Unlocking multiple histories of amateur media

Over the last century, amateur media has evolved from representing somewhat marginal practices into becoming a pervasive force in today’s mainstream media culture. Without doubt it has become a crucial and defining feature of our everyday lives, with producing and sharing personal, informal audiovisual content now routine. Video cameras – whether standalone or embedded in communication devices like smartphones – have become instrumental in building rich visual family archives. These born-digital sources add to the already plentiful home-movie archives built on a century of film and video productions, which are now gradually being digitized. Ideally a history of home movies should be able to chart how people presented their lives in certain ways at particular moments in time, and how technological, economic, social and cultural factors influenced these choices. As such, amateur media has moved from the periphery of theoretical approaches and gained a far more visible role in media studies, including media history

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