Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion.
Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.
In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic
exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.
By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. Yet the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
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Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
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Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
1. A Star Is Born
2. Owning the Story
3. Video Nasties Behind the Green Door in the US and Britain
4. Viewing Parties and the Party
5. Business Models
6. Nostalgia and the VHS Aesthetic
Notes
Index
Index
Product details
| Published | Sep 04 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 160 |
| ISBN | 9798765100028 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 7 bw illus |
| Series | Object Lessons |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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