ABSTRACT
Magnetic tape was one of the first opportunities Americans had to access, create, and distribute content, disrupting the decades-old industry control of media content. Invented in the 1930s, a surge of user-friendly products in the 1970s made magnetic tape accessible to the consumer market. Chapter 7 discusses how magnetic tape offered the opportunity to capture, edit, copy, distribute, and play back content that had once been proprietary or ephemeral. Magnetic tape uses a fluctuating signal to polarize magnetic film to record multimedia information. Audio and video cassettes were more durable, portable, versatile, and cheaper than records or film, and the wide variety of recording and playback devices dramatically changed when, where, and how users could engage with content. However, despite magnetic tape’s seismic effect on the media environment, the effects of this media technology on user psychology is largely absent from the literature. The chapter elaborates on the psychological impacts of possessing and controlling content, creating content, and distributing content independent of gatekeepers and how these opportunities tapped into psychological needs and established an on-demand culture wherein users expect to have their content available at their discretion and to be used as they see fit.
