Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Video began as a technological innovation and changed the media landscape of mainstream network television around the globe forever (→  Television Networks ). As the technology became more accessible to the consumer market, it developed a greater impact on independent filmmaking: “media arts centers” emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as →  community media with the advent of community video centers and programs. By the 1980s video had become a revolutionizing force worldwide, changing the way audiovisual media as part of TV and film culture were produced and consumed in everyday life (→  Television ; Cinema ). Programming diversified and paved the way to today's transnational media systems, which profoundly impact the way we conduct our public and private lives. Nowadays, average citizens, for example, can upload privately recorded questions to presidential candidates and expect to have direct access to their political realm. The TV news coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 privileged amateur footage over the images shot by professional TV crews, and the footage was distributed via YouTube to a national audience (→  Amateur Photography and Movies ). The actual perpetrator of the shootings sent his video message post-mortem to NBC television as a video manifesto, similar to the recordings of terrorist suicide bombers or even the tapes circulated by Osama Bin Laden ... log in or subscribe to read full text