Book Giveaway! "Video Revoluations: On the History of a Medium" by Michael Z. Newman

This week our featured book is Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, by Michael Z. Newman. In addition to features on our blog, we will also be posting about the book on twitter, and facebook.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Video Revolutions to a lucky winner. To enter the contest please e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu and include your name and address. The winner will be selected Friday, April 25 at 3:00 pm.

In Video Revolutions, Michael Z. Newman casts video as a medium of shifting value and legitimacy in relation to other media and technologies, particularly film and television. Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real. Techno-utopian rhetoric has repeatedly represented video as a revolutionary medium, promising to solve the problems of the past and the present—often the very problems associated with television and the society shaped by it—and to deliver a better future.

For more on the book, read the book’s preface.