Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the ‘80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War. In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people. By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. Yet the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment.

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9798765100004

Table of Contents

Reviews

Oana Godenau-Kenworthy tells the story of how videotape – once an essential medium, now a nostalgia object – set us up for the current age of streaming platforms and interfaces. * Michael Z. Newman, author of Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (2014) *

Author Information

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is a Teaching Professor in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, Ohio, USA. She is the author of Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination (2022).

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