Michael Shamberg

Michael Shamberg co-founded the Raindance Corporation in 1969 alongside Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, and Ira Schneider, an alternative media collective that became one of the intellectual engines of the early video movement and published Radical Software, the journal of record for the emerging video counterculture. His 1971 book Guerrilla Television argued that broadcast television's one-way, centralized structure was antithetical to democratic communication, and that portable video in the hands of communities and individuals offered an alternative model: decentralized, participatory, and freed from the control of corporate networks. That argument, and Raindance's advocacy for community access to the cable spectrum, helped supply the language and the intellectual framework that activists and regulators drew on when writing public access requirements into federal communications law.

After the guerrilla television period, Shamberg moved into commercial film production, producing films including Pulp Fiction and Erin Brockovich, a career shift that did not diminish the significance of his early work but reflected the choices many early video pioneers made when the movement's utopian moment passed.

His place in community media history is as one of the thinkers who articulated, before public access television existed as policy, why communities needed their own channels and what would be possible if they had them.