American Folk Music as Tactical Media

'"This is a rich and engaging book that excavates and scavenges through the American folk music revival — defined by Svec as ‘the moment in mid-20th century America that young people turned to acoustic guitars and to various vernacular traditions’ (13) — to ask and answer the question: ‘What if the American folk revival had something to teach us about [=] digital media culture?’ (13)." - **Michael Audette-Longo**, _LSE Review of Books_, April 2019 "Both media ecologist and archeologist, Henry Adam Svec in this powerfully revisionist book shows how the folk revival's communications milieus, metaphors, and, in a brilliant reading of Bob Dylan, its songs, had already discovered that "the folk and the machine are often one and the same." From Lomax's computer-generated Global Jukebox and Dylan's Telecaster to today's music apps and YouTube, from the Hootenanny to the Peoples' Mic, the folk process, then as now, Svec argues, reclaims our humanity, reinventing media technologies to become both instruments of resistance and fields for imagining new societies, new selves, and new futures." - **Robert Cantwell, author of When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.** "An intriguing addition to the archive on Tactical Media, Svec's analysis of the American folk revival begins from the premise that acoustic guitars, banjos, and voices have much to teach us about technological communication and ends, beautifully, with an uncovering of 'the folk' within our contemporary media environments. What takes center stage, however, is the Hootenanny, both as it informs the author's own folk-archaeological laboratory of imaginary media and as it continues to instantiate political community - at a time when the need for protest, dissent, and collectivity is particularly acute." - **Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.**