[ecrea] Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life

> NEW PUBLICATION FROM UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
>
> Home Truths?
> Video Production and Domestic Life
>
> David Buckingham, Rebekah Willett and Maria Pini
>
> Over the past decade, the video camcorder has 
> become a commonplace household technology. In 
> the UK, around one third of households own 
> digital camcorders, with a further proportion 
> owning older analogue models. Many people also 
> now have mobile phones and digital still cameras 
> with video recording capabilities; and the rise 
> of YouTube and other video sharing sites has 
> made it significantly easier to distribute 
> amateur video productions. With falling prices 
> on compact and easy-to-use camcorders, access to 
> moving image production technology is becoming 
> virtually universal. This book represents one of 
> the few academic research studies exploring this 
> everyday, popular use of video production 
> technology: it looks particularly at how 
> families use and engage with the technology, and 
> how it fits into the routines of everyday life.
>
> This book is a further outcome from an extensive 
> three-year research project which explored the 
> diversity of â??camcorder culturesâ?? in 
> contemporary Britain. This book focuses 
> specifically on the experiences of twelve very 
> diverse inner-London households, each of which 
> was given a camcorder and a supply of tapes and 
> followed over a period of fifteen months. The 
> households range from large families with young 
> children to a single elderly person living 
> alone; and they include people from a wide mix 
> of social class and ethnic backgrounds. The 
> participants used video in some very diverse, 
> and often surprising, ways ­ not just to reccord 
> the minutiae of family life, but also to rework 
> existing media, to create dramas, video-diaries 
> and montages, and to play with the potentialities of the medium.
>
> The book draws on interviews, observations and 
> on the participantsâ?? videos themselves, 
> painting a comprehensive picture of the role of 
> video-making in their everyday lives. Readers 
> gain a sense of the individual characters 
> involved in the project, and the complexities 
> and diversities of their lives. However, the 
> analysis also raises a range of broader issues 
> about learning and creativity, subjectivity and 
> representation, and the â??domesticationâ?? of 
> technology ­ issues that are  of central concern 
> for Media and Cultural Studies.
>
> Published in the Michigan University Press 
> series Technologies of the Imagination: New Media in Everyday Life

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