Hand-Held Visions: The Uses of Community Media Book

From her early 1960s work with children having a hand in producing their own films to an analysis of the media activist phenomenon exploding across the Internet and known as the Indymedia Centers (which grew out of the 1999 Seattle protests against the WTO), Halleck (communications, U. of California at San Diego) presents 58 essays which cover the work of herself and others as media activists and critics over the past four decades. Her concern for the topic encompasses the ability of the powerless and the marginalized in the United States and abroad to define for themselves the meanings of media and to expand their abilities to communicate with others without the imposition of corporate-defined limits and definitions. Among the many projects she discusses are: the use of camcorders to expose U.S. government disinformation from the Gulf War, the Zapatistas' use of e-mail to publicize their struggle against the Mexican government, and on-line resistance to the prison-industrial complex in the United States. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)