DVD Killed the Video Star

A recent NY Times article by Dennis Lim (citing IU's own Barb Klinger as a source on the implications of media viewing technology), discusses the death of VHS technology. The article is essentially an advertisement for Michel Gondry's latest film, Be Kind Rewind (which will hopefully be less soporific than his last, The Science of Sleep), and it's final message seems to be, "Well, it had a good run, at least."

But it raises a lot of significant ideas about the associations we hold for different kinds of media in different contexts. For instance, Klinger notes how the medium has become a marker of authenticity for a particular generation of viewers (citing the uproar over the digital alterations to the original DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy), while Lim notes that, at least during the period in which the medium rose to prominence, it held the fairly alienating connotations associated with its role in surveilance and pornography.

We often examine the implications of various media formats historically: it's a variation of the kind of technological determinism initiated by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s. After all, Boogie Nights is a pretty substantial thesis on how video technology drove pornography in new and more exploitative directions, and Baudrillard's revision of Foucault's understanding of surveillance would not have been possible without video technology available as a material ground to some rather abstract theory. And, I have to admit, limiting the field of available questions to the effects of media technology alone is something of which I am occasionally guilty mysef in my own writing (see either of my two of my previous entries on digital technology to see what I mean).

But this poses a fundamentally different kind of question about how we relate to the effects of media technology. What is the process by which we somehow change our cultural attitudes toward different kinds of media as they become superceded? How does our understanding of a technology shift from that of invasive surveillance and hyperreal porn to that of the "authentic" text? My initial instinct is that this is actually a marker of how we have always perceived this technology. Video's sense of "authenticity" is precisely what had previously been deemed so disturbing in those earlier trends: its seeming authenticity, its "uncut" aesthetic fueled the sometimes violent fantasies that gave such success to the porn industry in the 1980s, and it also aided the paranoia of being "caught" in real time in live footage, even do something as mundane as walking through a parking garage or riding an elevator. But the question remains as to what cultural conditions are necessary for this quality of authenticity, deemed so menacing at the technology's origins, to have the potential to become (retroactively, of course) the basis for a fond nostalgia once the technology has died?

I suspect that arguing that the death of the technology alone is responsible would fall into the same old trap of technological determinism. Rather, to account for this transition from the threat to the fond memory of authenticity, we need a more sophisticated understanding of how affect operates at a larger cultural level, a more nuanced theory of how our investments are articulated by a host of issues shaped by the rise of convergence technologies, which in turn articulate a whole new politics of "authenticity" and its uses in media.