Home Video and the "TV Problem": Cultural Critics and Technological Change

This article resituates the emergence of the first home video technologies during the 1960s and early 1970s within the context of contemporary debates over the state of American television. It traces the influence that cultural intermediaries—namely, the journalists who covered television for publications like the New York Times and Saturday Review—exerted on the cultural meanings of this nascent technology in this period. For a number of these critics, home video represented a potential technological solution to the aesthetic and moral shortcomings of American commercial television. Tracking these critics’ interventions in the negotiations over this new technology’s meanings and uses enriches our understanding of home video’s past. More importantly perhaps, it highlights some of the ways in which critics have historically mobilized their cultural capital to subtly shape the trajectory of technological change.