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Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. Over the decades, it has been an avant-garde artistic medium, a high-tech consumer gadget, a format for watching movies at home, a force for democracy, and the ultimate, ubiquitous means of documenting reality. In the twenty-first century, video is the name we give all kinds of moving images. Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. Over the decades, it has been an avant-garde artistic medium, a high-tech consumer gadget, a format for watching movies at home, a force for democracy, and the ultimate, ubiquitous means of documenting reality. In the twenty-first century, video is the name we give all kinds of moving images. This study considers video as an object of these hopes and fears and builds an approach to thinking about the concept of the medium in terms of cultural status.
List of contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Three Phases2. Video as Television3. Video as Alternative 4. Video as the Moving Image5. Medium and Cultural StatusNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
About the author
Michael Z. Newman is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.He is the author of Indie: An American Film Culture and coauthor of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status.
Summary
Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real. Techno-utopian rhetoric has represented video as a revolutionary medium, promising to solve the problems of the past and the present and to deliver a better future. Video has also been seen more negatively, particularly as a threat to movies and their culture. In this new history of the medium, Newman considers video as an object of these hopes and fears and builds an approach to thinking about the concept of the medium in terms of cultural status.
Report
"Looking at the distinct ways in which the term, video, has been defined in relation to a number of other institutions and technologies, Newmans Video Revolutions covers over a half-century of historical material and draws upon a wide range of specialized secondary research. The result is a stimulating and satisfying intellectual tour and argument, chiefly for the authors ability to encompass the often-disparate case studies within a single historical lens." - William Boddy, Baruch College, CUNY
