CD-ROM: Radical Nostalgia?: Cinema History/Cinema Theory, and New Technology

THE AUTHOR TAKES THE POSITION THAT SOME OF THE CURRENT DEBATES in film theory and film history may point towards a new strategy for developing CD-ROMs as a medium in their own right and retrieving them from the combination of despondence and hype that some commentators see as dominating the industry. Siegfried Kracauer’s ideas about mass ornament and recent scholarship in film history underlie an examination of the nature of CD-ROMs, leading the author to propose that determinist explanations of technology are not only insupportable but also stand in the way of commercial and artistic development. In the case of CD-ROMs, they also lead to a significant misconceptualization of the medium. The author concludes that any analysis of CD-ROMs depends on which theory of audience and which theory of history are used to conceptualize the medium and proposes that in order to build a catalog of media-specific material and a mass audience for CD-ROMs, outright sales should be replaced with a system of rentals.