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- [00:01]
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- [01:27]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Specialoffer welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today to welcome back to the New Books Network but in a slightly different capacity. We have with us today an author who has also been an NBN host. So on the other side of the interview today to tell us about some really interesting research thinking ideas all wrapped up in a book titled Videotape. Now, as the one word title might suggest, this is part of Bloomsbury's wonderful Object Lesson series which are really cool looking books that take a particular object and tell us about it, but tell us about it from often quite unique perspectives and combinations of ideas. So yes, we're going to be talking about like the physical thing and some of the tech in it, but the conversation's going to go a lot more broadly than that. At least I hope it will. I think it will. So I'm very pleased to welcome Back to the NBN and to this episode the author of the book Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy to tell us all about videotapes. Juana, thank you so much for joining me.
- [02:40]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.
- [02:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write an object lessons book and what about videotapes?
- [02:54]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Sure. So I teach in the Department of Global Intercultural Studies at Miami University in Ohio in the US And I'm interested broadly in the link between popular culture, media, political systems in the story of the genesis of this book is kind of twofold. So my personal connection to the videotape is that I grew up in Romania in the 1980s, when videotapes are kind of a rare and illicit pleasure because they were not legal. So that's part of my personal story. And then in 2020, I participated at a workshop at Miami University with Chris Schauberg, who's the editor of the Object Lesson series. And this was a workshop that sparked my interest in public writing. And somehow the two interests collided, and the result is the videotape book.
- [03:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's always quite a fun thing to hear, the kind of backstory of a book, because there's never one reason. Right. There's always like, multiple things that come together. So when I suppose, did you, like, have you always been interested in videotapes or did it come from that workshop that suddenly the idea popped into your head?
- [04:15]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
It's a combination. So I was interested in how Western media circulated in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, partly for research reasons, partly because of my own kind of personal connection to that period. So I had a project, an older article that I had written after following the career of a Romanian British documentary about the Romanian black market for VHS tapes, a documentary that came out in 2015, Chuck Norris versus communism. A fun documentary. But what was the most fun part for me was noticing how it got adopted in the conservative blogosphere in the US as evidence of the power of Hollywood to bring down the Iron Curtain, which is a very simplistic and slightly naive take on the end of the Cold War. But I was fascinated about the very different uses of the story of the videotape in a different political context. And that was part of my research. So that kind of remained. That interest remained on the back burner for a while until I decided to look more into the global story of the videotape. Right. What was the videotape story like in the west versus my own experience? What about other parts of the world, like Iran which didn't fall neatly under the Cold War divisions. So that is kind of part of the genesis of the. In my interest in the videotape, and.
- [05:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Having read the book myself, I can definitely see a lot of those threads come through in the finished product. So interesting to hear kind of how far back they go in your own interest. But I think before we get into, well, any or all of those places in the videotape, we should probably do a bit of an origin story of the tech. So when are we talking why and how do we get sort of a consumer at home? Vtr, vcr? When and how did this happen?
- [06:16]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
So first of all, maybe we should kind of clarify that film and tape are different formats, right? As a format for moving images, tapes are completely different from film. At the most basic, the difference is whether they're light readable, right? Film, which long preceded the advent of the videotape, film is light readable. So you can look at the kind of reels of film and older movie theaters, and each reel is made up of individual still images with side perforations. Tapes are just a kind of silky spoon, a spool of plastic where the visual information is recorded magnetically. To access its contents, you need a special machine. So that technology was first developed for magnetic audio tape. It was first developed in Nazi Germany in the 30s, and it was unavailable in the US until after the end of World War II. So the technology progressed. Initially was developed as a professional tech for radio. Later, video capacity was added, but it was still a professional device that was only affordable and available to TV broadcasters so they could record shows and news and broadcast them coast to coast. And the first prototype of kind of the granddaddy of video recorders was unveiled in 1956, in April at the national association of Radio and Television Broadcasters convention in Chicago. But it was big. It was very expensive. It was very popular with TV broadcasters. But it took about two decades for that huge, bulky affair to shrink into a consumer object. And the research was kind of part of the fascinating story of the videotape is that it's always a global story from the very beginning. If you think about the origins of the technology in Germany, the way it was improved in the US but then it's in Japan. The first major breakthrough for commercial VCRs happened when Sony, which had experimented with a model that used small tapes that were enclosed in this kind of plastic cartridge. So the videotape becomes a video cassette. So the first major breakthrough happened in 1969. And then in 75, Betamax was born, which is an even smaller version of the 1969 Sony gadget that brought the VCR on the consumer market for the first time. And one year later, Sony's rival, jvc, created the VHS system, the video home system. And both Sony and JVC had fairly similar technologies. Kind of the spools of magnetic tape encased in this plastic cartridge. But the size of the cassettes was different. So when a consumer invested, which was still fairly significant amount of money purchasing the vcr, they had to commit to one format and then stick to it. So that's kind of the origin story. And one of the interesting detail that I find about the videotape as a cultural and tech story is that between 1975 and the demise of the videotape, in, I believe, 2014 or 2015, when the last ones were produced, the format did not really change. Unlike other technologies that have enough time to evolve and be changed in themselves, the videotape did not change. But what changed were the legal, the social, the economic arrangements and models around them as they entered new markets and transformed those societies.
- [10:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about some of that transformation, and definitely interesting to note as well about kind of the format lock in, I suppose that kind of appears, and then the amount of change or not that there was over the course of its time. But imagine that a consumer, for example, has made that decision. They've picked kind of which way they want to go, they've decided they want to invest. What were most people using this for?
- [10:30]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Well, originally, when the VCRs were launched by Sony, the Betamax system was offered and marketed as a time shifter. So in the US and in Japan, consumers had a good problem in a way. There was too much entertainment and not enough hours in the day. Competing channels offered appealing shows that may have been broadcast at the same time. People could not watch them both at the same time. So what the videotape and the VCRs promised was the freedom from this and the tyranny of the TV stations and a flexibility to shift time according to one's schedule and watch the content one wanted to watch. As an aside, this was not the case everywhere else in the world. So maybe we'll get to that. So as a timeshifter, initially, the videotape was considered an accessory to the video recording machine, which was an accessory to the TV set. So they first entered on the market as appendages to the TV set that each household owned, and as a way of freeing individuals from the schedule of the TV program. Over a brief period of time, consumers started having other ideas. So in the us, consumers started taping shows and then trading with one another and then swapping tapes from coast to coast and then eventually renting them. So gradually the videotape became a desirable consumer object in itself because it became the repository for the content, which had been until then immaterial. Right. Until then, to watch a movie, to watch a TV show, it was something that you did, connected to the movie theater as a space or in your living room, connected to the schedule of the TV set, you watched it and that was it. Now, the videotape provided a material support for entertainment, something that people could own, could sell, could collect.
- [12:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a pretty big shift indeed, and lots of reasons that consumers would be excited about it. But isn't that illegal? Like, how does this work with copyright law?
- [12:53]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
The launch of Betamax really made everybody very nervous. So part of the, or the large part of the revenue that TV companies collected had came from advertising. So what they were selling was viewer attention. It's easy to forget today when we can pause and stop and re watch segments that we want, that people did not always have the freedom to stop a show or a movie. There were no pause buttons on a TV show. You went to the bathroom when there was a commercial break and that was it. Those advertisements were a source of revenue, just like tickets for movie theaters were a source of revenue for Hollywood studios. The advent of the videotape and the ability of consumers to tape content gave them obviously the freedom to shift time. But it also raised a number of questions about loss of revenue for the advertisers and the threat of piracy for the Hollywood studios. Now the industry took measures fairly early on and sued Sony. So in 1976, so basically, a year after the VCRs and the videotape's entry into the consumer ecosystem in the US and Japan, a group of movie studios, among whom Universal and Disney, took Sony to court in a California district court. And over the next few years, the case slowly made its way through the legal system, ending up in the Supreme Court. So the case is known as the Betamax case. And in 1984, the Supreme Court decided by a 5 to 4 margin that taping TV shows was not an infringement of copyright. And the logic was based on the complication of the case. Right. So Universal didn't try to make Sony responsible for how users used its product. Rather, the legal arguments revolved around this kind of loss of profit and ultimately touched upon the. The very structure and understanding of how copyright law and principles upon which it was based evolved in the US So the copyright law evolved in the US Alongside the Constitution. And it's interesting that its original goals were a, to promote and incentivize the publication of scientific or artistic works that would benefit the public at large. And that was the the B part. So the 1970s, the first kind of copyright law in the US 1970 simultaneously tried to protect authors and publishers temporary rights to make money from their creations, but also guarantee the sharing of these cultural, scholarly, artistic works with society. And this was what became known as the doctrine of fair use. Certain types of use were exempt from copyright law protections because they were considered to benefit society as a whole. That's why we have public lending, libraries, book clubs, schools, universities. Fair use, or what constitutes fair use or fair dealing existed in American law in a sort of a gray area. And it was only codified in the Copyright act of 1976. So kind of a major overhaul of the copyright laws. And from that moment, this idea of fair use was articulated in a way that said that, okay, so for form of use to fall under this category, it has to show some sort of new expression or meaning and contribute to society. So when the Supreme Court made their ruling, they argue that time shifting was fair use because it enhanced viewers ability to benefit from the content that was broadcast through TV stations. And incidentally, with the exception of Disney and a few other studios, most of the owners of the TV shows did not object to the copying of their shows. But the Supreme Court was really kind of building its ruling on this idea that by allowing people to have more flexibility in consuming the content that the creators put out there, they were essentially improving society or contributing something to society. And that's why it was not considered to be an infringement of copyright laws. Of course, the reality of the vcr, like the recording machine, is that it always had in it the potential for piracy. Right. Hollywood essentially lost the control over access to its content the moment entertainment became a tangible physical object. And VCRs provided consumers with the ability to record content, but also make copies for their own use, but also potentially for illicit use or sell.
- [17:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's a really interesting case. Thank you for helping us understand kind of why the ruling came down the way it did. And when you explain it that way, you're like, okay, well, I see their point. But yeah, as you said, there's a whole bunch of things that kind of come from that. What do you think are some of the most interesting sort of unintended consequences of these rulings. So.
- [18:23]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
There'S some of these consequences that are visible and invisible. For me, the most interesting unintended consequence of this rule came or begin to happen in the 1990s. So the industry lost the battle of over access, but continued its war. And part of the war was to try to get rid of the videotape. That's why the DVD, when it was invented or launched in 1996, was embraced enthusiastically by the industry, because it was a technology that was initially intended to be playback only, not to have recording capability. So there was this reassurance that it would stop the piracy that the VHS the videotape had unleashed. Of course it didn't, because its encryption system was cracked very soon and was posted online. And then digital piracy blossomed. So what followed was a series of laws and regulations meant to limit access to digital content. And gradually those regulations applied to all software, which meant that over the course of the first half of the 2000s, nationally and internationally, a series of laws were implemented which made it harder to break any kind or kind of break any type of encoded software, no matter where it is located, including other types of consumer objects, from phones to guns to dishwashers to cars to combines. Which meant it became harder and harder for things to be repaired legally. So part of the growing problem of e waste today can be traced back to the legal arrangements to protect access to content that were actually unleashed by the age of the videotape. So for me, that's the most interesting thing.
- [20:38]
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- [21:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Edu this is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers.
- [21:14]
United Airlines Customer
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
- [21:20]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
- [21:22]
United Airlines Customer
I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
- [21:27]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
That's. That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
- [21:29]
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- [21:32]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
It felt like I was the captain.
- [21:34]
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- [22:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I would agree. That's a very interesting kind of wait, is that where that came from? Moment. So thank you for sharing that with us here. I want to talk a little bit then about the content, though, of the videotapes, not just the technology and kind of the Pandora's box that they open there. There's obviously a lot of ways in which kind of, with all this content much more available and tradable and sellable, as you've just been describing, that, that could kind of open up lots of ideas that people might be weirded out by kind of not having as many restrictions. So I wasn't particularly surprised to read the section of the book that talked about kind of the US or other governments, for example, being concerned about what was on the videotapes, not just the fact of their existence. I would admit, though, I was a little surprised that there seemed to be a lot of emphasis on porn, pornography being like the big scary thing. I sort of thought there'd be like a category of like, you know, violence and porn and political. There would be a group of things that were maybe of concern to the US government and other countries as well. But it really does seem to be porn that they're so worried about. Why?
- [23:15]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Well, first of all, it's interesting to think about how porn functioned as an umbrella for a lot of things that people were anxious about because for inst. We'll maybe we'll get to this. But in. In the Eastern bloc, you know, any type of video that came from the west that could be viewed as problematic in some way was labeled as porn. Like martial arts films were accused of being pornographic and banned in the ussr. In the US the focus on porn was. Was interesting because it's created these very bizarre alliances between the moral majority in the U.S. the kind of a cultural and political movement that appeared on the wake of the upheavals of the post civil rights movement in the US and feminist activists. So again, the materiality of the videotape gave a lot of freedom in terms of what type of content could be consumed, where and when. Porn has always existed or coexisted with the entertainment industry, lived in its shadows. But usually porn was a type of entertainment that could be consumed in places that were outside the realm of domesticity. By the start of the 1960s, for instance, as film technology advanced and became more affordable, porn on reel, again, the so called stag films proliferated. And there were adult movie theaters where people could go and watch this type of content. The trick with that was that these movie theaters were usually outside neighborhoods in areas that were kind of seedy parts of town associated with drug and crime and prostitution. So to go there was a move that could be risky in terms of kind of being seen, being judged. And that geographical distinction between the space of these sexual fantasies, the place where content could be consumed, and the sphere of domesticity was erased by the introduction of the videotape in this business ecosystem. Because as new business forms, the video stores that rented videotapes proliferated throughout the 80s, they became a common fixture of most neighborhoods. Viewing habits had changed given the availability of the videotape, which meant that every neighborhood had a corner store that sold videotapes or rented videotapes for of all content. And most of these rental stores found it very lucrative to have a back door, a back window, a back room, sorry, 18 for 18 year olds and over, where porn tapes could be rented. So this effectively brought a content that was viewed as morally dangerous or problematic in terms of its portrayal of women into residential neighborhoods. So this is part of the reality that started this alliance in the US where kind of religious conservatives and feminist activists tried to use zoning laws to try to push video stores out of neighborhoods, because video stores were viewed as the place where now young people could access porn in a way that bypassed all the regulations that existed in place before in terms of what content could be watched on tv or the geographical distance which the old arrangements pose between the domestic sphere and the spaces where people could go and watch porn.
- [27:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to think about that being such a focus. But I do want to not just talk about the US So can we talk about the Eastern Bloc and the ways in which viewing habits and kind of cultures of video watching were either different or similar to what you've just been telling us about the U.S. yeah.
- [27:28]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
So the Eastern Bloc is interesting to think about how this was a place where you can see the commonalities in how societies reacted to the entry of the videotape in their entertainment ecosystems versus the differences in reactions and regulatory arrangements. So obviously for Eastern Europe, the choice was never. Or the problem that the videotape addressed was not that people had too much entertainment and too little time. It was the opposite. People didn't have enough entertainment. Incidentally, this was the case in other parts of Western Europe as well. For instance, in Great Britain or in France in Northern Europe, where there were not enough TV stations with not enough variety of content. And people embrace the videotape as a source of entertainment that was more flexible and that could provide more choice. In Eastern Europe, however, due to the ideological divides between the Eastern Bloc, the Western Bloc, the videotape was viewed as not just an accessory to whatever content existed on tv, but as a dangerous subversive force that brought content images from a part of the world that was meant to be isolated from the communist experiment. VCRs were also fairly expensive, so that that was another factor that shaped viewing habits differently in Eastern Europe from Western Europe. Now, it's good to keep in mind that the Eastern Bloc was not a monolith. So part of my research was unpacking these assumptions of uniformity, this division of east versus West. And actually, when you look at how the videotape entered various national entertainment ecosystems, you realize that things were different even within what we call the west, as they were within Eastern Europe. For instance, not all Eastern European countries reacted the same way to the entrance of the videotape as a technology. Some had more lenient policies. For instance, Yugoslavia or Poland were fairly open to the videotape, whereas the USSR or Romania had pretty harsh laws that tried to control the flow of content that came across the Iron Curtain. What they all had in common was the fact that rather than drawing viewers into their homes where people would consume entertainment in the us, in Japan, in Britain, in Western Europe, where the videotape brought this extra choice, people stopped going to movie theaters or went less to the movie theater and took more advantage of the content that they could watch comfortably in their own homes. The viewing patterns in Eastern Europe were different, primarily because not a lot of people could afford a vcr. So here the practice was to rent a VCR and rent the tapes and then organize collective screenings where people share the cost. Rather than drawing people into their homes, the videotape kind of brought people out of their homes in these collective screening parties. And again, the patterns varied. So, for instance, in Romania, where I grew up in the late 70s, very early 80s, these collective parties were out in the open where entrepreneurs would rent the FOIA of theaters or other public spaces and charge a small fee, advertise the, the films that would be screened, and then they would connect multiple TV sets to a VCR and people grab chairs and watch the, the movies. As the government started cracking down on the practice in the mid-80s, these public viewings moved back into the, into private homes. But they remain collective. So instead of having a viewing in the foyer of a theater, you would have a household that would organize a viewing party for the neighborhood and then they would charge a small fee and people would just go and spend an entire Saturday night watching back to back movies and kind of talking and smoking. And in the morning they would go home and the organizer would return the VCR and that would be the end of the collective viewing. So it was a very different dynamics, far more collective, and this was linked to the different availability and cost of VCRs in Eastern Europe.
- [32:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really interesting link between kind of something that just sounds like a boring economic fact and it's like, well, but then what does that mean socially, culturally? Right. In terms of impact. So thank you for connecting those dots for us. If we think then about these, as you said, the differences within the sort of Eastern bloc between the regimes that were kind of more scared of the videotape versus those that weren't, was there any sort of I told you so? Like, were the fears, for example, in the Soviet Union or in Romanian leadership about the videotape is going to do XYZ horrible thing? Like did that actually happen? Or were the more relaxed ones, like Yugoslavia, kind of the ones who had it right?
- [33:05]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Well, I think that this kind of naive idea that watching Rocky brought down communism is wrong. But the existence of these thriving black markets for VHS tape of Western content was interesting, was problematic, and in some ways it kind of revealed the vulnerabilities and the weaknesses of the systems in place in Eastern Europe, for instance. Right. If you think about it on an economic level, in a society that thrived on centralized planning, the existence of the videotape and all these black market entrepreneurs, small and big, showed that private businesses could thrive despite central planning, despite the government control of the economy. So in a way you have the videotape demonstrating the efficiency of a supply and demand ecosystem. Second, the Eastern European countries all kind of were built on this assumption of egalitarianism and rejection of consumerism and a society organized on different principles, then of kind of asserting individual identity through consumption and as videotapes became more common and VCR is the same, they became more common, but they did not became widespread. So they became kind of signifiers of social status. Those who had access to them were obviously different to superior, different from superior to those who did not have access to them. So they already indicated that despite the myth of egalitarianism, privilege and access to consumer goods existed and created differences between people. So again, kind of a revealing a lie of the ideology behind the Iron Curtain. And then. Right, it was the political crisis, because although it did not bring down the Iron Curtain, it is true that watching films that were set in the west, especially Hollywood films, ultimately gave people access to an image of life in a capitalist society, a democratic society. I mean, my personal take on this is also that it may have created an illusion of life in the west, where there are no problems and everybod lives comfortably, which contrasted harshly with the realities of the transition to capitalism and democracy in the 1990s for many of the countries in this part of the world. So, no, it did not bring the system down, but it did expose its vulnerabilities and created some images, perhaps distorted, of what the west was like and what life in the west was like. Hmm.
- [35:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting. It doesn't, you know, goes beyond the nuance of, like, as you said, Rocky did not bring down communism by itself, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to see there at all. I'd love to pick up now the thread you mentioned earlier of kind of, you looked beyond countries in the Cold War binary. So can we talk a little bit about Iran and what sorts of methods the government used there to try and control videotapes and what happened?
- [36:22]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Yeah, so Iran was very obviously different from the kind of the impetus that divided Europe. So after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the goal was to create a theocracy. And the years that followed the revolution coincided with the years when videotapes were spreading everywhere globally. And in Iran, there used to be video stores, and there was a brief moment when video was a respectable kind of medium. But after the revolution, all of that went underground. So the ban in Iran was a ban not only on the content that came from the west, but also on the videotapes themselves, including on blank tapes. Yet people still wanted their entertainment. So as the industry went underground, the dealers who became ignorant dealers who moved from one household to another household carrying their tapes with them, they also had to make pretty harsh decisions in terms of their portfolio because there were simply not enough videotapes to keep recording films on, so often they had to erase older films. They created their own portfolio that reflected their own artistic sensibilities. They had their clients that seek to kind of. They pursued certain types of films. So the methods were similar. The result was, in a way, similar to the Eastern Europe patterns of viewership, in the sense that these were collective screenings that tended to dominate, although here there were more like intergenerational, multifamily viewer viewing parties rather than neighbors. But the goal was the same, to control information through a control of the entertainment that was recorded on VHS support. And then the result was that as the industry went down, people had to create different networks through which to have access to this content. And these mobile dealers, who often carry their tapes in Samsonite suitcases or in laundry bags, would move from house to house, bringing every week a new set of videotapes for their subscribers.
- [38:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In a way, thank you for taking us to so many different places. Just to remind readers, this is part of the Object Lesson series, which means despite going to all these places, the book is not like 800 pages long. It's very readable to go on this journey. And I'm going to ask you, Juana, to kind of keep moving us through, but not different places this time. We've gone to now, the US Bloc, the Eastern bloc, Iran. What about moving through time? Because as you mentioned a while ago, VHS is like not a thing anymore in that they're not currently still being made. They haven't been made now for about 10 years or so, but they still matter today, at least in some ways. Obviously we're here talking about them. Why else do videotapes do you think still matter?
- [39:43]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
The relevance of the videotape today is. I think it happens on many levels. First of all, a lot of the practices around entertainment that we take for granted today in the age of streaming are the result of the new technology which the videotape introduced, right? The ability to pause, fast forward, kind of rewatch something. This convenience of watching things on our devices is something we take for granted, but it did not exist before the videotape. The other kind of legacy of the videotape is the one I mentioned, the legal backlash against the digital management rights laws which prevent repair for gadgets. It's another invisible legacy as. As are the types of kind of heavy regulations and the enforcement of digital management rights, which made DVDs and Blu Rays seem more cumbersome when compared to streaming when streaming came. And increasingly we see that device manufacturers are moving away from physical media to the Point where cars don't have CD slots anymore and laptops don't have places where you can play a DVD anymore. So consumers are choosing and are also pushed towards streaming, which is digital, but also gives the owners of content perfect control over the access of that content. So that is also a legacy we don't really think about, or it's not clear. Finally, videotapes remain a sign of nostalgia for the 1980s. So whatever we think of the 1980s, whatever we remember, whether we think of the 1980s as a personal period or through the lens of our personal experience of the decade or the 1980s collectively as a point in time, VHS tapes, videotapes are a marker or a signal of that age. I mean, if you think about shows like Stranger Things, right? Kind of the most recent example of 80s nostalgia and entertainment. So there were these collectible sets of DVDs and Blu Rays designed to look like VHS tapes. The official soundtrack for the show was released on audio cassette. All these ways in which the technology of the 80s function as a sign for nostalgia for that time. And it's also useful to think about how nostalgia is inflected differently in the Western world versus the Eastern world. There is a nostalgia for the 80s in Eastern Europe, and it is probably. It is weaponized by politicians in the form of kind of nostalgia for communism or nostalgia, which is something else I researched. But it is also nostalgia for a time of that communal solidarity when people remember how they would get together and just have fun watching videotapes. And that was kind of despite the fact that there were hardships and there was all the kind of. All the challenges of life. But it is a way in which the videotape serves as a reminder of those moments of a simpler life, despite hardship and the pleasure that Watt could take in watching films.
- [43:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think videotapes are gonna be around for many people, even though they're not being made anymore. Lots of legacies there to highlight. So are you going to keep watching videotapes? Are you going to keep studying them? What are you moving on to now that this book is done?
- [43:30]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
So right now I'm working on a piece on the history of the right to repair laws and their connection to copyright changes, kind of the backstory of the copyright laws and their connection to the technology that the videotape introduced and the disruption it created in the entertainment industry. So this is kind of where I am right now. I don't know if videotapes will be around or they will make a comeback the way vinyl did, but they are a marker of kind of a longing for a time when we were not always being connected to an online trace of everything we watch, kind of the the videotapes serve as an example of a form of entertainment where consumers had a lot of freedom what to watch, when to watch it. And there was also not a lot of traceability of those patterns of consumption.
- [44:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I suppose we shall have to find out. But of course, in the meantime, while we wait to see whether the videotape gets revived, listeners can read and think all about it through your book, published by Bloomsbury as part of the Object lesson series in 2025 and, of course, titled Videotape. So, Juana, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [44:53]
Dr. Juana Gudano Kenworthy
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.