Video Revolutions

Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real. Techno-utopian rhetoric has represented video as a revolutionary medium, promising to solve the problems of the past and the present and to deliver a better future. Video has also been seen more negatively, particularly as a threat to movies and their culture. In this new history of the medium, Newman considers video as an object of these hopes and fears and builds an approach to thinking about the concept of the medium in terms of cultural status.