Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution

Abstract

This paper examines the history of social broadcasting and the experimental video art movement that brought about a radical departure from traditional, hierarchical forms of mainstream media and television. The concept of social broadcasting draws from a relatively obscure, yet seminal history in which the first generation of video artists, whose work coincided with the availability of affordable cameras in the late 1960s, organized around socially-participatory and politically activist agendas. These artists embraced video as a call-to-action against establishment media, forming independent, decentralized, and mobilized collectives to make their own media. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, alternative broadcast communities in the US and across Europe emerged, claiming public access television as their medium. These artist-driven video networks, including Videofreex, TVTV, Paper Tiger TV, Deep Dish TV, Radio Free America, and Raindance, encouraged others to create their own broadcast media, rather than being passive consumers of centrally constructed television programming. In the seminal video art journal Radical Software, Gene Youngblood proclaimed: “The videosphere will alter the minds of men and the architecture of our dwellings,” forecasting the transformative and politically revolutionary potential of emerging information networks. By looking back and analyzing the historic legacies of video activism, we see a still unfolding future for networked and social media, not just as a corporate controlled delivery mechanism for reinforcing consumerism and mainstream popular culture, but as an artists’ collaborative platform for experimental invention and social broadcasting.