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[ecrea] Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life

Sun Feb 20 23:40:08 GMT 2011



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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