Videotape

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. The meteoric rise and fall of the VHS videotape encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic shifts to come in the Cold War.

In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victories over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.

By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD, then by streaming. Yet the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment.