Time Shifting

In the process of doing research for the Digital Poetics book, I have the opportunity to go back to some of the early discourse surrounding the rise of video for the home market. Especially interesting are early ads and news articles about the rise of home videocassette recorders and betamax and vhs tapes. It's fascinating to see how this new technology was imagined. Jack Gould, writing for the New York Times, was eerily on-target with some of his predictions. As early as 1967, he was writing that home video playback systems would change the way people use media.

In his article "Soon You'll Collect TV Reels, Like LP's" in the September 3, 1967 New York Times, Gould writes that "By far the most interesting aspect of the innovation is its promise to introduce into the television medium the element of individual selectivity that up to now has been lacking." He goes on: "By an exotic combination of electronic physics and photochemistry, the system enables any     kind of visual material--be it a motion picture, a Broadway stage play, a concert or a course in home economics--to be transfered to a tidy cartridge of special film which could be sold or rented at supermarkets, libraries or bookstores."

And, roughly thirty years before the cinephile craze for building DVD libraries, Gould speculates that "Certainly, there will be some film afficionados who would be delighted to have on their bookcase shelves the best of the works of W.C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin."

What's sort of interesting here is not only that the elements of "selectivity" that Gould predicts have become the dominant logic of the DVD, where viewer options and bonus materials dominate, but that in many of his articles Gould is almost McLuhan-esque. Then, as now academic theory--which has become a vocation, a profession--is threatened by non-academic theory, which is often quicker, sharper, and more lively than professorial treatments of the same topic. Folks like Jack Gould, Lester Bangs, Pauline Kael, Richard Meltzer, and others each offered visions of the world which were largely theoretical, but which were written with a humor and energy that is largely absent in today's academic theory.

Here are two images. This first on is of the Gould New York Times essay from September 3, 1967:

This one is also from the New York Times, March 8, 1976. An ad for an early Videocassette Recorder from JVC: