i learned about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn’t stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive. (x)
i feel like this is selling her a bit short tbh. It’s not like she was a random woman who decided to tape ‘whatever’ was on television. She was a civil rights activist and archivist, who was extremely concerned about preserving history. She believed that, by taping television, she would be preserving history EXACTLY as it was perceived at the time; she didn’t want the detail in the news to disappear with time. And she was RIGHT.
Like I said, she didn’t just tape ‘whatever’ was on television. It was extremely targeted towards news stations. There were 8 VCRs running at all times in her home. Her life—-and her family’s lives—-were centered around 6 hour blocks, since that was the amount of time that a tape would record for. Her collections were also extremely organized.
The Marion Stokes Movies and Video Collection may be found on the Internet Archive here.
Wikipedia’s article on Marion Stokes may be found here.
A documentary of her life, Recorder: the Marion Stokes Project, was released in 2019, and seems to have good reviews, though I have not yet seen it.
From archive.org (Internet Archive) - The Marion Stokes Papers contain documents related to the life and activism of Marion Stokes (1929-2012), civil rights activist, feminist, and news archivist. Stokes’ social activist career began in the 1950s, and encompassed many areas of left politics during a particularly transformative time in America. Her groundbreaking television show (co-produced with her husband John S Stokes Jr), Input, addressed many pressing issues, and much of it remains relevant today. Additionally, Stokes amassed a huge archive of videotaped television news, which is slowly being made available through the work of the Internet Archive.
