Video Revolutions by Michael Z. Newman

Author:Michael Z. Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

From the 1950s to the 1990s, video developed in multiple directions, performing various functions and producing a number of perceived effects and consequences. Its identity was contingent on its uses and affordances, and on widely circulating ideas about their social or aesthetic significance. Such notions depended most often on an understanding of video’s relation to other popular media. Where video was valued, it was in contrast to prevailing conceptions of television. Where it was denigrated, this was a product of its enduring association with the small screen and its identification with commercial broadcasting, the epitome in these years of mass media. Video’s identity was inconsistent as some uses and ideals of videotape recording and playback technology clashed with others, and its identity as a medium depended on how its uses and affordances were perceived and evaluated. Videotape was a technology characterized by interpretive flexibility, as different social groups constructed it according to their needs and interests.101 The medium’s status was negotiated in relation to this flexibility.

Most of all, what the cultural status and identity of video in these years reveals are anxieties surrounding television’s status as the most powerful mass medium, a formidable hegemonic institution of the later twentieth century. As the next chapter proceeds to the twenty-first century, TV retains this force, but new configurations of technology and social relations will complicate the distinctions of value and legitimacy that gave shape to phase two.

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