I just finished Subject to Change by Deirdre Boyle. This book is a captivating history of the first decade of Guerilla Television, before the true proliferation of public access cable-TV stations. The book is almost entirely based on Boyle’s interviews with the participants along with a survey of original tapes and periodicals. The saga begins circa 1968 and ends at about 1980. It interweaves the stories of 3 different organizations, although it devotes most of its attention to TVTV: Top Value Television (TVTV), a true Guerrilla Television group focused on flexing their own resources to create artistic and journalistic tapes; University Community Video (UCV) a Minneapolis-based access center, funded by a university, dedicated to achieving social change through working with and training the community to produce alternative video; and Broadside TV, a cable station in rural Tennessee built on the premise of creating locally originated programming, with extensive community input/engagement, based on the model of the community newspaper. It looks at the situation which lead to the creation of these three groups, describes their brief triumphs, and analyzes their death, examining why they failed to radically change society or television.

This book was probably the most exciting history book I have ever read. What struck me as the most interesting was the three different approaches that the groups took to achieve their goals of changing the media landscape. Notably, each one’s approach changed regularly in response to their successes and failures, but mostly in response to funding needs. The TVTV was the least community centered, acting as “postpolitical media mavericks intent upon sabotaging the media from the inside” through innovative and down-to-earth content (186). As each attempted medium failed to adequately fund or allow for expansion of viewersip they progressively moved from tape distribution to cable, to public TV, then broadcast where they hit a dead end and collapsed. UCV was closely linked to it’s community for the first several years, but it then gradually began to move away from community work as it sought to create more impact films and the political consciousness of the community grew colder, it never got the cable access channel that it wanted. It ultimately abandoned it’s community vision in favor of being a center for regional and national video arts. Broadside TV began as an attempt as creating an electronic “folk school approach of self-sustaining self empowerment” in opposition to the big organizer model “in which outside organizers forcefully martial a community behind its program, only to discover that once they leave the original funding dries up, the model collapses” (145). Ironically the group turned into what it opposed as it became more reliant on contracts and deadlines with community organizations as the funding dried up due to changes in FCC regulations. This is highly informative, especially for an aspiring worker in community media. It illuminates why the public access TV model, as opposed to these other three, has lived on (despite troubles of its own). Cable access managed to secure long term (often a decade or longer) government contracts which guarantee funding.

Boyle, Deirdre. Subject to Change: Guerilla Television Revisited. New York: Oxford, 1997. Print.