Dissertation Research: Medium and Message in the Consumption Junction: Retailers, Consumers, and the Invention of Movies on Video

在其最初的60年里，美国电影业发展出了一个明确定义的结构，将特定的技术产品和社会实践纳入一个系统，从摄像机到分销网络到影院放映机，从好莱坞制片厂到世界各地的观众。然而，在过去的二十年里，新技术和新的社会实践极大地改变了这个行业。我们现在在电影院、飞机、汽车和我们自己的客厅里看电影，我们把它们编码在赛璐珞、录像带、DVD上，并作为电流。在美国，构成电影的社会技术体系并没有发生太大的变化，而是在复杂性上发生了爆炸，然而，电影的概念在美国文化中似乎一如既往地没有问题。本论文的研究项目是研究的主要网站之一，在那里的电影的性质，以及它们的正确使用的新的理解被构建-视频零售商店的网络的20世纪80年代。视频零售商创造并促进了一个新的分销网络，作为用户、电影制片厂和制造商的消费枢纽（科万，1987），为我们当前对娱乐和媒体技术的理解奠定了基础。最终，电影如何在家中而不是在电影院里通过录像带观看的故事，在很大程度上是这些调解人如何设法构建信息概念的故事（电影）与播放它的媒介完全不同，一个对建立一个技术系统至关重要的想法，（将磁性编码磁带转换成阴极射线管上的像素）等同于另一种（赛璐珞印刷品的投影）。NSF的资金将支持在各个研究站点收集数据：电影艺术与科学学院图书馆;百视达娱乐之旅;和视频软件经销商协会。

In its first sixty years, the US motion picture industry evolved a clearly defined structure incorporating specific technical artifacts and social practices into a system stretching from cameras to distribution networks to theater projectors, from Hollywood studios to audiences around the world. However, in the past two decades, new technologies and new social practices have altered the industry dramatically. We now watch movies in theatres, airplanes, cars and our own living rooms, and we encode them on celluloid, on videotape, on DVD, and as streams of electricity. The socio-technical system that constitutes the motion picture in America has not so much shifted as exploded in complexity, and yet the idea of a movie seems as unproblematic in American culture as ever. This dissertation research project is studying one of the major sites where new understandings of both the nature of motion pictures as well as their proper use were constructed - the network of video retail stores of the 1980.s. Video retailers created and facilitated a new distribution network that served as a consumption junction (Cowan 1987) of users, movie studios, and manufacturers where the groundwork was laid for much of our current understanding of entertainment and media technologies. Ultimately, the story of how motion pictures came to be viewed on videotapes in the home rather than simply in theaters is largely the story of how these mediators managed to construct the idea of a message (a motion picture) that was completely distinct from the medium on which it was played, an idea which was essential to the establishment of one technical system (translation of magnetically encoded tapes into pixels on a cathode-ray tube) as equivalent to another (projection of celluloid prints). NSF funds will support data collection at various research sites: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library; trip to Blockbuster Entertainment; and the Video Software Dealers Association.