Abstract
Technological developments have led to a rethinking of how obsolete media should be treated when it becomes relatively inaccessible. This article focuses on Video Home System (VHS) videocassettes in digital culture. Using semi-structured interviews undertaken with people who converted their videocassettes into a digital format, this study explores the notion of participatory and convergence culture. It shows how media innovation results in emergent roles and functions for videocassettes, attributing new experiences and meanings to both digital and VHS formats. Specifically, divergence helps videocassette owners control and manage family memories, strengthening ties between family members and relations between friends. This culminates in the creation of an inherited object of memory. The findings indicate a lack of confidence in technology, especially in its ability to preserve family memories. In addition, it was found that a sort of spiritual power is attributed to videocassettes, which prevents their owners from throwing them away. This study offers a model of the divergence process and a set of terms relying on research into religion transformations and human–technology relations. These frameworks can be applied to participatory culture, more accurately accounting for old versus new media user behaviors.
Keywords
Introduction
Wandering around the streets of my neighborhood in Tel-Aviv, I often find books left in piles on benches, sidewalks, and next to garbage cans. This sight is an accepted and well-known urban reality. At times, instead of books, I find VHS videocassettes: Some feature old movies and television series from the 1990s, while some are homemade films, which appear to be of no value to anyone except for their owners. Nevertheless, they decided not to throw these VHS cassettes into the trash. This can be related to two phenomena in the evolution of media: (1) media obsolescence (as vividly demonstrated by a June 2016 news announcement on the closing of the last factory producing Video Cassette Recorders) (Titcomb, 2016) and (2) media conversion (as evidenced by flyers advertising digital conversion services for transferring VHS videocassettes into a new media – DVD discs).
In this period of technological changes, people are engaged in rethinking how to relate to and use their old media objects. Digital developments have thus rendered old media objects obsolete. Ineffective or outdated old media objects exist in a problematic state in the new media reality: What are people doing with their old media and with its content? How do people feel toward digitalization and preservation?
This study focuses on the activities of old media videocassette owners, who convert VHS content to digital format. In addition to technological convergence, which is the digitation and aggregation of all media content into one medium, this study shows how videocassette owners choose to separate the digital content of the recordings, stored on DVD discs, from the videocassettes in a divergence process. This seemingly represents an opposite process to technological convergence. That is, videocassettes gain a new role – becoming media objects to be passed on to future generations, accruing a special sort of spiritual aura and power. This is perhaps analogous to the phenomenon of still photographs. In both cases, owners deliberately refrain from throwing them out and destroying them. The function of the digital content also changes from what it used to be in its original format: From preserving special family moments or recorded movies and TV series to a tool that helps family members and friends communicate and strengthen the bonds between them.
In our model, relations between media objects and people are elaborated on as well as emotional and functional aspects stemming from new and old media at a technological junction. These aspects of media are central to understanding the participatory culture, especially acts of divergence.
The relations between (old) objects and people
In many cultures and throughout much of history, people have tended to imbue objects with meaning, a phenomenon documented in the formation of identities and biographies around objects (Hoskins, 1998). From the variety of objects that surround the person, there are meaningful objects that serve as identifiers of what they represent, with their own style, with the social position that is given to them and with their ability to connect them with other people. These objects serve as a means for people to understand themselves and their surroundings (Miller, 1994). Karl Marx explained it as an act of commodity fetishization (1990).
Commodity fetishism is the perception that a commodity is not just a trivial or abstract object but possesses intrinsic value. The value of a commodity is understood in relation to other commodities. People often believe that these relations are transcendent. However, Karl Marx argued that these relations are entirely social relation – between people themselves. They, in turn, create the fantastic perception of relations between objects. For Marx, these relations are explainable as a form of religion. The products of the human brain appear as autonomous, endowed with a life of their own (Marx, 1990: 165).
Derived from economic and ethnologic studies, Marx applies the concepts of fetish and fetishism as forms of concealing and displacing connections between subject and object. Fetishism is thus a displaced and deficient connection between subject and object, concealing a more profound and primordial meaning (Cluley and Dunne, 2012: 257).
Anthropological studies that focus on the relations between people and meaningful objects examine their exchange ability and the rituals that accompany it – how they undergo a symbolic transformation and become sociologically and culturally influential (Miller, 1994: 400). People relate to changes and developments of objects over time. Objects change from being typical, used in everyday life. They can shift from stylish and consumer-oriented to be valued as objects with auras of heritage, symbolizing moments from the past or even historical periods. Objects also gain meaning in relation to other objects from different cultures, highlighting diverse social norms and gender aspects (pp. 400–404). Objects connect to national, ethnic, and community identity, representing peoples due to the symbolic meaning which they carry (pp. 409–410). For the individual, changes in personal objects are often signs of changes in the person. For example, a change in clothing may express a statement connected to identity (p. 411).
Some of these relations between meaningful objects and people express relations of embodiment that combine a person and an object. Marcel Mauss (2005) noted this relationship in tribes when exchanging gifts. For example, the gift in the Maori tribe is accompanied by the soul of the person, the ‘Hao’, which is the spiritual power of the gift. Therefore, the gift or its equivalent value must be returned in some way, or a disaster may occur (pp. 45–48). This perception is also expressed in modern Western capitalistic societies through socialization processes and marketing methods that tie the object to the person (Sut, 1990: 26–29).
Mihály Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton (1981) use a psychological framework to explain the connection between meaningful objects and people. They found that household objects such as furniture, electrical appliances, stereo systems, photographs, books, and art objects are ‘culturalized’. They become part of people’s lives, shaped by owner identity, perceived as socializing symbols, and serving as role models.
Gender differences are also found in person–meaningful object relations. For example, men are mainly characterized by an instrumental and functional relation to meaningful objects, while women show an emotional relation to them. There are also age differences concerning perception of time: For young adults, it is what they can do with the objects in the present and future. In contrast, for older people, it is what they did with meaningful objects in the past and what these objects remind them of.
These relations show that objects can help the person stabilize, crystallize, and rearrange the self (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993). People accomplish this in three main ways. (1) The objects emphasize the person’s power, energies, and position in the social and economic hierarchy. (2) Objects provide the feeling of continuity of the self over time because they relate to the past, present, and goals of the future. (3) Some objects provide testimony of the place of the person in the social network and their connections and ties with others and with family members.
When focusing on the relations between people and media objects, such as old cameras and radio receivers, research has shown that similar relations exist between these objects as they do for other old objects (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981). However, some media objects, like still photos, possess an additional feature – people attribute to them a sort of magical power (Sontag, 1979), as Marx suggested.
Family photographs have a respectable place in the list of meaningful objects. They can evoke memories, stimulate experiences, and arouse nostalgic emotions. They also preserve memories, mainly among adults (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981, 67–69). In Susan Sontag’s (1979) classic treatment, family still photographs are associated with belief in their magical power. This belief, usually attributed to indigenous people, is grounded in the fear that the photograph will take away part of the soul. However, it is also relevant to Western societies, as we can see in the norm to not tear up or throw away photographs of family and friends (p. 155).
Sontag defines still photos as a medium with special magic that serves as evidence of the immortalization of achievements, positive experiences, and memories that occurred in the past (p. 14). The photos function as a part of the social and family rite through which each family shapes its chronicle of self-image (pp. 12–13). The activities and places captured in the photographs are not centrally important, but the way they are collected confirms the continuity and solidarity of the wider family life. The photographs also have the ability to strengthen the feeling of nostalgia (p. 20). In other words, the photos are the medium that creates an invitation for sentimentality (p. 76).
In the digital age, old media may consist of books, still photographs, and videocassettes. With technological developments causing confrontation between old and new media, as in the case of VHS and DVDs, media convergence becomes a useful term and theory. Various definitions and processes of convergence exist, with the standard technical definition as the ability of the consumer to obtain multiple services on a single platform or device (Dwyer, 2010). However, this is just one of the five types of convergence dealt with by Henry Jenkins (2006). There is also economic convergence, which refers to the integration of the entertainment industry. Social or organic convergence applies to consumer multitasking strategies, in which multiple streams of content can be consumed simultaneously from different media platforms. Global convergence represents the hybridity that results from the international circulation of media content (Jenkins, 2001). Finally, cultural convergence, which Jenkins focuses on, refers to the flow of stories, images, sounds, brands, relationships across the entire media system. This involves both a change in the way media is produced and consumed. Jenkins describes it as ‘where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable way’ (2006: 259–260). Therefore, convergence culture fosters participatory culture by giving average people the tools to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate content (Jenkins, 2001). All this is expressed in the present case study, with people who own old videocassettes and convert them into a digital format.
Methodology
This study has two main goals: Understanding (1) what people do with their old media when new media supplants it and (2) how they perceive and experience this technological change. Hence, the following questions: (1) what do people who converted VHS videocassettes into a digital format do with their old videocassettes and with their converted digital content? (2) How do they perceive and experience the digital conversion process and its outcomes?
To answer these two questions, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 16 people from within this interpretive community (Schrøder, 1994). That means they are part of an epistemological community with shared media uses, interpretations, and beliefs. This number of interviewees is defined as optimal for qualitative research that deals with an interpretive community (Gaskell, 2000: 43; Hill et al., 1997). The interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic (Boyatzis, 1998) and textual analysis, which examine the main aspects of discourse, the use of rhetoric, and terminology (Perakyla, 2005).
In our case, the interpretive community includes people who have or had homemade videocassettes and converted them into a digital format. Seven men and nine women between the ages of 30 and 70 were interviewed. None were family members. They all live in Israel and are from a variety of professions: farmers, salaried employees, homemakers, government workers, businesspeople, and retirees. The interviewees were located via snowball sampling.
Results
Old VHS videocassettes and their digital conversion: The divergence model
The process of converting VHS videotapes into digital format due to technological obsolescence is presented here as a general model (see Figure 1). The model places old media owners in the center and shows their decisions – what they can to do and how they can use old and new media when economic interests are not involved. This model can be applied to other media forms, in which content is linked or contains media elements, such as old musical instruments, old cameras, personal computers, and old cell phones when dealing with divergence process.
The divergence process mode.
The model starts with the decision of which VHS videocassettes to convert into digital format, which to keep and preserve and which not. This is based on emotional proximity to the VHS tapes. Generally, family documentaries are kept to undergo digital conversion. Conversely, those featuring movies or TV episodes are often discarded.
The decision to convert VHS has two separate outcomes: (1) for digital content and (2) for the medium itself – the converted VHS videocassettes. Each has two frames of reference: (1) an emotional response and (2) a functional response.
The emotional response to digital content may be incredulity at the ability of digitization as a preservation tool. This leads to feelings of concern and anxiety for the safety of family memories. The functional response may be the use of digital content to strengthen family and friendship ties.
After digital conversion, the VHS owners still have their converted videocassettes. Now they need to decide – which to preserve and which to discard (and how to go about either course of action).
Preserved converted VHS videocassettes become from the functional perspective authentic memory objects to be passed on as an inheritance to the next generations. They also serve as original sources in case the digital copies degrade over time. This means that they serve as a backup. From an emotional aspect, they provide a feeling of confidence just by virtue of their continued existence due to the perception that they are authentic. They produce a sense of nostalgia and they are experienced as being part of the body and soul of the family, perceived as imbued with a sort of spiritual power.
The decision not to convert some VHS cassettes leads to two products: those chosen for preservation and those to be discarded. The discarded videocassettes can be divided into two types: (1) those that documented family and social events and (2) those featuring movies or TV episodes. Many videocassettes owners feel disinclined to destroy either kind. Instead, they can be donated (tapes featuring movies) or sent to recycling sites (tapes that documented family and social events). In this way, they change their form and function but continue to be useful for society in their metamorphosis into raw recycled material. The preserved videocassettes are stored in warehouses or closet storage, in places that are not accessible every day.
This model focuses on two main issues in the crossroad between old and new media: (1) as an opportunity for people to rethink of the story of their lives and (recorded) memories, they can reshape family stories and choose what memories to visually preserve (hence implicitly prioritizing memories their narrative) and (2) as a source of freedom to separate medium from content, with the ability to use the latter for different functions contrary to the commercial and the industrial processes of convergence. As will be seen, these are important dimensions of cultural convergence and emotional responses to it.
Emotional responses to digital conversion
Conversion of VHS to DVD may be accompanied by a sense of inability to play the digital content and a sense of lack of confidence in digitalization. The latter may be perceived as a process that exposes the artificiality of digital content and at the same time creates value and an emotional status of originality for the videocassettes. Interestingly, digital content is often perceived as of lesser quality, not always accessible and readable. In our interviews, Rebecca, a 61-year-old farmer, displayed emotional attachment to the old media and showed her distrust in digital content: I do not know why I kept the [converted] videocassettes. Perhaps if it [the digital disc] will go wrong, and it is a kind of emotional connection. I am connected to these cassettes. I am afraid that the [DVD] discs will be deleted. I prefer to keep them [the VHS] in case there will be a problem with the discs, so I will be able to convert it into a disc again.
A feeling of incompetence is noted by Eti, a 58-year-old female. She expressed her disappointment in the digital product compared to the videocassette: ‘I converted some of the movies to DVD discs, but the discs today can’t be read everywhere. I couldn’t play them in my DVD player. That’s why I still have the cassettes’.
Eti presents a level of technology ignorance, which causes her to feel a sense of distrust and inability to operate the new technology product. This was created as a result of the absence of a standard that allows digital content to be read on any digital platform, as Fitzpatrick (2011) seeks to create.
In addition to the distrust in digital technology, change in quality and emotional value were mentioned. One interviewee, Tzvika, a 56-year-old photographer, referred to digitization as a form of translation, which causes loss of authenticity attributed to the cassettes: The information is not eroded away when it undergoes digitization, but people say, I am not an expert but I tend to agree, that digitization loses something from the characteristics of the cassette. They say it is less warm, breathes less, especially in terms of color, fleshiness. Digitization translates the information to the digital signal and, still, it is lower quality. My mother was a little bit hesitant about converting the movies digitally. She was afraid that something would happen to the old cassette. There was a real value to the cassette itself and not only to what is inside. Because from her point of view: ‘Why turn it into a disc? It will no longer be the same item’. At times when it is in its authentic state, it has a higher value. It feels like it is real, that you did not convert it to something else. I very much believe in the authenticity of a product, of something that you received as an inheritance, of original things.
Videocassettes as magical artifacts
VHS owners tend to ascribe magical force to homemade videocassettes. That is, they are viewed as quasi-spiritual objects informed by the spirit of filming family members. They constitute part of family memory and serve as a generational souvenir. As such, they may be perceived as extensions of the family – part of the family body and soul – and not just as objects. It would, therefore, be unthinkable to throw them away. In our interviews, Tikva voiced this sentiment: ‘It is a crime to throw something like this away; it’s a souvenir from the kids when they were little. It’s alive’! Rebecca added to this: ‘The cassettes are like my identity card, like my passport; that’s my past’. Zehava, a 56-year-old policewomen, went even further: ‘It’s like part of our body […] it is part of me’.
These statements describe a spiritual connection between people and objects and are, therefore, a form of commodity fetishism. That is, authenticity leads to not only a forgetting of the source of the objects but adds the perception that they are extensions of the self. So the human–object combination is presented as a sort of magical force. This dynamic that we see in VHS cassettes was famously noted by Susan Sontag (1979) in still photographs. They thus have an indexical status, serving as reference points for family identity, tradition, and memories.
Passing on videocassettes as media memory objects
The emotional response to VHS creates a new set of conditions as cassette owners cannot completely detach from their old media objects – regardless of the effects of digital development. Therefore, they are compelled to find new roles and functions for their videocassettes as media memory objects or souvenirs from the past.
Family VHS cassettes possess other roles and functions, symbols of the family and they become souvenirs for the next generation. Some interviews report passing them on as inheritances to preserve tradition. As one interviewee, Ronit, described: I will absolutely not throw them [the videocassettes] away but pass them on to the children. I think that there are objects forbidden to throw away…I believe that when my kids will grow up, and when they will sit with their kids, the videocassettes will have a very important nostalgic and educational family meaning for them. There is something in the family legacy, so, it’s mainly for the kids, this continuation and the memories. My daughter, Alona, is 40 plus today. I assume that she will be happy when these things will be accessible to her. It will make her happy to see it one day or to show it to her children. One of the reasons that I save all of these movies is also for the kids so that they can watch them in the future.
Nevertheless, this research is more concerned with videocassettes as old media objects in a family, and not social, context. Their documented history is that of the private family, standing against social collective memory mediated by electronic communications (Neiger et al., 2011). They are also opposed to ‘Realms of Memory’ (Nora, 1989), a theoretical construct in which concrete and symbolic public sites or written and visual materials create common and unifying social stories and memories. Positioned between subjective personal memory and critical and academic history, the ‘Realms of Memory’ constitute a practice carried out by and for the benefit of the state, which governs, controls, and directs collective memory. Instead, videocassettes strengthen citizens’ freedom to create and maintain their own family history and memories that do not need to be in any relation to the state. Neither the private and subjective memories of a single person nor the state’s collective memories, they are collective family memories that family members decide to remember, inherit, or forget. Hence, preserved videocassettes may enable future generations to reflect on family identity and its legacy.
Where to place the media memory object?
When owners decide to save their videocassettes after conversion due to their new function as media memory objects, the question may arise as to where to physically place them in the house. They are often made accessible but not easily visually detectable and not in a central place in the house. One interviewee, Zehava, reported a need for cassette visibility and tangibility: ‘I like to look at the cassettes every now and then and to know that it is the original recording […] It is easier to see or to become attached to something concrete’. Thus, she keeps the cassettes in a drawer in the closet in her room, a location both concealed and accessible. This gives her a secure feeling. In a similar way, other interviewees reported that, in contrast to other meaningful objects, videocassettes are not situated in a noticeable place in the house, but rather in a closet. As Tikva noted: ‘The cassettes are kept in a fixed and closed place. If you don’t preserve it in storage, then it gets damaged. So I put them in a box in my clothes closet’.
Arieh, 60 years old, reported a feeling of security: ‘I have it here in one of the closets. I barely use it, but I like to know that it is there. That it exists’. Dafna elaborated on this feeling: I have [videocassettes] in my workroom in a closet. Since I know that it’s there, it gives me a feeling of peace and tranquillity. That is, it is there in a place where I am often during the day. It is close so the kids won’t reach for it or play with it. I have my wedding album and the wedding videocassette, but it [the marriage] ended very badly. I have no interest in seeing it. I don’t look at the pictures and at the cassette, but, on the other hand, I am not able to throw them away. So, it’s locked in a closed box in a high place that I can barely reach and open.
Ritual viewing
Most content extracted from VHS videocassettes in the process of digitization is tinged with positive emotion due to nostalgic feelings aroused during ceremonial viewing. Most of our interviewees rarely watch the content of the videocassettes. However, when they do watch it, it is during family and friendship ceremonial events. Nostalgia can even be created from only looking at the videocassettes. This was reported in the interviews, as Shlomit noted: ‘Like still photos that can remind you of something, so the videocassettes can also remind you of moments in life. It’s nice to remember them’. To this, Dafna added: ‘The videocassette is like time travel…it takes me to this place in childhood, where I was once’. And Avi expressed similar feelings: [Watching homemade movies] always arouses a kind of uplifting mood and it fills your lungs with air. It is always nice. It makes you feel good to watch it. These are things that are fun to see…good memories. There are a lot here, a lot of emotions involved in it.
The VHS cassettes thus function to connect relatives and are used more frequently in routine events than exceptional social occasions. To strengthen ties between family members, Rebecca reported sharing snippets of family videos using an instant messaging app: We have a family group on WhatsApp and when I look at the content of the videocassettes and find a scene that is funny from the time of our childhood, I post it. They burst out laughing.
The family rituals of creating a shared family memory – neither institutionalized nor personal – and passing it on to the next generation are closely associated with the culture of Israel and Jewish tradition in which the interviewees are immersed. Israel is characterized as a society with collective characteristics that regulate family values (Toren, 2003). Part of the Jewish ethos that shapes Israeli society is the Biblical call to remember. Collective memory is ideologically required to unite society and produce a shared narrative (Zerubavel, 1995).
The preservation of family memories and their digital distribution can be seen as part of a required collective preservation method (Fitzpatrick, 2011). This challenges the national conventions to some extent in that convergence culture leads to subversiveness, which may break down the dichotomy between institutionalized memory and subjective memory. Thus, digital preservation and distribution encourage tribal/family memory.
To preserve or discard? Converted homemade videocassettes
As noted, owners often elect to keep homemade videocassettes and discard recorded entertainment content. However, there exists a widespread sentiment that neither form of VHS cassette should be destroyed. Underlying this taboo is the notion of continuity, which accompanies both acts of preservation and bidding farewell to old media objects.
Of course, not every videocassette with family content that has been converted to digital format is saved. A selection process often takes place in the interests of storage. But this storage imperative is subordinate to the selection process informed by which visually recorded family memories are more important enough for preservation. As one interviewee, Avi, a 57-year-old retiree, reported: I’m saving the most important videocassettes in a storage room. I still have the movie at my wedding. I have the [DVD] disc at home. In the storage room I have the [VHS] videocassettes. I kept them perhaps because I am still a bit emotionally tied to the videocassettes of the wedding and to my daughter’s Brita [A party held for the birth of baby girl]. I preferred to keep them in spite of the fact that I did not see them for years. I am not someone who saves too many things. There are things that it pains me to throw away. It may be that I will leave some [videocassettes], just in order to see what once was. But I won’t save them all. We put them [the videocassettes] in a special place for recycling. There were huge boxes, cartons full of cassettes. It’s hard to throw away books, so it’s like this. It is also a kind of nostalgia. Here, at least, you can say I am transferring it from one media to another [to DVD].
Discarding recorded movies and TV entertainment
Interviewees were also confronted with the difficulty of throwing away old videocassettes featuring recorded movies and television entertainment. These may have been a part of family lives for many years. However, this act of discarding can be seen as making a resource useful for someone else, achieving a sense of continuity. In the words of Avi: I had a box with about 60 or 70 videocassettes. Most of them were children’s movies and animated movies or just things that we recorded, that weren’t important, but I didn’t throw them away…you can’t throw them away. I gave them to a place that collects things that people need, so I donated all of them. We had videocassettes of Disney films; it was really hard to part with them. I called the municipality and we found a nursery school that has an old video machine. I wanted to pass them on.
In this scenario, the concept of continuity translates into VHS owners seeking to preserve old videocassettes by securing their future use with obsolete technology even as new technology threatens to eliminate them. By doing so, they resist the process of technological convergence, which characterizes late modern capitalism. Technological convergence implies that VHS content is viewable using current technologies such as video on demand or DVD discs. However, VHS owners also wish to avoid the process of divergence, which results in a separation between media and content – as they did with their homemade family videocassettes. Instead, they want to share with others authentic and positive emotions associated with these videocassettes, goals only attainable outside the conventional commercial and economic exchange system: donation without receiving any material compensation.
The relationship between people is thus preserved, although somewhat challenged by the capitalist idea behind the exchange of commodity and money, as articulated by Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism (1990). In this case, the donor in this transaction marks his social position in relation to others.
Discussion and conclusion
With the current ubiquity of digitalization, digital culture (Jenkins et al., 2009) is increasingly applied to everyday life, with old and new media colliding in the convergence of cultures (Jenkins, 2006). This research focuses on adjustments and changes that people make to their old media. The VHS videocassette was examined – how it is perceived and what are its uses. In addition, theoretical aspects of videocassette owner practices were looked at. Specifically, content conversion into a digital format was discussed, along with decision-making processes concerned with questions of what to do with old media and with digital content. A basic model was formulated based on the process of divergence. These processes result from people having decision-making power – the freedom and the ability to separate old media from its content, which elicits a variety of emotional aspects.
In our case, the specific divergence process was located in the participant culture, which is closely associated with convergence culture. Even in a commercial economic framework of mass consumerism, people can still elect to participate more widely in cultural forces that favor control over the flow of media in their lives. We have seen how this freedom can be applied to the ability to control and manage family memories, strengthen family and friendship relationships, and create an inherited family memory object.
As discussed, people attribute varied emotional responses to technological change. However, a lack of confidence in technology, especially in its ability to preserve family memories, is prevalent. In the tension between old and new technology, the authenticity of the source is challenged by commodity fetishism, which is quasi-religious and not material in nature. Indeed, the new technology of conservation is often not considered reliable and stable. As a result, symbolic needs of stability and security are left unfulfilled in relation to the digital content, compared to the old media, the videocassetts. Even so, this digital content may serve its communication and connection purposes. Therefore, the old videocassettes do provide feelings of stability and security, with spiritual relations between them and their owners – the videocassettes are as part of the body and soul of the family.
Videocassettes thus change their role and create a different experience than the one they provided in the past. They are no longer perceived solely as technical tools used in video recordings. Instead, the cassette functions as a memory object, a souvenir symbolizing family traditions and heritage. Thus, this new memory object serves as an indexical sign, similar to photo albums. Nevertheless, differences can be noted: photo albums, unlike cassettes, offer clear and accessible iconic signs in the form of printed still photos.
Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s (1968) Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction informs videocassettes as imbued with an aura of authenticity. This may compensate for the feeling of loss of aura that art objects created before the industrial era formerly possessed. According to Benjamin, this aura was derived from the uniqueness of the object and its unique position in time and space. However, this ended in the age of mass production, with new forms of art such as movies negating questions of originality and authentic source material. In contrast, videocassettes are a technology of reproduction, and yet in technological obsolescence have gained a new authentic aura. Thus, in post-modernism, an object that functions as a simulacrum may be infused with the feeling of authenticity. These objects have no economic value and are outside the capitalistic cycle of conventional market exchange. However, they attain the status of a priceless object, to be passed on as an inheritance to preserve family tradition and legacy. In contrast, discarded videocassettes are also passed on in a nonmaterial act of exchange. They are given to people as a donation or are recycled to serve a different purpose. The most important thing is that they will not be destroyed.
These acts give us insight into participant culture, which is generally understood in reference to new media and digital culture. In our case, it is old media that is creatively participative. VHS possesses an old media magical power similar to religious symbols, consistent with Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism in which the association between commodities and people is defined by a religious-like relationship. For Shlomo Deshen (1999), four abstract terms explain the meanings people give to religious symbols. The first is a novelty – the change of use and experience to which the old symbol refers so that new content is embedded into the icon. It is not foreign content or completely different from the old experience. The second is creation – when a person appropriates a newly created symbol or adapts one from a foreign tradition to his experiences and uses. The third is desecration – a change in the field of experience to which the symbol refers, it is inconsistent with the idea of the symbol. The fourth is elimination – the detachment of the symbol from the domain of its existential experience, with the symbol losing its meaning.
In our case, novelty most appropriately explains the participatory actions of videocassette owners in convergence culture. They attribute to the videocassette characteristics associated with the still photo, extending its role and adding new emotions and experiences from related domains.
Further studies are needed to explore relationships between people and other old media objects in the context of emotions and uses, to explain the meanings of these relationships using the terms and models proposed here.
Footnotes
Author’s note
The study was conducted in collaboration with the Institute of New Media, Politics and Society at Ariel University.