Dissertation Research: Medium and Message in the Consumption Junction: Retailers, Consumers, and the Invention of Movies on Video

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

In its first sixty years, the US motion picture industry evolved a clearly defined structure incorporating specific technical artifacts and social practices into a system stretching from cameras to distribution networks to theater projectors, from Hollywood studios to audiences around the world. However, in the past two decades, new technologies and new social practices have altered the industry dramatically. We now watch movies in theatres, airplanes, cars and our own living rooms, and we encode them on celluloid, on videotape, on DVD, and as streams of electricity. The socio-technical system that constitutes the motion picture in America has not so much shifted as exploded in complexity, and yet the idea of a movie seems as unproblematic in American culture as ever. This dissertation research project is studying one of the major sites where new understandings of both the nature of motion pictures as well as their proper use were constructed - the network of video retail stores of the 1980.s. Video retailers created and facilitated a new distribution network that served as a consumption junction (Cowan 1987) of users, movie studios, and manufacturers where the groundwork was laid for much of our current understanding of entertainment and media technologies. Ultimately, the story of how motion pictures came to be viewed on videotapes in the home rather than simply in theaters is largely the story of how these mediators managed to construct the idea of a message (a motion picture) that was completely distinct from the medium on which it was played, an idea which was essential to the establishment of one technical system (translation of magnetically encoded tapes into pixels on a cathode-ray tube) as equivalent to another (projection of celluloid prints). NSF funds will support data collection at various research sites: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library; trip to Blockbuster Entertainment; and the Video Software Dealers Association.