From Betamax to Blockbuster excerpts by Greenberg

Time has been short so I'm going to give initial reactions with the option to correct them before class tomorrow.

I think I get the drift of Greenberg's argument, that the distributors and retailers formed a socially dynamic community that sold the public and manufacturers on the market viability of video. I hope that there will be a discussion of how experimental film/video art of the 1960s provided a template for this enthusiast community he speaks of. Before any innovation enters into general consumption it is heralded by a lot of cultural work by somebody. Video as art stemmed from a desire to use the generally poor visual quality of television along with its immediacy for subversive ends.

Some other cautions: while it is important to look at the content of process as well as the content of messages, it is dangerous to be too optimistic about the utopian potential of the process, like Jacques Attali in the book Noise, where he saw boomboxes as the answer to modern music. They were not the answer, just the continuation of modern music by other means and a larger number of actors.

One of Jim Cortada's observations, which I think is true, but could be ominous, is that (rough quote) "every industry followed the same pattern" in adopting IT. If it's the same pattern, then the information content resides in that repeated pattern, not in the industry implementation. What we need to know is the impacts, intended and otherwise on the work and lives of individuals--did they move up or just shift laterally?