Black Freedom, Busing as Media Theory, and Stan VanDerBeek's "Social Media"

abstract: This article resurrects a prehistory of social media through intermedia artist Stan VanDerBeek's proto-theorization of the term in the early 1970s. I elucidate VanDerBeek's concept of social media through one case study: his 1970 project Panels for the Walls of the World , a collage mural distributed simultaneously to multiple sites in Boston, page-by-page via the new Xerox Magnafax Telecopier. Contextualizing Panels in relation to local struggles for school desegregation, I argue for a media theory of busing that helps us understand both desegregation as a media process and the principles of topographical montage and "cross-talk" operative in the facsimile murals.