Placeholder text

Go to cart

Videotape

Videotape

0 - Default Title
Description
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.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
160
Release Date:
2025-09-04
Publication Date:
2025-09-04
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Academic
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN13:
9798765100004
Weight:
146 g
Height:
121 cm
Width:
165 cm
Thickness:
20 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out