ABSTRACT
Introduction The main focus of this book is the domestic video cassette recorder (VCR) and in particular how women use, and what they think about, this piece of entertainment technology. The VCR was the subject of a consumer boom in the early 1980s and was quickly established as the major innovation in home entertainment since television. The VCR was taken up across the social spectrum, this being made possible by existing networks of distribution for television sets which enabled rental contracts to be entered into, thereby eliminating the necessity for the large capital investment unavailable in lower-income households. The VCR offered the novelty of being able to record off-air and view broadcast material at alternative times and to hire pre-recorded tapes, mainly movies, from an increasingly large number of varied retail outlets. The VCR or ‘video’, as the vernacular would have it, rapidly entered the culture, exciting consumers, entrepreneurs and the self-appointed ‘moral guardians’, all of whom, in their different ways, were responding to an innovation in ‘mass’ culture. The present study does not deal explicitly or in any detail with the video industry which mushroomed as a result of the wide take-up of the domestic hardware, as its point of departure is the household. It is true, however, that the industry, its products, marketing styles and image, and the public debates which surround the viewing of ‘unsuitable’ material, have an effect on people’s perceptions of the video culture, and these issues are taken up as and when they appear during my analysis.
