Community Video Report (Winter 1974)

4: reviews News from the circular file By Nick DeMartino Trying to keep,up with the latest books and publications in the communications field is a full-time job, and, I daresay, none of us really does it to our own satisfaction. But the least we can do is pass along what we have learned and share it with others trying to do the same thing. What follows is a selection of what seems right now to be the most significant of the materials that have passed over my desk in the last few months. A number of useful items in the cable access field have come out recently. The Wired Island: The First 2 years of public access to cable television in Manhattan (Fund for, the City of New York, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, NY 10036) is a report by David Othmer. While lots of our friends in the public access movement have complained about various aspects (particularly the recommendations section), it certainly provided for me a coherent and extensive review of the first two years of public access in its first real big-city test. Aside from useful statistics, lists of user groups, problems encountered, appendices of regulations and so forth, the author has tried to give some flavor of the chaos and energy that characterized the public access scene. He has done a better job of the former than the latter, a job which requires less “objectivity” and more detailed, impassioned explication, but it is certainly the best existing descriptive document available to the general public about real life experience with cable access. The Public Access Celebration in New York also has a report available which does provide more detail and a clearer point of view...A Ph.D. thesis by Gil Gillespie of the University of Kansas entitled The Apparent Viability of the Public Access [Community Cable Telvison] Idea in Urban North America is based on survey work with local access groups throughout the U.S. and Canada, as well as research of his-own. Students of public access will find this study valuable as a first attempt at some assessment of how access has worked during its initial phases. Unfortunately, these dissertaions are somewhat less than accessible. Gillespie can be reached at 1800 Naismith Dr., #902, Lawrence, Kan. 66044 for further informaWON Eitan ce: An upcoming series of publications by the Alternate Media Center, the best-funded and one of the earliest of the public-access groups in New York promises to give the sort of in-depth treatment that the NY city studies offer for some of the access experiments. For the royal sum of $35, AMC is offering a series of books, including an access workbook, ‘‘Public Access Experience—profiles of 6 AMC Centers’, 1974 Supplement on Library Access, the 1975 Supplement on Educational Access, and “Telemedicine—The Current Experience.”’ Write AMC, 144 Bleeker St., New York 10012. Another kind of publication dealing with access is an Aug. 1973 booklet about access in Madison, Wis., from the Citizens Cable Council. Called the Madison/Dane Co. Community Action Handbook, it is full of clippings and letters and info about that access. project (from P.O. Box 5574, Madison, 53705). There have been several new books on aspects of regulation, among which the most general is The Politics of Broadcast Regulation by Erwin G. Kraskow and Lawrence D. Longley (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). The authors, one of whom is a member of the FCC bar, the other a political scientist with expertise in interest-group politics, have presented a theory of policy-making in broadcast issues that try to make sense out of ies “who got what, when, and how.” Cable Television and the FCC: A Crisis in Media Control by Donald R. LeDuc (Philadelphia: Temple, 1973) is a full-length treatment of the case of cable television regulation at the FCC, with an eye toward how this case illustrates the incapacity of the Commission to deal with new technical challenges to its “clientele industries.” “Cable seems to have been released, as it was previously repressed, not because policy had been developed to guide it in performing communications functions essential to the American public, but simply because a process of legal and economic assimilation had blunted its threat to the broadcast industry it once challenged,” LeDuc concludes, and further recommends seeking alternative methods of introducing new technologies into the electronic media system, now that cable has become a part of the existing structure. An excellent and challenging study. Another book dealing with cable edited by RAND Corporation consultant Rolla Edward Park is the outgrowth of a meeting of the Western Economic Association in 1972. The Role of Analysis in Regulatory Decisionmaking: The Case for Cable Televison (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath & Co.) assesses the affect of the masses of studies, analysis and thinktankery on the FCC cable televsion rules adopted in 1972. Even more specific and detailed than LeDuc, the book is geared toward those interested in economic analysis and administrative law. For those who are interested in another piece of recent history in. the CATV regulatory field, the city of Boulder has done up its ordinance in a nice little book with some information about the unique negotiation process that led to the final law. Available from Boulder County Cable Communications Project, Municipal Building, Boulder, Colo. 80302: A Boulder system, however, will not be built by TelePrompter, due to the latter’s financial woes. In Boston, cable will be delayed because the city has concluded that it won’t do enough for the city at the current time. The Nov. 1973 Report of the Boston Consumers Council to the Mayor on CATV is available from the Council, City Hall, Boston, Mass. 02201. The whole question of cable economics is central to the development of any system, and one group offers information and a service that is designed to assist local organizations to plan an economic simulation of a cable system based on_ local characteristics. Whitewood Stamps, Inc. 61 Chapel Street, Newton, Mass 02158, provides a computer service, a simulation program, a videotape about cable economics. Write for their brochure and publications. ---Kristin Moeller A fullscale economic study done tor a community development corporation in South Bronx, N..Y., conludes that subscriber-oriented services will not be sufficient to make cable TV viable there, and provided a careful look at utilizing institutional services as'a way of financing cable in a low-income, densely populated inner-city situation. The study, is'also one of the best introductions to cable etonomics I’ have yet seen for the layperson, because it relates to a specific situation and is designed to convince you of a particular perspective on cable—one which has yet to be understood by many franchising officials— that cable is more than an entertainment medium. Write for Cable Communications System for the South Bronx Community: Technical and Economic Analysis. by Arawak Consulting Corp., and Telecommunications. Management Corp. (South Bronx Community Corporation, 384 E. 149th Street, Bronx, N.Y. 1045S. Jan. 1973). These books, however, tend toward the obscure, and are of almost no value to the beginner or to anyone trying to work with laypeople and the public. This is not the case with a series of reports issued this fall by the RAND Corporation under contract with the National Science Foundation. The bulkiest of the set, and the best introduction eS “Ce to the current thinking in cable is Walter Baer’s Cable TV: Handbook for Decisionmakers, which, as the title. indicates, is designed: for policymakers at the local level who are trying to sort covering public access, educational and municipal uses, cable technology, and other topics, are more uneven in their usefulness. But none are couched in the annoying lingo of the field or . the legal/technical. jargon .of,. government... bureaucrats. Thank God for small favors. In the great tradition of NACLA and other left-wing research groups, the Network Project has been issuing a series of reports on all sorts of communications issues, and their work is first-rate. Cable Televison is Issue #5 of the Notebook series, which also includes numbers on domestic communications satellites, a directory of the networks, control of information, Office of Telecommunications Policy, and the Childre’s Television Workshop. No matter how readable and accessible RAND documents become, they are still RAND documents, and as such, reflect the bias of a research institution that has until recently, applied its considerable analysis skills almost exclusively to problems of military, strategic, and [continued, see REVIEWS, p. 7/ For the beginner: guerilla warfare. Pity the poor beginner, the layperson who is interested in learning more about issues in communications like cable television, access to broadcast media, minority and women’s hiring, or any of the many other issues in the exploding field of teleecommunications. Pity the poor beginner, because, by and large, the ‘‘field,’’ almost by definition, is dominated by specialists who all read the same periodicals, attend the same conferences, keep track of the major reports and proposals—all to the befuddlement and exclusion of the average person. What follows is an eclectic selection of materials that will at least give the newcomer a broad background in the field of media and communications. Perhaps the most comprehensive (and longest) general academic study of the broadcast field is Eric Barnouw’s three volume History of Broadcasting (Oxford). While he doesn’t really get into the kind of radical analysis many of us might like, he covers virtually every major development and theme of the development of the industry from year one. A shorter and sharper critique of the industry is Herbert Schiller’s Mass Communications and the American Empire, which chronicles the domination of U.S business and the military in the world development of television and other communications systems. More theoretical and controversial are the many books by media theorist and pop sociologist Marshall McLuhan, most notably Understanding Media (Signet/ Mentor or McGraw Hill). A more recent and more readable McLuhan-ish treatment of new developments in media is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema. Both suffer from a belief that somehow the technology per se, not the political and economic structures that spawn technologies, will determine the structure of society. An extremely useful new paperback anthology called Human Connection and the New Media by Barry Schwartz (Prentice-Hall/Spectrum, 1973) focuses on precisely this conflict: between those who feel the technology is the determinant, and those who claim that industry and other politico-economic control will prevail. In addition, there are chapters on such new subjects as bio-feedback, telepathy, holography, videotape, cable television, cybernetics, etc. If you want to deal with the whole area of videotape use and development, you’d do well to see the early issues of ‘a journal (still