoples Video Theater to Lanes-
ville TVs call-in shows. In an interesting parallel
to the Oscar Grant story, a community media or-
ganization in the Boston area combined footage
of a teenage boy being beaten by police with its
own hybrid form of storytelling to produce a re-
port from within rather than about a community.
4

In October 2010, a student at Roxbury Commu-
nity College captured on her cell phone footage
of police beating a sixteen-year-old boy who
had purportedly escaped from a nearby juvenile
detention center. The footage, uploaded to You-
Tube and covered by local TV news, prompted an
investigation into police behavior. Press Pass TV
used a short piece of the video in its coverage of
local reaction to the incident. In Police Account-
ability Rally (2010), the young videomakers of
Press Pass TV interview several community mem-
bers. Although the visual style of the segment
has the polish of a local news broadcast, from
its crisp high-denition video to its own custom
identication bug, the narrative strategy differs
signicantly. Interview subjects are given plenty
of timetwenty or thirty seconds, an eternity by
TV news standardsto make their points. The
reporter, identied as Shalimar, speaks only a
few seconds at the beginning of the segment to
identify the event as a community rally. Aside
from asking a few brief questions, she lets com-
munity members tell the story. Cara Lisa Berg
Powers, codirector of Press Pass TV, explains
that it is important that PPTV segments appear
polished and professionally produced because
the visuals can add credibility for mainstream
audiences even if the message is not what they
have grown to expect. She states that members
of the group like making things that have an
almost radical message and making them look
really professional at the same time.
Press Pass TV, founded in
2004, evolved out of a rather
serendipitous encounter
between its founder, Gabriel
Mugar, who was working as
a video specialist in a local
Apple store at the time, and
a customer who had just
received an education grant and bought a
computer and needed someone to help him
with video equipment. The grant involved work-
ing with children in public schools, so Mugar
Watch it on JFV Volume 64 Vimeo
Channel
(http://vimeo.com/jfvvolume64)
Police Accountability Rally (11/3/10)
TRIPP/Police Accountability Rally/
Press Pass TV/ Nov. 3, 2010
13 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
began volunteering at an after-school program
in Roxbury, one of Bostons poorer suburbs.
Every time he looked at the local news, he saw
Roxbury depicted negatively with stories that fo-
cused on crime and poverty. Being a volunteer
I knew about a lot of positive things happening
in the communities, he says. He decided to
encourage the students he was working with to
produce video segments on positive aspects of
their communities. They began doing a student-
hosted half-hour news show that compiled seg-
ments produced over the course of the school
year. Early topics included a feature on a local
hip-hop artist with an inspiring, positive mes-
sage to his music and another on a successful
after-school program. As Mugar began to ease
himself out of the groups day-to-day opera-
tions in order to pursue a doctorate at Syracuse,
PPTV was able to hire two part-time codirectors:
Berg Powers and Joanna Marinova. All three
had some experience with media production,
but none was schooled formally in the history
of early alternative video. Mugar put together
a workbook in 2006 that lays out the basics
of the ve-shot sequence and other staples of
television news. Since then, the group has in-
corporated some techniques from documentary
lmmaking and other sources. Berg Powers
notes that she and Marinova are voracious
consumers of media who are always looking
for new techniques to try.
Press Pass TV is among a number of estab-
lished alternative media organizations empha-
sizing youth education. Others include Califor-
nia-based Youth Radio and its afliate, Youth
Media International; the Appalachian Media
Institute (Appalshop); and Reel Grrls of Seattle.
Many of these organizations were established
before the advent of online video sharing (Ap-
palshop was founded more than four decades
ago), but they have embraced the ability to post
their media work online. Reel Grrls, founded in
2001, originally was conceived in the context
of women in lm, but the training program is
now decidedly multimedia. Kathleen Sweeney
notes in an article from 2005 that graduates of
the Reel Grrls program come away with a broad
digital skill set and a signicant video exhibi-
tion record. The Reel Grrls social media savvy
earned them notoriety recently when a tweet
by the group about former FCC commissioner
Meredith Baker leaving her post for a job with
Comcast brought on the wrath of the cable
giant, whose representative shot off an e-mail
threatening to pull $18,000 in funding for a
summer program. Without skipping a beat, the
Grrls posted a video responding to the threat.
In less than a minute, two young women, shot
at medium range against plain backgrounds,
speak their minds in a simple, but devastat-
ing retort. I cant believe you broke up with
me over e-mail because of a tweet, one of
the women states at the beginning of the
forty-one-second video (Dear Comcast). The
national media picked up the story the day the
video was posted to YouTube, and a Comcast
executive apologized and backed away from
the funding threat within a few hours (Kang).
Bullying from benefactors notwithstanding,
the viability of alternative media organizations
such as Reel Grrls and Press Pass TV appears to
rest with their educational afliations. After all,
funding for education may not be what it used
to be, but it is still more abundant than funding
for the arts.
The question of viabilityboth of nancial
sustainability and of social consequence
remains a serious one for alternative media
organizations, even in the digital age. Now
that millions can broadcast themselves, to
paraphrase YouTubes motto, who is going to
pay attention to what you in particular have to
say? The case of the Reel Grrls dispute with
Comcast is a good example. Although the group
has received more than 12,000 hits on its
Dear Comcast video, a respectable number
by Web standards, the tally is puny compared
to the audience gures garnered by media gi-
ants such as Comcast. Only when the likes of
the Washington Post become involved do the
scales become balanced. Even in the highly
publicized Oscar Grant case, the ultimate im-
pact of the videos uploaded to YouTube by Var-
gas and several others came not from the few
hundred thousand views on YouTube during the
weeks following the incident, but from the foot-
14 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
age subsequently being broadcast to millions
of people on network television.
5
Even within YouTube itself, the Goliaths ap-
pear to be dwarng the Davids at an increasingly
dire pace. Research from 2010 shows that the
work of independent news producers posted
to YouTube is being overshadowed by main-
stream producers such as the Associated Press,
which at that time was publishing twenty-ve
to forty stories a day. As Albert L. May writes,
Despite the hopes of YouTubes founders for a
medium of user-generated content and indepen-
dent producers, the platform is showing some
of the same signs evidenced elsewhere on the
Internet, where major corporate news sites, such
as CNN.com and MSNBC.com, draw dispropor-
tionate trafc (501). Further, as several studies
of Web topography have shown, online trafc
in general more closely reects a broadcast
model than a more evenly distributed pattern
that would be suggested by the term Web.
Indeed, access patterns on YouTube mirror those
that have established themselves across the
Internet: despite the hype of the long tail, the
blockbuster still reigns supreme. What several
media critics intuited at the launch of the World
Wide Web has been borne out since by math-
ematical models of Web trafc: rather than an
egalitarian distribution of connections, the Web
is a constellation of highly visited superstar
hubs amid a vast array of obscure nodes. Un-
surprisingly, these hubs are almost entirely com-
mercial, and many are Web-based extensions
of mass media conglomerates. According to
Albert-Lszl Barabsi, the mathematician who
supervised the rst and most inuential model
of Web trafc, [t]he hubs are the strongest argu-
ment against the utopian vision of an egalitarian
cyberspace. Yes, we all have the right to put
anything we wish on the Web. But will anybody
notice? (58).
For alternative media veterans such as Skip
Blumberg, Barabsis question presents an
old problem with a new twist. Back in the day,
the issue was, How do I get on? But once you
got on, people would know about you because
there were only three or four channels, or in
New York you had six, Blumberg explains.
Now its easy to get your work on. Now you
get on every day. And how do you generate an
audience? Tom Weinberg, whose work with
Media Burn has him pondering similar ques-
tions lately, suggests that the solution must lie
with an enhanced curatorial function for video
linked on the Web. Although he frets about the
accelerating consolidation of media powers
and its impoverishing effects on programming,
Weinberg, always the true believer in the power
of new media technologies, remains optimistic:
The fact is that those videos are now available
to people in a way that they never were.
Press Pass TV, meanwhile, is approaching
the question of audience with a bold new strat-
egy that has its roots recognizably in the past.
In 2010, it inaugurated Press Pass TV on Tour,
a program to screen its videos before small
groups of community stakeholders. PPTVs You-
Tube channel describes its work with this state-
ment: We take our content on the roadright
to the communities we serve. . . . We provide
the viewers with information and the tools to
take action. The rhetoric sounds as though
it could have been lifted from Ken Marshs
handbook for Peoples Video Theater. The
tours are central to Press Pass TVs distribution
strategy, explains codirector Cara Lisa Berg
Powers. Were taking our content to where we
think it will have the most impact, she states.
She notes that the success of the community
screenings can be evaluated based on steady
growth in attendance and in the level of en-
gagement with the audience and dialogue pro-
duced at the forums. She cites as an example
a video PPTV made on domestic violence and
long-term strategies to address the problem
within the community. Among speakers invited
to the screening was the lieutenant governor
of Massachusetts, who had taken a special
interest in addressing problems of domestic
violence; a professor who studies domestic
violence; and a social services professional
who works with abusers. Berg Powers says pro-
viding community organizations and members
of the public with an opportunity for unscripted
access to someone with the stature of a lieuten-
ant governor is an important benet that their
15 journal of film and video 64.12 / spring/summer 2012
2012 by the board of trustees of the uni versit y of illinois
town hall distribution model provides. While
our message may not fall on the ears of those
whose minds we are trying to change, we are
denitely reaching those people who want to
know about and join these movements, states
Mugar, the groups founder. If our role is to
create awareness amongst the activist commu-
nity and help create bonds that did not exist,
then Im ne with preaching to the choir.
In conclusion, the young videomakers of the
YouTube generation may not be aware of the
portapak generation, but they face many of the
same challenges and share many of the same
goals. Introducing these nascent practitioners
to the history of their eld seems a natural
goal for media educators, yet often the work of
many early videomakers is omitted from cur-
ricula as institutional histories gravitate toward
lm documentaries or video art. Blumberg is
among several people prominent in the alter-
native video movement who have made it a
goal to make sure that the history of video as
a unique medium from 1965 to 2005, when it
merged with lm . . . is remembered, along
with this huge community of people. Such
attention would indeed remedy an oversight
and give many deserving individuals and orga-
nizations credit for their contribution to video
history. More importantly, however, the story
of alternative media at the dawn of video offers
a valuable resource for the citizen journalists
working today. Further, an effort by scholars
and teachers to examine new work within a
better informed sense of video history affords
all of us working in the eld a broader critical
context. It is my hope that this initial attempt at
a genealogy of participatory video practices will
help move that effort forward.
notes
1. It is worth noting that a well-known group of
digital artists and programmers founded by Alex Gal-
loway, a New Yorkbased artist, programmer, and
scholar, has adopted the name Radical Software
Group (RSG) in homage to the magazine, which, ac-
cording to a description on the Electronic Arts Inter-
mix Web site, investigated nascent video technology
with much the same irreverent spirit that RSG now
brings to digital culture (Radical Software Group).
2. Miller, interestingly, alludes specically to the
early video movement in his denition of cybertarian-
ism: Cybertarianism dovetails with three utopias: the
free-cable, free-video social movements of the 1960s
and 70s; the neoclassical, deregulatory intellectual
and corporate movements of the 1970s and 80s;
and the post-Protestant, anti-accumulative hacker
ethos of the 1990s and today. Porta-pak equipment,
localism, a disinterested, non-corporate approach to
newness, and unrestrained markets supposedly pro-
vide an alternative to the numbing nationwide com-
mercialism of mainstream media (426). Examples
of more sanguine outlooks on the social effects of
participatory video include Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins,
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with-
out Organizations by Clay Shirky, and The Practice
of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption
to Mass Cultural Production? by Lev Manovich. The
YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick
Vonderau, features essays from critics with a variety
of perspectives, including Miller, Bernard Stiegler,
Richard Grusin, Thomas Elsaesser, and several others.
In addition, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green provide
a valuable overview of the YouTube phenomenon in
YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture.
3. Giovanna Fossati describes a similar dilemma
when she writes of the challenge of curating a sample
of one hundred YouTube videos: A curator is sup-
posed to have a good knowledge of the collections
content as a whole, which I certainly do not have in
the case of YouTube. How was I going to select one
hundred clips with the claim that they are in some
way representative of the whole? (458).
4. The groups codirector, Cara Lisa Berg Powers,
says she considers Karina Vargas one of her heroes,
and PPTV has named one of its annual student
awards in her honor.
5. According to an analysis by Mary Grace Antony
and Ryan J. Thomas, four videos of the shooting up-
loaded to YouTube received just over a half million
views between 6 January and 2 February 2009 (1285).
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