Abstract

This article traces the discourses surrounding home video-recording technologies, from their emergence in the mid-1960s to their popularity in the mid-1990s. Through an analysis of newspapers, magazines, and advertisements, this article contends that video’s history has been shaped by two seemingly opposed visions of the medium: one which embraced it as a tool for intimacy, and another that condemned it as a harbinger of spectacle. Ultimately, I argue that these two seemingly contradictory views actually share similar convictions and emerge in response to crises and conditions of American capitalism. In their attempt to grapple with video, they condemn commercial television, defend a nostalgic vision of home and family, and in so doing reveal the instability of intimacy and persistence of spectacle at the heart of American domestic life.